Earlier this week, you may recall reading about a new piece of software that was reportedly capable of completely removing all of the LHR restrictions found within the Nvidia 30XX series of graphics cards. A mildly concerning piece of news as, with their mining potential possibly being fully restored, this might have again seen more pressure placed on their overall market demand. – Following a report via The Verge, however, there is some good news! Well, presuming you didn’t actually try it out for yourself.
What is it? Well, in a nutshell, rather than removing any LHR restrictions, it would appear that the software simply installs a bunch of malware on the system instead!
Nvidia ‘LHR Unlocker’ Found to Just be a Malware Installer!
Following testing of the so-called ‘LHR unlocking’ software from a number of reliable sources, the overall conclusion is that ‘Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker’ is an exceptionally undesirable piece of software for anyone. – Not only does it apparently completely fail to remove the LHR restrictions seen on the Nvidia 30XX graphics card, but it actually installs a whole bunch of malware onto the system.
Although exactly what the malware does is a little unclear, it would appear that, based on the symptoms, it might (rather ironically I might add) actually install a mining virus. Effectively, stealing your system resources to earn someone else cryptocurrency!
What Do We Think?
As we noted in our original report on the subject, installing this software was never a particularly good idea in the first place. Primarily because it seemingly required not just new ‘custom drivers, but a custom BIOS to be installed on the GPU. Put simply, given how expensive graphics cards are at the moment, it was quite a risk to take for something that could potentially completely ruin the hardware.
If you have, however, decided to give this software a whirl, the advice from this point on is pretty clear. Your operating system will likely now require a complete reinstallation and, fingers-crossed, you should start attempting to get your GPU back to its factory condition.
In the grand scheme of things though, we can’t pretend to be overly surprised that this LHR unlocker was (somewhat ironically) merely a trojan horse!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
