If you were an Ether miner last summer, you may have learned why store shelves were stocked full of 2gb GPUs, while 4gb GPUs were completely sold out. It was... The DAG! Now, I don't know what the DAG is or what's inside of it, but I know it needs to fit inside the vRam of the GPU to do hash stuff or whatever. In June of 2017, that DAG file surpassed 2GB, as it does naturally grow. This was when the 8gb GPU price surge began.
Soon after, DAG size calculators caught attention and when people realized that the DAG file wouldn't surpass 4gb until long after they'd fried their GPUs anyways (February, 2021), miners jumped on 4gb cards. In addition to the run on 4gb GPUs, 3gb cards were also quickly snagged by late miners as the 3gb DAG date of May 2019 was also a reasonable ROI deadline.
Recently, however, Microsoft released an update to Windows 10 which consumes a little over 600mb of space in each GPU, bumping up the ROI deadline for 3gb GPUs to like... right meow! You can still use those 3gb cards for Ether mining if you switch to a lighter operating system such as Ubuntu, EthOS, or maybe even and older version of Windows, but that card's Windows 10 mining days are over.
It should also be noted that voltage control on RX series AMD cards is not possible in Linux without modifying the Kernel, which we have not attempted ourselves. We've even gone as far as modifying the GPU voltage in the vBIOS to no avail. Apparantly, the vBIOS is a Windows thing or whatever. But anyways, if you were profitable while mining on Windows and you did underclock and undervolt your GPU, you might wanna take some time and re-figure that out if you're planning to switch to Linux. We personally saw a 30% power consumption increase moving from Windows 10 to EthOS with identical core/mem frequencies.
How does everyone feel about this? Were you one of the victims of this unexpected event? Did you buy a 3gb GPU with aspirations of hammering out some Ether and now have to switch to Monero, the official crypto currency for criminals?
What about my tin-foil hat buddies? Do you think this this update is a covert ops deal between nVidia and Microsoft? Did nVidia pay Microsoft to create this update to stimulate GPU sales? Or perhaps a major crypto farm? Has anyone else come up with a different solution to this problem?
There is an easy way to prevent this 600mb vram issue with Windows 10.
Disable updates! Yes it's not recommended, but keeping the firewall blocking everything not related to mining you should be ok.
Worst case scenario; You get infected, but there isn't a wallet running on a mining rig, the only thing an attacker can do is use your rig to mine on their wallet, and you would notice that in a couple of days! So no big deal, and if that means you can keep mining eth with your 3GB GPU I think the risk is worth it.
Or you could move to Linux/ETHOS but as you sadi, hashrate will be lower and voltage control is way harder.