NVIDIA markets its most powerful GPU for crypto mining

The NVIDIA CMP 170HX, the top of the range in the «processors for mining in crypto miningAs the green giant calls them, it is already on sale at some retailers. Its price is high (4,300 dollars), but it is a specific solution for this segment and of enormous power.

The management of cryptocurrencies is a insatiable consumption of resources and the ‘miners’ have made massive purchases penalizing the availability of units for computer tasks and video games. If we add the current component production problems, we can understand the lack of stock of graphics cards and their very high price.

NVIDIA promised to address the situation limiting the mining performance on their cards, the Ethereum hash rate first on the GeForce RTX 3060 and then additional measures on the rest of the RTX 30 which, obviously, were not intended for the crypto mining market and for mass consumption that was has been penalized.

NVIDIA CMP 170HX

The card features a GA100 matrix made in 7nm processes with 4,480 CUDA cores, 280 texture mapping units, 128 ROPs, and 280 tensor cores. The GPU runs at a clock rate of 1,140 MHz, which can be boosted up to 1,410 MHz in turbo mode.

The card combines a dual-slot design with a silver metal cover, as well as a passive cooling solution. It includes 8 Gbytes of high-speed HBM2e memory and a frequency of 1458 MHz. It receives power through a single 8-pin PCIe connector for a declared TDP consumption of 250W.

It does not have screen outputs, which prevents other uses for which it is specially intended: that of mining cryptocurrencies. The Ethereum hash rate is 164 MH / s, far above the solutions that NVIDIA had marketed to date.

Both NVIDIA and AMD have denied that they are prioritizing the sale of cards to crypto miners over those who want to buy a GPU for computing or games, although the measures that have been taken so far have not helped to improve availability significantly. nor lower prices to reasonable levels.

Hence the importance of launching specialized models such as this NVIDIA CMP 170HX, which should ensure that crypto mining does not influence a chart market of great importance in PCs. Official launch is expected imminent because the card is already available in some retailers.