While Nvidia hasn’t officially announced it yet, we’ve already seen several appearances of its dedicated mining CMP 170HX, and now it’s been spotted for the first time at an auction in Japan, where it sold for 600,000 yen, which is almost $5300.
As far as we can see, the GPU is passively cooled and is designed to be mounted in racks with powerful fans on the front and back. While it has a single 8-pin connector, it actually requires connecting two 8-pin connectors to an adapter that connects them into one, as seen in the image below:
According to the seller, there are no drivers for CMP 170HX yet and it has only been tested to see if it is recognized by the system. So the buyer has paid more than $5300 for something he can’t use yet until it is officially announced and the drivers are released. There is still no indication of when that announcement might come, so the wait could be long.
Unfortunately, its specifications have not been confirmed, although rumors say that it is based on the GA100 core, has 4480 Cuda cores enabled, 8GB of HBM2e memory with a bandwidth of 1.5TB/s, PCI-E 1.1 x4 interface, and achieves 164MH/s with a power consumption of 250W. It will be interesting to see when Nvidia announces it and at what price it will eventually be offered, although it certainly won’t be cheap.
The CMP 170HX features 4480 CUDA cores, 8 GB of HBM2e video memory, and a power consumption of 250 W.
In terms of mining efficiency, the Etherpad computing power can reach up to 164MH/s, beating the 100MH/s of the non-castrated version of the RTX 3080 by a long shot.
I’m afraid that miners and mining companies will have to weigh for themselves whether such a price is worth it or not. People say if NVIDIA launches a mining card, will it be beneficial or detrimental to mitigate the rush for gaming graphics cards?