Nvidia's CMP 170HX crypto mining cards pop up in China with fanless design and 164 MH/s speeds

LHR might not be able to fix things for the gaming GPU market, so Nvidia is now offering the CMP 170HX specialized crypto mining GPU. This particular model appears to be available on the Chinese market, as a Zhihu forum user recently posted pictures of the card together with some first hand test results. Unlike the 30HX models that are based on rebranded GTX 1660 Super cards from Nvidia’s AIB partners, the 170HX GPU is supposed to be a cut-down Ampere A100 compute accelerator version repurposed specifically for crypto mining. According to Videocardz, Nvidia is probably using some GA100 SKUs that could not pass the tests for gaming or compute purposes and were thus binned for crypto mining cards.

The 170HX comes directly from Nvidia and has some interesting features. First of all,  the cooling system looks passive as the massive metallic shroud does not integrate any fans. Then the card is packing HBM2e memory, just like the A100 compute variants. Unfortunately, Nvidia did not include 40 / 80 GB of VRAM on these models, just 8 GB. However, the 1493 GB/s memory bandwidth is more than twice as fast as that of an RTX 3080 GPU. The card is missing any type of connector and cannot be used for gaming or compute workloads, either. Since it is a cut-down variant, it only features 4480 CUDA cores, which means it has 54% less cores than a full GA100 die. Additionally, the PCIe interface is restricted to 4 lanes and the GPU core can boost to 1410 MHz with a maximum 250 W TGP.

As far as raw crypto mining performace is concerned, the Chinese tester managed to squeeze 164 MH/s for the ETH algorithm out of the 170HX, which is noticeably lower than the 200 MH/s speed advertised by Nvidia. Moreover, the tester notes that the BIOS version of the card does not support memory overclocking so the card cannot be further optimized. There might be an improved BIOS launching later on, but, for the time being, the card is clearly gimped.

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