Nvidia's flagship cryptomining GPU CMP 170HX shows up at retailers for sales prices above US$4,000

To the detriment of countless gamers around the world, cryptominers have been snatching all available GPUs for several years now, which in combination with the microchip shortage has led to consistently low supply and therefore skyrocketing prices. For this reason, GPU manufacturer Nvidia decided to produce special graphics cards intended for cryptominers. The flagship model of Nvidia's cryptomining GPU lineup, the CMP 170HX, has now gone on sale after it was officially released in September.

The Ampere-based Nvidia CMP 170HX, which does not feature any video outputs and is therefore useless for gamers, was sighted at an online retailer in Dubai, which put 238 units of the cryptomining GPU up for sale at US$4,300. According to an article by Tom's Hardware, a CMP 170HX auction was also spotted in Japan, where the coveted graphics card has already reached a bid price of more than US$5,000.

With 8GB of HBM2e memory, 4,480 CUDA cores and a TDP of 250W, the Nvidia CMP 170HX can supposedly reach a noteworthy hashrate of up to 164 MHps when mining Ethereum. In comparison to regular consumer-grade GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 (from US$1,795 on Amazon), whose non-LHR variant can achieve a Ethereum hashrate of around 100 MHps, the cryptomining performance of the CMP 170HX is considerably higher. But this superior cryptomining performance is compensated by the inflated sales price of the Nvidia CMP 170HX. Therefore it appears quite likely that cryptominers will continue to buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards, even if the CMP 170HX will become available for sale in higher quantities in the future.