Nvidia reintroduces more old graphics cards – for cryptography

Yesterday, the latest addition to the Geforce RTX 3000 series, the RTX 3060, was launched. It offers performance that surpasses the RTX 2070, but the card is also the starting point in Nvidia’s investment in mining cryptocurrency in the CMP series. The RTX 3060 is the first card artificially restricted by the manufacturer, in an attempt to ensure that Geforce series cards are sold to gamers, and CMP cards to cryptocurrencies.

In connection with its original announcement, Nvidia promised four graphics cards in the CMP series, where cards named 30HX and 40HX would be available during the first quarter of the year. The company also promised that these cards would not compete with the Geforce RTX 3000 series for access, after which we assumed that they were partially defective “Ampere” circuits or similar.

Now Videocardz has dug into the drivers released for the RTX 3060 and got clarity in the whole thing. The CMP 30HX and 40HX cards are also supported by version 461.72 – and have a device ID that places the cards in the “Turing” family. This means that Nvidia has so far kept its word and segmented up new Geforce graphics cards for gaming, while older technology from the RTX 2000 series is instead recycled to cryptocurrencies.

In terms of manufacturing technology, the first two CMP cards thus do not compete with the RTX 3000 series, as “Turing” is manufactured at 12 nanometers at TSMC, while the Geforce RTX 3000 series “Ampere” is manufactured at Samsung at 8 nanometers. This in turn should lead to relatively good supply of circuits to build 30HX and 40HX from under the circumstances, provided that new production needs to be started.

Exactly what technology the upcoming 50HX and 90HX cards are based on remains to be seen – it is clear in any case that they take the step up from a maximum power consumption of 185 watts to 250 and 320 watts and are equipped with 10 GB of memory.

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