The cards Nvidia CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) are the attempt – apparently successful – to kill the classic “two birds with one stone”. On the one hand we try to capitalize on the high demand for GPUs in monetary terms by cryptocurrency miners (like Ethereum), on the other by prevent this request from spilling over to GeForce cards, already limited due to the shortage of production, taking them away from gamers.
In parallel it is a well thought out marketing move, because no one will be able to blame Nvidia for not having tried them all to solve the shortage of video gaming cards on the market (although unfortunately it will last for the whole of 2021 or almost). In these hours Gigabyte officially presented his first CMP card, a model 30HX called CMP 30HX D6 6G (GV-N30HXD6-6G).
Being essentially an accelerator, this proposal is devoid of any video output, but otherwise it is in all respects similar to a classic gaming video card: it adopts a TU116 (Turing) GPU running at 1785 MHz, connected to 6 GB of GDDR6 memory at 14 Gbps on a 192-bit bus. The CMP 30HX D6 6G requires an 8-pin auxiliary connection. According to data released by Nvidia, the 30HX is able to offer a hash rate of 26 MH / s.
The peculiarity, if we want to go and find the classic nit, is that the warranty of this card is not two or more years, but 3 months. Unlike the gaming proposals, a CMP card is in fact designed for operate constantly, 24 hours a day, under full load and in conditions that are not always ideal – in mining rigs that see them side by side, with greater difficulties in terms of heat dissipation.
Precisely for these reasons Gigabyte has equipped the board with Ultra Durable certified components, along with a WindForce 2X cooling system that combines an aluminum radiator, copper heatpipe and two 90mm fans that rotate in opposite directions to bring out the hot air mainly from the side (or above if the board, as is usually the case in mining rigs, is vertical).
The three-month warranty should not apply in Europe where a minimum of two years are required for electronic products, but it is however symptomatic of how different use affects hardware and consequently life expectancy by the manufacturer, who doesn’t want to take too many risks with a longer guarantee and then find themselves dealing with a wave of RMAs.
The theme of the impact of mining on video cards brings to mind a video circulated on YouTube in recent weeks in which we tried to demonstrate the performance deterioration of a GPU subjected to a year and a half of mining; however, the absence of many details on the evidence does not allow a clear cause-effect relationship to be established.