One of the critical points during this period of high demand for video cards is that some of them are being purchased by professional users looking to mine cryptocurrencies. The recent launch of new cards, along with records in the cryptocurrency market, led to the revival of the mining community, which recently could earn ~ $ 15 per RTX 3090 graphics card. These professional miners buy graphics cards on pallets, sometimes bypassing retailers and going straight to distributors, as they can guarantee a complete sale in one go. The indirect effect is less cards available to players looking to build new systems, leading to empty shelves and causing prices to skyrocket for the handful of cards that will reach retailers.
To at least offer a fig leaf to players, in the past some graphics card partners have started producing graphics cards just for mining. They had no graphical results, which made them almost impossible for game use cases, but it filtered part of the mining market to buy them, instead of taking inventory off the shelves for players. This was a bad band-aid, and now NVIDIA has taken a step further to separate mining from games.
NVIDIA’s announcement today is twofold: first, addressing the next release of the RTX 3060 graphics card on February 25ºand, second, announce a new line of dedicated mining hardware
RTX 3060: Cutting the mining rate in half
One of the main motivators for the reason that the new graphics cards are being sold is because they are so good at doing mining operations for various cryptocurrencies (ie, for Ethereum and other derivative currencies) and gain users a return appearance in their purchase. Mining requires hardware and software, and it is the software side that NVIDIA is addressing with this first announcement.
For the next RTX 3060, the software drivers for this video card will automatically limit the cryptocurrency hash rates in half – making as much as they can specifically earn in half. Software drivers will do this by detecting the math coming from the pipeline and restricting hardware access for these operations. At this point, we’re not sure if it’s a cut in the frequency that drivers will cause or simply limiting operations to half the hardware, but either way, NVIDIA hopes that this will prevent professional miners from buying these cards if their returns are split. half.
No plans are being announced for cards currently on the market, perhaps because the drivers for those cards already allow for a full-rate computing solution and can simply keep older drivers installed.
NVIDIA CMP: Dedicated mining silicon for Ethereum
Just as ‘cryptographic’ cards with no video outputs were pushing the market to balance themselves, NVIDIA is taking it a step further and removing video outputs from silicon altogether. There are other potential optimizations that could be made for power and performance, but at this point NVIDIA is simply declaring silicon without graphics. This could be a mixture of new custom silicon or simply silicon already manufactured that had defects in the video output channel.
The new dedicated NVIDIA CMP HX mining boards will come in four variants up to 320 W and from authorized partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit and PC Partner. These cards (together with the drivers) must also be designed so that more of these cards can be enabled on a single system.
| NVIDIA CMP HX mining hardware | ||||
| AnandTech | 30HX | 40HX | 50HX | 90HX |
| Eth Hash Fee * | 26 MH / s | 36 MH / s | 45 MH / s | 86 MH / s |
| Rated power | 125 W | 185 W | 250 W | 320 W |
| Reference Connectors | 8 pins | 8 pins | 2 x 8 pins | 2 x 8 pins |
| Memory size | 6 GB | 8 GB | 10 GB | 10 GB |
| Availability | T1 | T1 | Q2 | Q2 |
| * NVIDIA measured for DAG and Epoch 394 | ||||
What is interesting here is that these states are not so good. Here’s an analysis of what NVIDIA cards do today, and you can see why:
| NVIDIA hardware hash rates | |||
| AnandTech | Hash rate | Power | Efficiency MH / s / W |
| RTX 3090 | 121 MH / s | 290 W | 0.42 |
| RTX 3080 | 98 MH / s | 224 W | 0.44 |
| 90HX | 86 MH / s | 320 W | 0.27 |
| RTX 3070 | 62 MH / s | 117 W | 0.53 |
| RTX 3060 Ti | 60 MH / s | 120 W | 0.50 |
| RTX 2080 Ti | 49 MH / s | 240 W | 0.20 |
| 50HX | 45 MH / s | 250 W | 0.18 |
| 40HX | 36 MH / s | 185 W | 0.19 |
| 30HX | 26 MH / s | 125 W | 0.21 |
| NVIDIA HX data Minerstat RTX data |
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The only way for these new CMP HX mining add-on cards to make financial sense is if they are really cheap, around $ 600 for the 90HX, otherwise retail gaming GPUs appear to be much more efficient.
NVIDIA is not giving further details on when these mining add-on cards will be available, in addition to Q1 for the slowest and Q2 for the fastest. No word on pricing or distribution methods – there is a chance here that these cards are sold only through direct distributors to professional mining stores. By the pallet. Note that this does not prevent the high demand for power supplies. This market is also feeling the effects.