The latest news from Nvidia is quite interesting for both crypto-mainers and gamers, as the company appears to be taking drastic measures to make gaming GPUs available to gamers. With the upcoming release of the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards on February 25, the company wants to make sure that the new graphics adapters will be available to gamers and will not be purchased in large batches by crypto-miners.
The RTX 3060 GPU video drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate or cryptocurrency mining performance by about 50 percent. Thus, you will get half the hash rate that you would normally get if the card was running at full performance. For mining, the expected hash rate for the RTX 3060 was in the 40-45 MH / s range for Ethereum and with overclocked memory, so if the drivers cut that in half, you would only get 20-22.5 MH / s, which makes the price high.
RTX 3060 GPUs are unattractive to miners, or that's what Nvidia thinks will happen with these active actions they are taking.
Here are Nvidia's dedicated CMP HX GPUs for crypto-mining as a solution to the problem, or at least what the green company thinks they have figured out. Nvidia will try to offer separate products designed for cryptocurrency mining and, in particular, Ethereum (ETC) mining for miners. NVIDIA CMP line of products or processors for mining cryptocurrencies for professional mining, which does not support graphics (does not output video) and, therefore, should not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs for gamers.
Nvidia has announced 4 products in its new dedicated CMP graphics processors for crypto-mining, two of which will be available in the first quarter of this year and the other two planned for the second quarter of this year. The Nvidia CMP 30HX mining GPU should deliver 26 MH / s at 125W power consumption and will ship with 6GB, while the Nvidia CMP 40HX will deliver 36 MH / s at 185W power consumption and will ship with 8GB of video memory. These are the first two models scheduled for the first quarter of the year, with the second quarter being for the Nvidia CMP 50HX with 45 MH / s at 250W and 10GB VRAM and the Nvidia CMP 90HX with 86 MH / s at 320W and 10GB VRAM.
These originally announced specs for mining GPUs probably won't be as interesting as Nvidia expects, unless they cost significantly less than what GeForce RTX GPUs cost now. For reference, the RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 currently produce 60 MH / s with a power consumption of 120-140W when optimized, and with 200-220W they produce 50+ MH / s.
This essentially makes the 30HX, 40HX and 50HX not very attractive unless they cost a lot cheaper, so only the 90HX seems more interesting of the four cards to be based on the RTX 3080 and should be with GDDR6X memory, as opposed to the rest of the CMP line. The RTX 3080 is really hard to find at the moment, but that's not surprising considering the fact that it does about 95 MH/s with 240W of power consumption when optimized correctly, which again is much better than the listed official 90HX specs. The Nvidia RTX 3090 can do about 120 MH / s with a power consumption of about 300 watts.
We'll have to wait and see what comes to market and what the pricing and availability of Nvidia's new CPM product line will be to get a better idea of whether the company has made a good decision or something half and half late. like they did with the mining series in 2017. It's entirely possible that they didn't do well enough this time either, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and wait to see what the actual products will be, and whether Nvidia will just set them conservatively and they will be capable of further optimization, otherwise their performance will not be as attractive as desktop GPUs and people will continue to prefer them over dedicated mining products. The warranty period is also an important factor, so the idea is to see a normal warranty, not just a 3- or 6-month warranty like last time ...
Learn more on the official page of the NVIDIA CMP HX dedicated graphics processor for professional mining...
