Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
MSI has revealed the company's Nvidia CMP 50HX Miner graphics card, which caters to Ethereum miners. The CMP 50HX is part of Nvidia's Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) lineup that aims to put more GeForce products into gamers' hands by giving miners specialized mining graphics cards.
The CMP 50HX Miner rocks 3,584 CUDA cores and 10GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 320-bit memory interface. The graphics card works perfectly fine with a PCIe 1.0 x 4 interface. We suspect that Nvidia was recycling Turing dies for its CMP mining graphics cards, although the chipmaker never confirmed our suspicions. If we had to take an educated guess, the CMP 50HX is probably utilizing a cut-down version of the TU102 silicon, which powered popular Turing models, such as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
The CMP 50HX Miner comes with a 1,350 MHz base clock and 1,545 MHz boost clock. Performance-wise, we already know that the CMP 50HX delivers an Ethereum hash rate up to 45 MH/s. MSI confirms this piece of data, highlighting that the quoted hash rate is applicable to the DAG algorithm, with Epoch 394 under room temperatures with good cooling.
The CMP 50HX Miner employs MSI's dual-slot Aero cooler, which comes in at 268 x 114 x 36mm. It's a typical blower design where the single cooling fan pulls cool air from the outside and exhuast the hot air through the I/O panel. The cooling fan itself features double-ball bearings that are more durable and silent than normal bearings. Not that silence really matters in a cryptocurrency mining operation.
The CMP 50HX Miner even comes with a backplate to provide extra rigidity to the PCB. MSI claims that the graphics card utilizes a custom PCB, but didn't share additional information on the matter.
With a power consumption of 225W, the CMP 50HX Miner requires two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Being a product oriented toward mining cryptocurrency, the CMP 50HX Miner lacks display outputs. Instead, MSI left a big opening for hot air to exit the card.
Since there was no formal announcement, the pricing and availability for MSI's Nvidia CMP 50HX Miner is unknown at this point.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
Got to love when time-to-market makes it so products destined for a highly volatile market completely miss their peak opportunity window.
Wonder if someone has checked whether these CMP cards can be salvaged as GPUs by re-routing video output through the IGP or a secondary GPU like previous mining cards could. If that trick still works, these could be some nice bottom-dollars makeshift GPUs to pair with a GT1030 or similar for outputs.
There will be another round, somewhere. Will this be enough to make a difference?
Or will prices stay up there regardless given the evident profitability of selling the proverbial shovel, and $1000 become the normal price of a new mid-range graphic card?
