During the mining crisis, many gaming cards were diverted from their original purpose to be used in cryptocurrency farms. To curb this practice, NVIDIA offered CMP GPUs for mining. A total of six cards were launched. The question now is whether they can be recycled as gaming cards. This is what the YouTube channel Sfdx Show wanted to know.
A mining CMP recycled as a gaming card : feasible, but not great ..
As a reminder, NVIDIA’s mining cards used GPUs from the gaming world. However, most of these cards have no video output and suffer from other limitations. These include software limitations, such as bios or driver limitations. However, these can be easily circumvented, as the YouTuber’s video shows.
What’s more complicated to get around, however, are the hardware limitations. As it stands, the card we’ve purchased is limited to four PCIe lines. What’s more, the standard displayed by GPU-Z is 1.1. All this contributes to literally slashing the card’s performance, which offers a drastically reduced framerate compared to what the card could offer. Remember that the 50HX features a TU102 GPU limited to 56 SM (3584 cuda core), compared with 68 SM for the 2080 Ti, which shares a similar GPU.
However, the videographer tried everything, even going so far as to re-solder the capacitors on the card’s PCB, but to no avail. The limitation is certainly at the GPU level. At the same time, it’s easy to imagine NVIDIA applying limitations all over the place. The aim is to avoid the proliferation of dubious mining/gaming cards on the market, all at a lower cost. Well, that’s without mentioning the GPUs used, which are probably defective chips or have not passed the tests, in short.
In the meantime, you can get this kind of card for just under €200 on AliExpress. After that, in view of the fiddling involved and the performance obtained, it doesn’t seem worth the effort!
