 This Nvidia GPU has no display outputs, can't play any games, does not exist on Nvidia's website, costs upwards of $5,000 US dollars, and it doesn't even have a cooling fan. And yet it's sold out nearly everywhere. What the heck is going on with this thing? It's like a big block of aluminum. Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring this video. Whether you wanna upgrade your own toolbox or give the gift of repair this holiday season, you can find huge savings, new toolkit bundles, and get free shipping on orders over $50 at ifixit.com slash LTT. Now, the keen-eyed and brained among you might've already figured out what this card is designed for, crypto mining. And yes, yes, I know, but hear me out. This video isn't about promoting or selling you on crypto mining. We're really just incredibly curious about these Nvidia CMP mining GPUs. And because of the cost of these cards, very few of them have made their way into the hands of tech media, at least until now. Full disclosure then, this was provided to us by Vipera, who sells these cards, but we made no commitment to them or to Nvidia to say anything in particular about it. Not that Nvidia is likely to talk to us. That is the first weird thing about this. While CMP launched back in February with cards like the CMP90HX, which used a cut down version of the chip you'd find in a high-end 30 series gaming card, this particular model, the CMP170HX, isn't mentioned anywhere on Nvidia's website, social media, or even their investor calls. As far as we can tell, it's a complete ghost product. Making matters even more interesting, there have been leaks about it on Twitter since early this year, but no hardware made it out into the wild until the last couple of months. So what is it exactly? Well, in line with their previous mining cards, there are no display outputs. This allows Nvidia to cut costs, including the royalty that they would normally pay to the HDMI forum, and it prevents people from using the card as a gaming card, potentially cannibalizing their GeForce business. But there are a few other differences. For one, according to the third-party specs that are provided by Vipira, this card does not use silicon that could otherwise have been turned into a gaming card. In fact, it seems to use harvested dyes that didn't meet Nvidia's standard for their A100 data center GPUs. That could make things interesting later when we try to game on it anyway. The second weird thing is that this is an Nvidia-branded and Nvidia-distributed card. Most of the previous mining GPUs, be they CMP or otherwise, were manufactured and sold by Nvidia's board partners, MSI, Gigabyte, et cetera. But these cards are made, at least through a contract with someone like Pegatron or Foxconn, by Nvidia themselves. Third, it draws its maximum of 250 watts, not through an 8-pin PCI Express connector, but rather through an 8-pin CPU power connector. Now, thankfully, Vipira provided us with an adapter. So this is dual 8-pin PCIe to a single 8-pin CPU connector. And that seems to be included by Nvidia based on these eBay listings for the same card that also appear to come with the same adapter. And then finally, let's talk about this cooler, shall we? Most consumer graphics cards and a lot of the previous mining cards use inexpensive horizontally oriented fans designed for use in an ATX style computer case or an open air mining chassis. This works great for the home gamer or casual crypto miner, but that style requires extra space for the cooler to operate properly. So it's not really ideal for large scale crypto mining. So borrowing from the data center playbook, the CMP-170HX removes the fans from the card altogether and orients the fins for lengthwise airflow. You throw a couple of blowing matrons on the end and you no longer need to space them out. You can just pack them right in, which can vastly increase density. That's awesome for crypto people, but for me, or rather for Jake, it meant spending some time figuring out how to cool the stupid thing. And since we don't have a compatible server chassis lying around that we aren't already using in our server room, we opted to design a little 3D printed shroud that can take a 120 millimeter fan and then direct all of the airflow down this slot, which we're gonna use these included thumbscrews to bolt onto the back of it. And yeah, we're gonna just zip tie the fan to the thing. If for whatever reason you end up buying one of these cards, we're gonna have the link to this little shroud thing in the video description. You're gonna need one heck of a fan on it, by the way. This is an industrial PPC from Noctua that runs at 3000 RPM and does some pretty good static pressure as well. Of course, there's not much need for me to put the shroud on now because before we fire it up, we are going to in true LTT fashion, take this puppy apart. You strip it already? A little. Really? Okay, so what is... Boy! Cool. Boy! Oh boy. Whoa, it's what? It's fake black. What? What the heck? Is it all fake? Now hold on just a gosh darn minute here. Okay, so what? They put aluminum heat sink here and here. For looks. They put these... Is that even metal? This one's not connected to anything. This appears to actually be for looks. Holy crap. This thing is fricking jank, Jake. Look at this. Oh. They just like low key solder the PCI express connector to the fricking contact pads on the board here. What? Yeah, that's weird. Is it like that on the cards with the... No, I guess not, right? So they could have made like a 3090 reference that had the power connector at the end. Oh, I'm sure they could have. Clearly. I mean, this is not a 3090 board by any stretch though. You can see it's actually got one, two, three sets of ND-Link fingers. Hold on. Does this come out of here? What the? Hey, language. There are miners watching this video. Yeah. Get it? Yeah, yeah. Is it gonna come out? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, there it goes. Come on out little mining boy. Oh God. Oh, that is a fricking expensive, just like cosmetic piece of fricking aluminum, man. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like Nvidia started with a fricking hunk of aluminum this thick and just milled away 90% of it for no reason other than to just have a beautiful cosmetic backplate on a GPU that nobody will ever see cause it's in a data center. To be fair, I think this is the same piece that would have ended up on an A100 just with different etched. So like that's an $11,000 card. But still why? Yeah, yeah, it's just for looks. You can see they've reused at least certain aspects of the consumer board design because they've got that weird fan cutout for the pass through cooling. I think the A100 is also like that too. But we don't know. We don't have one. Nobody's taking one apart. I mean, should we take the copper cooler off? Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, we kind of have to, don't we? It's our responsibility. Heck yeah. Don't get fingerprints on the copper. It etches with your finger. Tarnish, oh no. No, it etches with the finger acids. You people drive me crazy. I just touched all over it. Oh gosh. Oh wow. Oh, gentle. Oh God. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's thermal epoxy. The whole thing? The whole GPU. And the GPU is like freaking this big. It's huge. Oh no, there's gotta be a way. It's not worth it. I'm sorry, Jake, we can't. Oh, I say we just send it and strike. Give it a little bit of force. Hold on, Jake. Actually, no, it might come up. I did that. It seemed like there's components on the board. Everyone just be patient. It's like the plaster thing right in there and then twist. No, I don't want to twist against the component on the board. No, but it's a big component. It'll be fine. Look at how much solder's on that bad boy. Oh my God. We're not doing it that way. Alex, will heat gun help to get off a thermal compounded thing? Probably, but you just rip it. I like his style. It's five grand. Well, it's his five grand, not yours. Can we twist a little bit? Wait, does it twist at all? Yeah, just twist it. I can try a twist. Do a little wiggle. I'm on a glove. Oh my God. I'm not putting more fingerprints on it. I refuse. Hey look, there's a cloth right there. Use the cloth. Could you jam it in and twist it? No. I tried, he wouldn't let me. Okay, it's off. Oh wow, that was easy. Jesus Christ. Holy. Holy, that is a big. Wait, it has an IHS on it. GPU, yeah, it does. What the hell? We need some alcohol. Alex, did you see this? It has a. It's fricking enormous. It has an IHS. Holy. I know. What is it? So it's GA100-5F. It looks like the lasering was done using two different processes, probably at two separate times. Weird, that's really weird. Does an A100 have an IHS? I would think so. Cause as far as we can tell, they've just reused just about everything about the A100 for this card. So the SXM cards don't have an IHS, from what I understand. Oh, the ones that are in the. Like the server ones. The ones where you plunk them down like this. Yeah, okay. But the PCIe ones, maybe for whatever reason. No idea, because nobody's ever taken the cooler out. Well, they can put a bigger cooler on the PCIe version. So maybe they need the more efficient thermal transfer for the other ones. Cause that's why they did away with IHS. The other ones are way higher wattage. Well, again then, that would be why. Yeah, maybe. The other ones are like 400 watts. That'd be why they'd want to go bare die for sure then. I get such a kick out of this freaking PCIe connector here. This is hand soldered for sure. So it's a different kind of memory on this card. You see, you don't see any GDDR6X or anything like that, right? This is all power delivery, all around the GPU. And then there's nothing on the back. That's because all the memory is gonna be under this heat spreader right next to the die. And there's only eight gigs of it, which is really interesting. The A100 has- 40 or 80. 40 or 80. Yeah. Also a little bit more. The advantage of HBM2 is that it gets in closer to the die. It's higher bandwidth, hence the name, high bandwidth memory, HBM. But the disadvantage is of course cost. So that's why it hasn't really made its way into gaming cards, except when AMD experimented with it for one generation, I think, maybe two. So the GPU code name in this Nvidia dock, all they say is GA100. So we don't even know- So presumably it's probably like GA100-400 or something like that. But yeah, this is 105F. Weird. Very weird. I hope this thing still works. All of the cooling appears to be done by that copper heat sink that's in the middle, because these black fins are not connected to anything. And this back plate is not connected to anything, like thermally. You know, I see the copper now that I'm looking at it, but I never noticed it before. No, me neither. Crazy. I mean, I'm going to tighten them anyway, but I just don't think they do anything. No, they do go through the card though. Like they go through the PCB. Oh, no, I know they do. They just don't- Hold anything. They don't serve a purpose other than to enclose the copper fins so that our cooler- Hold the clamps together. Exactly. That's all they do. Okay. Well, hey, are we ready to throw this bad boy on here? Oh man. Ha. Script calls for hydration. V2LTT water bottles now with quad channel memory. Lttstore.com. You ready to fire that up? I'm putting more tape. I like tape. Oh yeah. So Jake's sealing up our duct here with, well not duct tape, but it's fine. Seal your duct. Woo, here it goes. I see what you mean about the blowback though. Oh, hey. Oh, well there's your problem. I was just going to plug it in while it's on, but whatever. Nope. If it was a $50 GPU, I'd consider it. The crazy part is this is like value compared to the product it's based on. Well, the one it's based off of, depending on the price is around like 11,000 US, 12,000 US. It also has five to 10 times as much HBM2E. I don't know how much the 80 gig ones are. I don't know. Probably more. Yeah. Now this is interesting. A card that is not present on Nvidia's website cannot have drivers downloaded from Nvidia's website. In fact, this entire CMP series is not here. Nope. It's not under C class either. So we end up on Viperatech's website where we can find out on mining GPUs. Here it is. Nvidia CMP 178 checks windows drivers. And we tried. You cannot use the regular GeForce or Studio drivers with this card. They just don't do anything. So from what I recall, I think this is the same version that you can download from like MSI's website for the lower end CMP cards. Oh, crazy. It doesn't even show up as a display adapter. It's a 3D video controller. It's kind of trippy to me that it even has a windows driver because who in their right mind would be running this thing in windows? That's true. This is crazy. So this mining specific driver we just downloaded still has like GeForce experience and stuff. Yeah. And you can use it with like 30 series cards. It's not, it wouldn't be an up-to-date game ready driver, but you could game on it with a 30 series. Which we have. Yeah. 3090 for comparison. This thing is so weird. Crap, OBS crashed while the Nvidia driver was installing. That makes sense. Wait, why don't we see if we can N-Vank on it? N-Vank. Okay. You're getting ahead. Well, it's an option, but it doesn't tell me which GPU I'm using. Yeah. You gotta select it. So it'd be GPU zero probably. GPU, no, it'd probably be one. Dude, GPU zero. I bet GPU zero is the- There's no way it's GPU zero. Lunch. No. I bet lunch. We're doing GPU zero now and it's going to be the RTX 3090. For lunch. I promise you. For lunch. There it is. RTX 3090. Told you. Told ya! Got him! GPU one. It's going to crash, I bet. Scammed. Scammed. It doesn't even register. It's GPU zero anyway. Wait, can you enter GPU 10? Wait, whoa. What's it even doing? Why is this one's 3D engine going crazy? I wonder if it's a weird pass through thing where the mining card has the hardware, but it's got to pass it through or something. Also doing encode. I wonder, I'm more thinking it's like the like on a 3090 you can pick. You want the GPU core or the NVENC core to do the encoding maybe. Okay. Let's try setting it to GPU two. Start record. Oh! You've selected GPU two. Set this back to zero and try again. All right then. So it doesn't work. Okay. Well, that's weird because the data center cards do have NVENC hardware as far as we know. Seems like it, yeah. GPUZ then. Yeah. Here we go. GPUZ does not know this graphics device yet. This is an entirely new one guys. Good job. Help the community by submitting a validation for the fourth tab. Heck yeah. Well, we'll start with that. My name, Sinus Labastian. I've never gotten to submit a new GPU to GPUZ. I think it's already listed, but. Oh, let's have a look at this thing then. Technology unknown. Die size unknown. Release date unknown. Transistors unknown. Oh, now this is fascinating. Whoa. Is that 1.1? It uses a PCIe 1.1 by four interface. Now, hold on a second. That may not be quite right because even though it might be at that link speed now, if we hit it with a load, it might change. It says it supports up to 16, but it's still PCIe 1.1. Yeah, 1.1. Huh? That's really interesting. Now, to be clear for mining, there's not actually much data transfer that takes place over the PCIe connection. You're just sending the GPU work, it's churning through it, and it's sending you back a result. That's it. So there's no reason, I guess, for Nvidia to enable the full PCIe Gen 4 by 16 link that this GPU would otherwise be capable of. In fact, there's reason for them to not. That makes it harder for people to potentially repurpose this as a card. That could do other things. Even if they could get through any driver locks that Nvidia has put in place, which nobody ever would. When Nvidia puts a driver lock in place, it stays there. What are they up to? Like 70% efficiency on the low hash rate card? 71%. 71, hilarious. But yeah, it doesn't increase when you're mining. Oh, okay. Oh, you're mining already? Yeah, it started mining. Okay, well hold on, hold on. I wanna look at stuff. I wanna look at stuff, James. All right, all right, all right. Okay, we've got HBM2 memory with a 4,096-bit bus, 1,493 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. Curiously, that bus width is less than an A100. I think an A100 is 5120 or something like that. And the A100 bandwidth is higher. That's still a lot of bandwidth compared to a gaming GPU. For sure, like a 3090 is under a terabyte a second. Clocked at 1140, boosts to 1410. Same boost as an A100. No Nvidia SLI. Higher base clock, interestingly. You've been talking a lot about DirectX. Oh, DirectX support, unknown. Go to advanced, I think. You can like try it. General power limit, okay. DirectX 9, try that. Device not found. Cannot initialize. Interesting. So if you were hoping to grab one of these and make your own cloud gaming service, you know, obviously it doesn't, well, it doesn't have an HDMI connection. You can't plug a monitor into it directly, but I mean, people have reused Nvidia's like compute cards for purposes like that. You will not be doing it on this one. It supports CUDA. Well, okay. And- Oh, interesting. Not Vulcan. Okay, let's fire up Blender. Okay. It's gonna start at some point here. I think it's frozen. Oh wow, yeah, it's really locked up then. Okay. You try optics. It does have tensor core, so. I mean, it's trying to do something. It's doing a whole lot of nothing. It's trying to do nothing. So the clock speed goes up, but the GPU temperatures actually don't change. It's just still not doing anything. Is that the base clock? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's just a base. All its base are belong to us. I think Blender is just telling it to switch power states. Gear it up to do work that it will then never do. Yeah. This is a giant disappointment so far. I mean, only because we got our hands on a mining GPU and wanted to do something else on it. A $5,000 mining GPU. Okay, I mean, is now the time to find out if it's at least good at that? This is gonna mine on both cards, just so we can compare them, and we haven't done any tuning yet. It hit boost clock for a second, and then it dialed back a little bit. How's their power? 245 watts, temps are okay. So the interesting thing is, it's a mining card, but you can't tweak the memory speed. You can't do really anything. The only thing you can adjust is the power limit, which we should do, because when I was messing around with it earlier, by default, it draws 250 watts, and mine's like 164 mega hash in Ethereum. But if you turn it down to like 80%, it does 160 mega hash at 200 watts, which is way more efficient. You're barely losing anything. Oh wow. All right, there we go. Oh yeah, so there you go. It's all locked down. I kind of, I give- You could change the core clock, but let's not. I give the community not that long to figure out how to change more stuff on these things. It's hard with Nvidia cards. Wow, look at that. 200 watts. Give it a sec. And... The memory temps in the 3090 are just ripping. Wow, look at that. I guess that's one advantage to having that IHS, is that your HBM is now gonna be cooled by your main GPU cooler. Yeah, there's no things on the back. Yeah, there's hardly any difference in temp between the HBM 2E and the GPU. So the 3090 is 275 kilo hash a watt. And sorry, what is the CMP? 804. 800? And I've seen people with a Linux OS that's a little bit more efficient can get like around 850. So like, yeah. That's insane. Mind you, a tuned 3090, you could probably get around 400 kilo hash a watt. It's still- It's double. Double. And that's with us tuning it in like four seconds. 372. We could definitely get to 400 kilo hash a watt, I'm sure. How can this be 40 to 50% faster than the top tier GeForce GPU and double the efficiency while on the same MP3 architecture? Yeah. It's crazy. Okay. Let's talk about that. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is likely memory bandwidth. The Ethereum mining algorithm, ETHash, is almost entirely bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. So if you have an approximately 50% memory bandwidth difference, and that correlates to a 40 to 50% performance difference, that mostly checks out. As for the power draw, while they are based on the same Ampere architecture, the A100 silicon is manufactured on TSMC's seven nanometer process rather than Samsung's eight nanometer process, which is what's used on the 30 series gaming cards. That's gonna help you on efficiency for sure. So there's no doubt that this is a killer piece of hardware for crypto miners, but there are still a couple of questions left to answer. With the looming proof of stake migration for Ethereum on the horizon, does it make sense to buy a pricey card that at current profitability could take about a year to pay itself off and has zero value whatsoever outside of mining crypto? Well, if Nvidia's shortfall in CMP business unit revenues are anything to go by, most people think probably not. Reselling old mining cards is one of the ways that miners will recoup their costs in the event of a crash or a legislative change. I'll let you guys make the final call on all of that though. I guess it's also time to make the final call on Nvidia's claim then, that CMP products would not affect the shortages of gaming products because they would not be redirecting silicon that could have ended up in a gaming GPU. And in this instance, it actually does appear that there's validity to Nvidia's claims. This GPU is clearly compute only with no meaningful gaming utility, though the same cannot necessarily be said of the other CMP cards. Let us know if you'd like to see us take a look at those in the future. Whether you've been thinking about learning to repair your own devices or just wanting to take your hobby to the next level, iFixit's got you covered. And now is the time to get kitted out because iFixit's Black Friday toolkit markdowns have started. For a limited time, you can get 20% off all laptop batteries, get discounts on the legendary ProTech, Manta, Mako and Moray kits, and you can get free shipping on orders over $50 with code FOR YOU. iFixit also launched their new bundles where you can get kits matched with helpful accessories and they're on sale. This is the only time of the year that you can get these sets at their lowest pricing and everything is still covered by iFixit's lifetime warranty. So go to iFixit.com slash LTT and give the gift of repair today. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the video we did a few years back on how ASICs work for mining. That was a very interesting one.