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 want to upgrade your own toolbox or give the gift of repair
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LTT
now the kenaid and brained among you
might have 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 vypira 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 cmp98 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 vipera this card
does not use silicon that could otherwise have been turned into a gaming
card in fact it seems to use harvested
dies 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 etc but these cards are made
at least through a contract with someone like pegatron or foxconn buy 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
bipira 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 all together and orients the fins for
lengthwise airflow you throw a couple blowing metrons 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 um 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 going to use these included thumb screws to bolt onto
the back of it and uh yeah we're gonna
just zip tie the fan to the thing if for whatever reason you end up buying
one of these cards uh 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 uh 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
what cool boy
oh boy whoa it's what
it's fake black what what the heck
is it now hold on just a gosh darn minute here
okay so what they put aluminum
heatsink 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 freaking jank Jake
look at this oh they just like low-key
solder the pci express connector to the
freaking 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 a like a 30 90 reference that had
the power connector at the end oh i'm sure they could have clearly
wow i mean this is not a 30 90 board by any stretch though you can see it's
actually got one two three sets of envy link fingers
uh hold on does this does this come out of here what the f
hey language there are minors there are minors watching this video yeah get it
yeah yeah
is it gonna come out oh yeah oh yeah there it goes come on little mining boy
oh god whoa that is a freaking expensive just like
cosmetic piece of freaking aluminum men maybe i'm missing something but it looks
to me like NVIDIA started with a freaking 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 because it's in a data center to be fair i think this is the
same piece that would have ended up on an a100 i know 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 uh kind of the
weird fan cut out for the notch pass-through
uh pass-through cooling i think the a100
is also like that too but we don't know because 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 it's our responsibility heck yeah oh don't get
fingerprints on the copper the edges
you people drive me crazy 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 bit it's huge oh no there's got to be a way
it's not worth it i'm sorry Jake we can't
oh i say we just send it in strike give it a little bit of force hold on Jake
actually no
it might come up i do that see like there's components on there and just be
patient stick the plastic thing right in there and then twist
you know i don't want to twist against the component on the board well 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 should just grip 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
it i can try a twist i want a glove oh my goodness i'm not
putting more fingerprints on it look there's a there's a cloth right there use the cloth could you jam it in twist
it um no i tried he wouldn't let me okay oh
wow that was easy jesus christ holy
oh that is a waiting it has an ihs on it
GPU yeah it does what the hell i need some alcohol should you see this
it hasn't it's freaking enormous it has an ihs
holy i know
oh what is it so it's ga 100-45f
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 because 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 server ones the
ones where you plunk them down like this yeah okay but the PCIe ones may be for
whatever reason no idea because nobody's ever taken well they
can put a bigger cooler on the PCIe version so maybe they need the more
efficient thermal transfer for the other ones because that's why they did away
with the other ones are way higher wattage well again then
that would be why yeah they would want their own 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
why 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 going
to be under this heat spreader right next to the die and there's only eight
gigs of it this is really interesting the a100 has 480 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
uh but the disadvantage is of course cost so that's why it hasn't really made
its way into gaming cards except when from 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 ga
100-400 or something like that um 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 yeah 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 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
clamps yeah together exactly that's all they do
okay well hey are we ready to throw this bad
boy on here oh man ha ha
script calls for hydration v2 LTT water bottles now with quad
channel memory LTT Store.com you ready to fire that up
uh i'm putting more tape i like tape oh yeah so
Jake's sealing up our ducks here with well not that make sure you uh it's fine
seal your duck 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 5 to 10 times as much hbm2e i don't know
how much the 80g ones are i don't know yeah 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 not it's not under c-class
either um so we end up on
viperatec's website where we can go to mining gpus here it is NVIDIA
cmp-170hx Windows drivers and we tried
you cannot use the regular g-force 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 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 a 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
30 90 for comparison this is so weird
crap obs crashed while the NVIDIA driver
was installing that makes sense wait why aren't we sleeping in nbank on it ben
bank okay you're getting you're getting ahead oh well it's it's an option but it
doesn't tell me which GPU i'm using yeah you gotta select it so bgpu0 probably
CPU you know it'd probably be one dude GPU zero i bet GPU zero is that
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 like i promise you for lunch there it is
yeah rtx 39 told you i told ya
can you enter like GPU-10 wait whoa what's it even doing why is this one
like 3d engine going crazy i wonder if
it's like a weird pass-through thing where like the mining card
has the hardware but it's like it's going to pass it also doing encode i wonder i'm
more thinking it's like the like on a 30 90 you can pick you want
the GPU core or the end bank cord to do the encoding maybe
okay let's try setting it to GPU too start recording oh
you've selected GPU to 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 n-fan 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 4 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 pci 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 pci express 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 pci express gen 4x16
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 seventy percent
efficiency on the low hash rate card seventy one percent everyone hilarious
but yeah it doesn't increase when you're mining oh okay oh you're mining already
yeah it's certified okay well hold on hold on i want to look at stuff i want to look at this all right all right okay
we've got hbm2 memory with a
4096-bit bus
1493 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth
curiously that bus width is less than an a100 i think an a100 is 50 120 or
something like that and the a100 bandwidth is higher that's
still a lot of bandwidth yeah compared to a gaming GPU for sure like a 30 90 is
under a terabyte a second clocked at 1140 boosts to 1410 same
boost as an a100 no NVIDIA sli higher
bass clark interestingly you've been talking a lot about directx oh
uh directx support unknown go to advanced i think there's you can like
try it general power limit okay directx 9 try
that device
could not initialize interesting so if you were hoping to
grab one of these and make your own
cloud gaming service you know obviously 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 is it 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 cores
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
huh 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 um 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 our 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 mines 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 can 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 and
the memory tips in the 30 90 are just ripping
wow look at that i guess that's one advantage to having
that ihs is that your hpm is now going to be cooled by your main GPU cooler
yeah there's no there's no things on the back yeah there's hardly any difference
in temp between the hbm2e and the GPU
so the 30 90 is 275 kilohash a watt and
sorry what is the cmp 840 800
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 30 90 you could probably get around 400 kilohash a lot
it's still double double and that's with us tuning it in like
four seconds 372. we could definitely get to 400
kilohaw 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 ampere 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 et hash 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 going to 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
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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 worked for mining that
was a very interesting one