In early May, MSI delivered its first Ethereum mining card from NVIDIA’s Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP HX) GPU family. The headless card was called the CMP 30HX Miner XS and is based on the GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU.
This time around, however, MSI is moving up the performance ladder in the CMP family with the launch of the CMP 50HX Miner. Whereas the CMP 30HX has an Ethereum hash rate of just 26 MH/sec, the CMP 50HX is more performant at 45 MH/sec.
According to MSI, the CMP 50HX Miner features 3,584 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1,350MHz, a boost clock of 1,545MHz, and 10GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps on a 320-bit bus. It’s reported that the CMP 50HX is based on the TU102 GPU and is most similar to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (although that graphics card features 4,352 CUDA cores and 11GB of GDDR6 memory).
Like all CMP HX mining cards, the CMP 50HX Miner does not feature any external display connectors. Instead, you’ll find exhaust vents covering the entire dual-slot I/O bracket, which maximizes the flow of hot air. As for cooling, the card uses a single-fan Aero “blower-style” cooler (with double ball bearings) to keep things quiet. Other items of note include the necessity of dual power connectors and a TDP of 225 watts.
The MSI CMP 50HX Miner is launching in a vastly different landscape than when the CMP HX family was first announced back in February. China has instituted a big crackdown on cryptocurrency mining (partially due to concerns over power consumption). The Chinese crackdown has decreased demand for mining cards, which is being felt in other regions around the globe (like in Europe).
At this point, we can only hope that this decreased demand in major markets like China, coupled with dedicated mining cards like the CMP HX family, along with targeted production boosts, will make it easier for the rest of us to purchase graphics cards. It’s been a rough nine months or so for those trying to obtain a GeForce RTX 20/30 Series or AMD Radeon RX 5000/6000 Series graphics card, and we could use all the help that we can get.