NVIDIA CMP 70HX

Released in March 2021 as part of NVIDIA's Ampere-based CMP wave, the CMP 70HX uses a higher-binned GA104 die than its sibling the CMP 50HX, the same silicon family found in the RTX 3070. It was built for the same reason as every other CMP card: to give crypto miners a dedicated purchasing channel during the 2021 GPU shortage so they would stop buying up GeForce cards meant for gamers. All video outputs were removed and firmware was tuned purely for sustained mining throughput and efficiency.

At launch the CMP 70HX mined Ethereum at roughly 64 MH/s, making it one of the more efficient cards in the original CMP stack on a hashrate-per-watt and hashrate-per-dollar basis. That reputation, however, is entirely tied to a mining economy that no longer exists for Ethereum: the September 2022 Merge to Proof-of-Stake removed GPU mining as a viable way to earn ETH, and demand for cards like the 70HX collapsed along with it. Today it's a well-regarded but ultimately legacy piece of hardware, useful mainly to a shrinking pool of miners working other Proof-of-Work coins.

The CMP 70HX outperforms the CMP 50HX thanks to its higher core count and power budget, while remaining below the GA102-based CMP 90HX and far below the A100-derived CMP 170HX. Its closest gaming relative is the RTX 3070, which shares its core GA104 silicon but keeps full display connectivity and driver support. For almost any use case outside of dedicated mining or compute work, a used RTX 3070 is the far more practical and valuable purchase; the CMP 70HX's appeal is narrowly limited to buyers who specifically want a display-less card at a lower cost.