NVIDIA CMP 90HX

Launched in March 2021 alongside the CMP 50HX and 70HX, the CMP 90HX uses a cut-down GA102 die, the same large Ampere die that underpins the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, NVIDIA's flagship gaming cards of that generation. It represented NVIDIA channeling some of its most powerful consumer-class silicon directly into the mining market, again with the goal of keeping actual GeForce RTX 3080/3090 cards on shelves for gamers rather than miners during the severe 2021 shortage. Video outputs were removed and the card was sold only through mining and system-integrator channels.

At launch the CMP 90HX delivered around 86 MH/s mining Ethereum, making it the second-fastest card in the entire CMP family behind only the specialized CMP 170HX. That made it a serious purchase for large-scale mining operations in 2021. Today, that performance crown means little: Ethereum's September 2022 Merge to Proof-of-Stake eliminated the coin that the CMP 90HX (and the entire CMP line) was built to mine, and GA102-based hashing power has no comparable Proof-of-Work market left to serve at scale. We rate the CMP 90HX honestly as a powerful but now largely obsolete piece of mining-specific hardware.

The CMP 90HX sits above the GA104-based CMP 50HX and 70HX in raw hashrate and power draw, and below only the A100-derived CMP 170HX in NVIDIA's mining stack. Its closest gaming relatives, the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, share its GA102 silicon but retain full display output, ray tracing/DLSS support, and much broader resale value and usability. For essentially any buyer today, a used RTX 3080 is a dramatically more useful purchase than a CMP 90HX; the latter's appeal is limited strictly to large-scale miners of remaining GPU-minable Proof-of-Work coins or to those wanting cheap GA102-class compute hardware.