With the gaming and tech world still in turmoil, as people struggle to secure either a new-gen console or up-to-date PC hardware without spending extortionate amounts of money, there have been some fingers pointed at a number of factors that have led to this situation. Chief among them is cryptominers bulk-buying graphics cards for their farms. With Cryptomining expected to continue causing issues until the middle of next year, Nvidia decided to actually making a GPU specifically for mining. However, it seems as though this comes with a hefty price.
According to a report from a few days ago, it seems as though the CMP 170HX, a card that Nvidia designed which is dedicated to cryptomining as opposed to gaming, would set those interested in one back a few thousand dollars. The report references a tweet by someone who spotted that the 170HX is going for ¥600,000 JPY on Yahoo! Auctions, which is roughly equivalent to $5,279 US. There is another outlet that is selling one for $4,600 US.
To put that into some perspective, at the time of writing, Best Buy is selling the Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU for just under $1,500 US. This means the CMP 170HX, even at the lower end of the price spectrum, is selling for three times as much as Nvidia's most powerful gaming hardware. As a result, it's likely to put off miners looking to purchase one of these cards, even though they've been designed specifically with them in mind. The 170HX has no gaming output, which make them ideal for miners and useless for gamers. However, at these prices, it doesn't seem as though it will stem the tide of miners buying regular GPUs.
As well as mining-specific cards, Nvidia also put limiters in its range of hardware, making them much more difficult to use on cryptomining farms by introducing hash rate limiters. Sadly, some have managed to bypass this, and coupled with the enormous price of the 170HX, it seems as though things are back to how they were when the issues began in the first place.
With the tech shortages expected to go on for perhaps another year, according to the CEOs of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, now is a frustrating time to be a gamer. With such an expensive price tag on the CMP 170HX, cryptominers may not be enticed over to that side, so the need for them to continue using other flagship GPUs is likely to rage on for a bit longer.
Source: PC GamesN