It’s potential to repurpose one in all Nvidia’s devoted crypto mining GPUs for a gaming graphics card, however you actually should not, because the adventures of 1 intrepid modder clearly illustrate.
VideoCardz reported this story of the conversion of an MSI CMP 50HX graphics card right into a gaming mannequin by Spanish YouTuber Sfdx Present (initially featured by Skilled Overview).
The MSI mining graphics card is powered by a TU102 chip. This is identical engine discovered within the RTX 2080 Ti, so it is a recycled gaming chip, albeit a distinct variant of the TU102 (with barely fewer CUDA cores). However in principle, this CMP 50HX will be was a gaming GPU with some intelligent trickery.
The hope is that it isn’t too far off from the extremely rated RTX 2080 Ti, however the actuality, as we’ll see, may be very totally different…
So let’s record the issues right here. First, the crypto mining card doesn’t have an output to a monitor (mining doesn’t want one, and doing with out it reduces prices). On condition that, it must be linked to a system with built-in graphics (that may faucet out to a monitor) and used as a secondary GPU.
Along with this {hardware} consideration, the CMP 50HX is provided with a fan-style cooler (which is lower than supreme).
The opposite massive drawback is with the graphics drivers, because the recycled GPU will not be acknowledged by Nvidia’s GeForce driver (for the reason that product doesn’t formally exist). The YouTuber needed to tinker with modified driver binaries to get the GPU to work, not one thing that is simple to do (Sfdx Present notes that it was an actual ‘ache’ as Google’s translation of the Spanish clip had ).
Ultimately, Sfdx Present obtained the mining GPU working as a transformed GeForce mannequin, however the outcomes had been disappointing – it wasn’t, as hoped, an RTX 2080 equal.
This was as a result of the CMP 50HX was restricted to 4 PCIe lanes and the modder could not get round this, even checking (by soldering in lacking bits) that the GPU chip does not have these lanes enabled (though they’re current on the cardboard itself).
Evaluation: Very impractical, however attention-grabbing nonetheless
Finally, given the expense of shopping for a used mining GPU and the complexity of tinkering with drivers (though one other third get together has made the method simpler, we’re advised) plus the opposite caveats talked about, this does not make sense path to get an inexpensive graphics card.
You may as properly use a used GeForce GPU, particularly contemplating that used graphics playing cards for mining will be on their final legs with many, many miles on the clock.
The YouTuber paid round €160 to get the CMP 50HX from AliExpress, which equates to round $170 / £140 / AU$270. For that cash within the US, for instance, on eBay you possibly can choose up an RTX 2070 (if we take a look at the Nvidia facet of the equation) for not way more than $200, with none of the hassles, quite a few caveats, and doubtless far fewer miles on the clock as talked about.
Nonetheless, though an impractical experiment on this case, the reuse of a graphics card for mining is actually attention-grabbing to see.
