The Hong Kong customs has reportedly seized a batch of CMP HX GPUs with over 300 Nvidia CMP 30HX cards according to a new report by the Chinese media "mydrivers". The picture above shows a batch of around a hundred such CMP 30HX units that were busted. These were apparently being smuggled so they could be put into use at mining farms there. While the reason for the action isn"t clearly stated anywhere, it may be a result of the recent efforts by the Hong Kong government to ban unauthorized cryptocurrency trading and use at retail.
Back in February, Nvidia launched these dedicated CMP HX mining cards to satisfy the needs of Ethereum miners, among others, so they may leave the gaming graphics cards to gamers. From a driver inspection, it was found that the CMP HX series of cards is actually based on last-gen Turing architecture with modifications made that prevent them from running graphics workloads. The variant in question here is the CMP 30HX which is a apparently a repurposed GTX 1660 SUPER and offers an ethereum hash rate of up to 26MH/s.
Alongside the launch of the CMP HX series of GPUs, Nvidia had also crippled the mining performance of the RTX 3060 so as to deter the miners from buying it up too. However, last month, the company had inadvertently released an internal developer driver which removed the 3060"s hash rate limiter. The driver has since been pulled.
Source: mydrivers