The CMP 90HX is not a CMP 170HX: it is a GA102 card, the chip family of the RTX 3080 and 3090, with 10 GB of GDDR6X on a 320-bit bus. The wiki's CMP 90HX unlock hub collects what is known so owners do not confuse it with the 10 GB 170HX, and it stresses that none of this work is the cmpunlocker 170HX tool.
What is known
Badges below: Proven means reproduced by a second person with numbers, Reported means one person's result, Theory is an untested idea, Contested means people disagree, and Warning marks something that damaged hardware.
- Compute (Reported): separate projects (bendy2/cmp90hx, WildFlash1st/cmp90hx-unlock and pearlfortune/cmpunlocker) restore the throttled SM compute rate; all are driver-side and volatile, so a full power-off re-locks the card. A full unlock at about 90 TFLOP/s FP16/BF16 was reported on August 12, 2026 and called confirmed by @serplay228 (August 18, 2026).
- PCIe (Reported): like the 170HX it ships without the lane capacitors and runs x4; fitting 220 nF capacitors restores x16, with a pad orientation that differs from the 170HX, per @ju5t5omedude (September 1, 2026). With the caps and a patch @emogop reached Gen2 x16 on September 7, 2026.
- Idle power (Proven): the pstated daemon brings idle from about 80 W to about 7 W, per @emogop and @ju5t5omedude (August 14, 2026).
- Ray tracing (Reported): @emogop reported hardware ray tracing working on October 16, 2026, with Indiana Jones running.
What is not known, or not possible
There is no memory to unlock: the card has no HBM and no extra memory on the board, so 20 GB would need a 3090 PCB and more chips, which is Theory. No SM unlock has been shown, because GA102 has no RIR records, per @scallion_9883 (October 17, 2026) and @ob88594 (October 28, 2026).
Three questions are Contested. Estimates of an unlocked card's speed run from an RTX 3060 to 3090-level compute depending on workload; WildFlash1st's analysis says FP32 cannot be software-unlocked while jdowning100's benchmarks show some FP32 operations working; and members disagree on whether CUDA works normally.
Warnings
A 90HX core burnt out from 12 V, per @green_dam (October 28, 2026), with no cause given. A mining 90HX that kept losing its VBIOS after reflashing had a dying SPI flash chip, per @d3m3n7r (September 2026).
Scope
The cmpunlocker maintainer keeps the tool to the 170HX: "I'm going to stick to 170HX only", per @_j3ns (September 14, 2026). Board card T-153 asks two 90HX owners for a clean CUDA sample and a llama.cpp benchmark each (Other CMP cards).
Mislabelled "170HX" listings are often a 90HX or a weaker card, so check the PCI ID before buying (Which card do I have).