Content
The absolute best gaming graphics card does not equal the best value and returns for mining using your PC. Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA2, aka Big Navi, GPUs are getting most of the headlines today, but what about previous generation hardware? The principles we’ve outlined above generally apply to the older GPUs as well. We’ve included Nvidia’s RTX 20-series, GTX-16-series, and GTX 10-series cards, best ethereum gpu 2017 along with AMD’s RX 5000, Vega, and 500 series parts. We’re going to skip all the baseline performance metrics this time, and just jump straight to optimized performance. Note that outside of the RX 580 and 590, and the three GTX 1660 variants, all of our tests were done using the reference models from AMD and Nvidia, which tend to be more of a baseline or worst-case scenario for most GPUs.
- One thing to remember here is that the newer GTX 1080 is nowhere near as capable as either of cards discussed here, even though its got more CUDA cores and, is clocked faster than the GTX 1070 out-of-the box.
- Before you start mining for Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, make sure you read the following articles so you know everything you need to before you begin.
- However, it continues to remain a favorite of the Ether mining community because it has a stunning hash rate of between 46 MH/s to 57.6 MH/s, which is the highest among any card available in the market today.
- The principles we’ve outlined above generally apply to the older GPUs as well.
- Nvidia’s GTX 1080s and GTX 1080 Tis have seen their prices increase by a few hundred dollars as well, but the price difference is less substantial than most other cards.
- We’re mostly looking at reference models as well, which often aren’t the best option, but here’s how our data compares to what NiceHash reports.
Leave it running for a few months, and you’ll have accumulated enough to pay off the card. You could stop here and sell the card to recuperate some of the initial cost or continue with passive income. Crypto mining is all about memory, and having 8GB of GDDR5 is great for running NiceHash and other mining solutions. The rate of return is slow, so don’t go buying a bunch of these if you have the expectation that mining earnings will continue at current levels well into the future.
How to Mine with a Mining Pool
This is why we’re not recommending only the most powerful (and expensive) GPUs available today. That doesn’t make sense in the current climate, but it’s also outright bad advice for those https://www.tokenexus.com/ new to the wonderful world of mining digital currency. Unlike gaming, where only the best GPU you can afford will do, choosing one for crypto mining is a little more challenging.
While BTC relies on SHA-256 and Litecoin on Scrypt for its hash function, Ethereum calls on an algorithm called Ethash, created especially for this purpose. In practice, it was designed from the start to prevent the development of dedicated ASICs to mine it. At the time of this writing, Ethereum (ETH) ranks second only to Bitcoin (BTC) in terms of market capitalization, with a total cap of almost $83 (£64) billion. In comparison, Bitcoin’s market cap exceeds $140 (£108) billion (after hitting a peak of more than $325/£251 billion several weeks ago), and Litecoin (LTC), silver to Bitcoin’s gold, crests at only $6.8 (£5.24) billion.
Should You Start Mining?
We may also have tips and more information to help you
compare providers. Generally speaking, you’ll get the best all-around results with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, although the AMD RX 5700 XT is a worthy alternative if you’re on a tighter budget. Both of these GPUs are great at solving the algorithms and earning some passive income. The RTX 3090 has some beefy specs for mining, including a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM and 10,496 CUDA cores.
This is all likely setting the stage for Nvidia’s next GPUs, Ada Lovelace, which we expect to see in the latter part of 2022. First, Ethereum GPU mining requires more than 4GB of VRAM, so if you’re still hanging on to an RX 570 4GB, it won’t work — and neither will the new Radeon RX 6500 XT. Second, there are a lot of different software packages for mining, but we’re taking the easy route and using NiceHash Miner. It includes support for the most popular mining solutions, and it will even benchmark your card to determine which one works best. Even though some algorithms may perform better than others, we’re going to focus exclusively on Ethereum hashing for now.
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2070
Alternatively, there’s plenty of room left for future growth and spikes, but that’s just speculation. We’ve passed peak profitability for mining Ethereum, at least for the time being. Mining for $10–$17 per day on a graphics card that costs $1,000–$1,750 might not seem like a bad idea. Mining at $5 per day is less enticing, and $2 per day or less looks pretty awful. And yet, from August 2018 up until July 2020, Ethereum mining with 100MH/s would have netted less than $2 per day.
If you’ve pulled up data using a mining profitability calculator, our figures indicate there’s a lot of variation between power and hash rates, depending on your settings and even your particular card. Don’t be surprised if you don’t reach the level of performance others are showing. We’ll start with the latest generation of AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but we also have results for most previous generation GPUs. Nvidia has managed to undo some of those gains with updated drivers, however, so newer cards like the RTX 3050 might not be all that great.
The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is still among the most powerful graphics cards out there, even in the face of its successors. It boasts Titan X-equivalent gaming performance and impressive cooling performance with 11 GB of GDDR5X memory. More importantly for those mining for cryptocurrency, this GPU can deliver a 21.63 MH/s hashrate on the KawPow (NBMiner) algorithm, according to BetterHash.net, and generate a healthy monthly income. It isn’t so readily available these days, but for those that can find it in stock, you might even find it on a deal. Further, with a bit of memory clock and power target tuning, the GTX 1070 can deliver a lot more performance, while still maintaining a much lower power draw profile. The most popular cryptocurrency currently being mined on graphics cards is Ethereum.
Based on recent Ether pricing, the GTX 1070 has a hash rate between 27MH/s to 36MH/s using EthOS, and has a TDP of just 150 watts. The card is priced at under $500 dollars, with prices hovering between $450-$490 depending on the make and model. The power to performance ratio when mining Ethereum is admittedly not a strong point of this card because of the LHR lock. Other cryptocurrencies like Ravencoin or Flux can be mined on it with full performance, though. So it’s worth considering buying this card, especially if you plan on mining cryptocurrencies that are not limited by the LHR lock. It’s good enough for 1440p gaming, just like the RTX 3060 Ti, and is very good at mining.
Genesis Mining – Cloud Mining Review
The idea is that NiceHash Miner will choose whatever is currently the most profitable coin to mine, based on what people are willing to pay to rent your hardware. Sometimes a new coin will launch, or someone will want to dedicate a lot of mining power at a specific coin, and they’ll pay more to do so. Instead of mining Ethereum 24/7, you might occasionally run some other algorithm, and it’s all managed by the software, which usually (but not always) manages to do a good job. The initial benchmarks on NiceHash Miner can be a bit prone to error, unfortunately.
- At the high end of the market, AMD’s Vega GPUs have been strongly affected, shooting up significantly more than their Nvidia counterparts.
- In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium.
- You could easily pull well into the three digits each month, and that’s after taking into account electricity (depending on your area).
- The 2017 GPU shortage, which we had previously referred to as quite possibly the worst GPU shortage in history, was a rather dark time for gamers and PC enthusiasts.
- What we have done is make the process easier for you by picking a handful of suppliers and showing you how to choose which GPU mines the most and which GPU is the best value for money.
- Those AMD mining GPU cards have been on such short supply that the price of them has more than doubled.
- Unfortunately, because of shortages in the market, cards without LHR are tough to find.
