Content
Build a list with expected hashrate and cost in a spreadsheet and work out the best for your situation. And all this depends on the cost of hardware (it’s all relatively more expensive in Australia) and the cost of your electricity (also relatively more expensive in Australia). Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom’s Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance. An Intel Core i7 7740X system running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 served as the host for this round of testing.
We’ve used our standard GPU testbed for these tests, running a single GPU. This isn’t an necessarily an optimal miner PC configuration, but it will suffice and is a closer representation to what most of our readers are probably using. You don’t need a high-end CPU, motherboard, or memory for mining purposes, and many larger installations will use Pentium CPUs and B360 chipset motherboards with more PCIe slots. The most important factors for a mining PC are power and cooling, as they both directly impact overall profitability.
Which GPU Is Best for Mining Ethereum? AMD and Nvidia Cards, Tested
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering BTC is the largest of cryptocoins, but if you want ETH you’ll need to take some extra steps. The other downside is that NiceHash takes a cut of the amount paid, and the net result is generally lower payouts than mining Ethereum yourself. Currently, https://www.tokenexus.com/ direct Ethereum mining should pay about 7% more than NiceHash. That’s a pretty big mining fee, though again the ease of use with NiceHash is hard to overstate. No, seriously, it’s not worth the hassle and you almost certainly won’t actually get any coins — at least not with Ethereum or Bitcoin.
- Shifting over to AMD, everything was very close on performance — within 2% across all four cards.
- It’s an obvious choice for “best performance,” but the RTX 3090 from NVIDIA truly is in a class of its own.
- Phoronix Premium allows ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while supporting this site’s continued operations.
- The current thinking for a lot of miners is that Nvidia’s RTX 30-series cards are superior to AMD, but that’s really only true if you look at pure hashrates on the 3080 and 3090.
- In practice, the mining pools have a much higher chance of solving and getting credited with a block.
Tom’s Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Hiveon OS supports best ethereum gpu 2017 mixing AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, so don’t be afraid to add an AMD GPU to your NVIDIA mining rig and vice versa.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Yep, this is another AMD card that can be difficult to track down thanks to its mining ability. However with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, it achieves a decent hash rate of 28mh/s, and again doesn’t require too much power. There are also versions available with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, if you’re looking for an even lower cost mining GPU. With their fast GDDR5, GDDR5X, and HBM, graphics cards are perfectly suited to mine Ethereum.
- We’ve got the linear chart, which includes an amazing spike at the right edge (early 2021).
- Don’t be surprised if you don’t reach the level of performance others are showing.
- Sometimes, you might bump the memory speed by 5% or more and only see a tiny improvement in hash rate, which means something else (probably GPU clocks or performance) is holding you back.
- Your AMD or Nvidia GPU should be a fairly recent model, and it’s going to be limited by the amount of memory on-board.
- There are plenty of GPUs out there, and many of them offer considerably high hashrates, making them ideal for cryptocurrency mining.
- We’ve run these benchmarks using NiceHash Miner, looking at actual realtime hash rates rather than the results of its built-in benchmark.
That means you’ll want to minimise your initial outlay and running costs to maximise your profits. We’ve got the linear chart, which includes an amazing spike at the right edge (early 2021). That spike looks very similar to the one that occurred in 2017, naturally, and we should maybe just ignore the equally dramatic crash in 2018 — or that’s what the optimistic miners seem to think. The logarithmic chart doesn’t look nearly as impressive, and it’s clear the real winners with Ethereum are the people who got in back in 2015, or even 2016. Incidentally, about two thirds of all Ethereum was actually part of a ‘pre-mine’ that went to ‘investors’ before mining was even possible. Everyone joining the bandwagon now clearly missed the best part of the ride.
AMD Radeon R9 295X2: Best Overall Graphics Card for Mining
Statistically, your chances of solving a block are equal to your percentage of the total hash rate of the network. With Ethereum, the current network hash rate is now over 1 PH/s, or 1 billion MH/s. Even if you had a farm of 100 RTX 3080 GPUs each doing 95MH/s, that’s only 0.0009% of the total. Mathematically, Ethereum averages around 6500 blocks per day, so your odds would be about 6% per day of finding a block, with an 86% chance of hitting a block in about a month. With a single RTX 3080, your odds of hitting a single block in a year are only 20%, and 49% after three years. The proof of stake transition makes any such talk completely irrelevant.
- However, this amount of memory allows you to mine Grin-type cryptocurrencies.
- For example, in a brief test QuickMiner suggested we “could be making 16% more” by using NiceHashMiner (which we’ll get to next).
- To mine Ethereum at higher speeds, typically about 45 MH/s, use a miner that allows you to bypass the LHR lock partially.
- While AMD cards miss out on some of the gamer-focused features like DLSS 2.0 and the same level of ray tracing as in NVIDIA GPUs, it’s mining where this GPU really takes off.
Each Graphics card will mine slightly differently depending on the way it is made. This is all about how each GPU runs the ETHASH algorithm which is key to the proof of work in Ethereum. AMD CPUs use more electricity than the equivalent (by performance) Intel CPUs. But AMD CPUs are cheaper than the equivalent (by performance) Intel CPUs. For the highest hashrate per GPU, the answer is the AMD HD 7990 (minimum hashrate 43 MH/s), followed by the AMD R9 Fury X (minimum hashrate 28 MH/s).
How About Mining-Edition Cards?
If you’re just trying to learn about cryptocurrency mining, you might not be willing to spend $500 on a card right away. In that case, the best options for you are the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 graphics cards, both of which give you a great bang for your buck. While the 3GB Radeon RX 570 costs just over $150, the 6GB model of the Radeon RX580 costs around $250 and, gives between 26 MH/s and 29 MH/s using Claymore Dual ETH miner. The RX 580 has a TDP of 185 watts, but you can use AMD’s Radeon Wattman to get the power draw on this card to below 150 watts. Here’s a gallery of all the ‘tuned’ settings we used for the legacy cards. Use at your own risk, and know that some cards prefer different miner software (or simply fail to work with certain miners).