As we reported yesterday, hardware OEMs are paying closer attention to the needs of consumers who partake in cryptocurrency mining.As of late, Ethereum, a new form of currency similar to Bitcoin, has been a hot topic.For example, ASRock is marketing its H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard, which features an huge array13 PCIe slots to be the foundation of a what could be a seriously powerful GPU-powered mining rig.And with 13 PCIe slots at your disposal, you’ll want to find some [relatively] affordable GPUs with enough processing grunt to make mining financially worth your while.Mitch Steves, an RBC Capital analyst, recently pitted two mainstream GPUs against each other to see how they compare when it comes to cryptocurrency mining.Steves’ testing involved the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and AMD’s newly released Radeon RX 580 to see how they performed with Bitcoin and Ethereum mining.His analysis determined that while the Radeon RX 580 offered just over a 3 percent performance advantage in mining Ethereum or Bitcoin and the estimated yearly dollars made via mining, the GeForce GTX 1070 actually resulted in much lower running costs due to a power efficiency advantage.

The analysis also mentions a 33 percent savings on power consumption for NVIDIA which then translates into lower daily and annual KW/h costs.When taking performance and running costs for electricity into account, the NVIDIA card came out slightly behind the AMD card in annual profit with Ethereum mining, but slightly ahead with Bitcoin mining.The cost-benefit of choosing the NVIDIA solution, when scaled at the datacenter level, Steves suggested would be even more apparent, noting, “If we switch to building a full Data Center environment, electrical costs become increasingly more important (Bitcoin environment) and the older NVIDIA GPUs outperform AMD over the course of a year."Seems pretty cut and dry, right?The analysis doesn’t take into account pricing for each card.GeForce GTX 1070 cards are running around $370 on Amazon, while the Radeon RX 580 retails for around $285 (if you can actually find one).That’s a pretty big disparity, which only grows if you start adding more GPUs to your mining rig.

Throw thirteen RX 580 cards into your ASRock H110 Pro BTC+, and that’s a savings of $1,105.AMD Radeon RX 580 (top), Radeon RX 570 (bottom) And Steves’ TDP numbers also appear to be off, citing the GTX 1070 at 90 watts (28 MH/s) and the RX 580 at 135 watts (29 MH/s).Actual TDP power numbers are 150 Watts for the GTX 1070 and also 150 Watts for the RX 580 but TDP doesn't tell the entire story, only real-time power draw in a specific application does.The two cards' performance is measured in million hashes per second or hash rate (MH/s).According to testing from 1st Mining Rig, here’s how the AMD cards stack up: Although it’s not an apples to apples comparison, here are some relative numbers from the NVIDIA camp: The numbers are a lot closer here, but there's definitely no 33 percent swing in one direction or the other for NVIDIA versus AMD here.In reality, both GPU camps, AMD and NVIDIA have their own sweet spot for getting the most performance at a given power level.And given that enthusiasts have been known to tweak their card's BIOS and undervolt their GPUs, while massaging clock speeds to get that perfect ratio to maximize return on power and hardware investment, whittling down comparisons to fit neatly into a chart with only two specific GPU models isn't so cut and dry.We hope to provide more specific and detailed light on this subject in the near future, so stick around.

About a week ago I was hunting for a few Radeon cards for a project, specifically a second Nitro+ RX 570 for a crossfire comparison, needless to say I couldn’t find one and gave up.flags bitcoin miningA friend of mine said he was looking for a second RX 480 for his setup and that he couldn’t find one outside of crazy high prices, chalked that up to EOL on the RX 480s and told him to snag a similar RX 580.bitcoin difficulty videoHe couldn’t find one of those either.club poker le bitcoinThinking he just didn’t know how to search, since he’s not very computer savvy, I decided to help out.bitcoin maximum 21 millionThat’s when things got interestingly and eerily similar to searching for a Radeon card in late 2013 – early 2014 back when I was deep into Litecoin and Feathercoin mining.bitcoin iphone rage

Then I came across Ethereum and everything became clear.While I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Ethereum I am no stranger to the world of crypto currencies.litecoin transaction timeHaving spent months on end tweaking GPU bat files for LTC and FTC while setting up ASIC miners for BTC, I decided to jump in on this one to see what the craze was all about!ethereum classic newsWhat we are doing here with this article isn’t going to be a tutorial or guide, we’re not endorsing or encouraging the mining, trading, buying, or selling of Ethereum.bitcoin php escrowWe are simply taking a look at the current landscape of GPU mining hashing performance, power draw, and current profitability of taking part in Ethereum mining.bitcoin mining shirt

Setup was simple enough, we simply found a pool to join and what miner we would be using.We decided to go with the Ethermine pool but finding a miner was a bit trickier.We first tried Genoils Miner but never was able to get the stratum server connected so we moved on to Claymores Miner and that one took off like a demon, so we stayed there.Claymores Miner allowed us to use Radeon cards as well as Pascal based GeForce cards without spending hours in configurations.We modified our x99 system to run the memory at the base 2133MHz and the 6800k was taken down to 2 cores and 4 threads clocked at 1.2GHz since we’re not needed CPU power and to lessen the power draw as much as possible outside of graphics cards.Graphics cards were all run at their out of the box configurations without any modification whatsoever.While we are aware that if you are going to set up a dedicated mining system you are likely going to run a modified vBIOS on your card we simply wanted to see the natural performance of these cards.

Radeon and GeForce cards were run on the latest drivers at the time of this article.In our first round of results we only looked at single GPU performance, which in terms of power draw is likely the worst way of looking at this overall, but can show individual card performance and help nail down which card someone would want multiple of.Megahashing performance of Radeon cards is still top dog, but it doesn’t make much sense going past the R9 390/x as the price/performance metric makes little sense in that regards.Going from 2560 stream processors to 4096 doesn’t net much value, suspect something fishy with the VRAM is going on here.That suspicion also bleeds over in the GeForce cards with the poor performance of the GTX 1080 once again suspecting something with the G5X coming into play.But when it comes to the hashing rate of the GTX 1070 my eyes popped a bit, after all the skyrocketing prices of RX x70/x80 parts are starting to make it look rather attractive.If you’re wondering why the GTX 1050 is sitting at 0 it’s because it simply doesn’t have the VRAM capacity to mine Ethereum, we left it in the charts for illustrative purposes only.

And because I forgot to delete it before making the charts.But Hashing performance isn’t everything in the world of mining, efficiency is king and lead to the next chart, profitability.There is a steady climb in the Radeon lineup but looking at the RX 470 power draw vs hashing rate it is no wonder people are jumping all over that card!The GTX 1070 is showing some promise here again with lower than RX 570 power draw but matching it on hashing.These numbers were taken from the wall after 1 hour of hashing.Profit is the name of the game, so if you are not making money then why are you here, I guess.This chart is not accounting for payback time, it is simply looking at current profitability with Ethereum priced at $169 (at the time of writing on 5/26/2017).This chart shows the total profit from one card after the cost of electricity (assuming $0.12kW*h) the resulting number display is pretending everything stays consistent for 30 days.This chart in all honesty is only good for comparing profitability comparisons between cards as the price of Ethereum is in constant flux.

Taking a look back at the Hashing Power vs Power Consumption directly compared to each other.When looking at this graph make sure to pay attention to the power side as it is set to a x10 scale so that it’s easier to visualize the performance per watt aspect when mining.Take the R9 390 as example the hash rate is 28.9MH/s and the chart shows 35 for the power draw, take the x10 scale and it’s really 350.Just like a tachometer on car it’s to make for an easier to read visual.Moving away from a single GPU to a mGPU configuration makes the most sense if you are even considering mining.You already have the necessary cost of operation (motherboard/system power) so adding GPUs to the mix pulls more return than a single GPU.We could have run many different mixed GPU workloads but we picked a few and ran with it.This direct comparison between these configurations shows just how powerful a Polaris 10 setup is when mining, even edging out the 1080+1070 config.Take the upfront cost of $400 (think MSRP folks) for the two Polaris cards or more than double for the Pascal.

Admittedly if you were doing this you would pick up a pair of 1070s rather than touch the 1080 with a 10 foot pole.But just like before efficiency rules the day, and that’s where the Polaris cards surprise us the most.I know in gaming the 1070/1080 are leagues ahead, but this is computational and when CUDA Core and Stream Processor counts are similar this is where things tend to fall.Impressive overall as I think back to just how much power my old 6x R9 270 LTC mining rig was pulling.But this is where the money hits the wallet and while the 1080+1070+1060 was 42.5% more profitable in terms of hashing to power draw the initial cost makes payback insanely high as it cost 3x as much as the 470+570 configuration.Something very important in the long game.In all reality I could have gone on for days with this topic as crypto currencies have always fascinated me and I love configuring miners.But like I said earlier on this isn’t a tutorial on how to setup a miner or a history lesson in GPU mining.