Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and Ethereum Mining, What to Expect

13 Jun
2016

nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080

The new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Pascal-based) video cards have been available for about two weeks now and we have finally managed to get one GTX 1080 to play around with it and see how good it performs for crypto crurrency mining. We are starting with Ethereum as the currently most popular altcoin for GPU mining and unfortunately the GTX 1080 does not do great for ETH mining. You should already know that Eehereum is better on AMD GPUs than on Nvidia and the new Pascal GPUs such as the GTX 1080 don’t do great either and there are some issues with them on Windows for the moment. The GTX 1080 cards are using faster in terms of clock speed GDDR5X video memory that might do great for gaming, but apparently it does not do great for memory intensive algorithms such as Ethereum. In fact it seems that the GTX 1080 is slower because of the GDDR5X than the GTX 1070 that uses regular GDDR5 video memory, and when you add the high price of the 1080 it is most definitely not good choice for Ethereum mining like it might be for gaming.

gtx-1080-win-7-ethminer

We have compiled a Windows binary of the latest pre-release of Genoil’s ethminer 0.9.41 fork version 1.1.3 (source) with CUDA 8.0 and Compute 6.1 that is used by the new GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 to test with and you can find a download link below. So let us get to the hashrates you can expect from the GTX 1080 by mining under Windows and then from Linux. If you are using Windows 7 or 8.x you will notice that with the default settings the miner will crash when trying to load the DAG file into the video memory of GTX 1080, regardless if you are using OpenCL or CUDA mode. Other OpenCL only miners such as qtminer will also fail with a driver crash, this is a driver issue and even if you manage to not crash the driver you will get a disappointingly low performance. You can run the Genoil CUDA fork of ethminer in CUDA mode with the -U option and add the following parameters --cuda-grid-size 2048 --cuda-block-size 128 to prevent the driver crash, however you will be getting less than 1 MHS in terms of hashrate, so pointless.

gtx-1080-win-10-ethminer

If you move to Windows 10 the situation is slightly better, but not that much actually. With the latest video drivers 368.39 for Windows 10 you will be able to mine Ethereum, unlike on Windows 7/8.x, but the hashrate you will get is still going to be disappointingly low at just about 4-5 MHS. Again a driver issues, however there is a talk about an upcoming driver update that should fix the problem of low hashrate at least for Windows 10 that is expected sometime next month (we cannot confirm this however).

So the only thing that is left to do if you already got a GTX 1080 GPU or more than one and want to mine Ethereum with it is to go for Linux. Under Linux people are reporting about 23 MHS on average as hashrate for mining Ethereum on GTX 1080, a speed that is a bit higher than what you can get from GTX 970, GTX 980 or GTX 980 Ti, but still a bit disappointing compared to what you can get from high-end AMD GPUs. The GTX 1070 that we already mentioned is doing better for Ethereum should be capable of around 27 MHS under Linux (in Windows they apparently have the same low performance issues for the moment), though we have not yet been able to personally verify that. So even with the low power consumption these hashrates from the GTX 1080/1070 are not that great and when you add in the high price of the GPUs at the moment and the driver issues with Windows, you can pretty much forget about being happy with mining Ethereum with these video cards. They should be better capable for other altcoin algorithms that are not memory intensive like Ethereum and we are off to checking that next, so stay tuned for more results.

To download and try the latest Ethminer 0.9.41-genoil-1.1.3 pre-release for Windows OS…






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25 Responses to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and Ethereum Mining, What to Expect

Isaac Church

June 13th, 2016 at 23:36

Why didn’t you test it with Decred as well?

Al_Rami

June 14th, 2016 at 00:05

As i see, it’s nothing to check now.
Drivers are unworkable under all Windows.
Linux ones looks better, – 23MH/s for GTX 1080 and around 27 MH/s for GTX 1070.

But i have around 22 MH/s from GTX 970 under Win7x64…
So if Nvidia wanna my money, they must work better. :-)

Curious

June 14th, 2016 at 01:51

Hi Admin,

Can you provide a link to the post a few months ago about changing the some settings to get a little bit of extra performance? I think it was something to do with the boost clock or something. Anyway, I can’t seem to find it.

Thanks!

ferdjones

June 14th, 2016 at 02:15

I got the same-ish performance with an eVga 1080 with Ethereum in Win 10, about 4.5 mhashs. So, for the moment I am letting it do Lyra2rev2 at Nicehash for about 38-40 Mhashs, which is much better than my old 980 (non-ti) which does about 22-23 Mhashes.

ttest

June 14th, 2016 at 09:13

Please do the test for all the other algos, and please measure the consumption for each algo. Thank you!

James

June 14th, 2016 at 10:05

Better off with Lyra2v2 at the moment. 39MH/s currently on 1.7.6 ccminer

Roughly about $4.38 a day before electric.

Higashi

June 15th, 2016 at 08:03

Lryra2v2 is for ethereum mining?

Tom

June 15th, 2016 at 15:45

Can someone provide steps to compile on Linux with latest version and cuda 8? I couldn’t get cuda toncompile on a slightly earlier version with cuda 7.5 . I’m on Fedora 23. Was getting unsupported operating system error but I think it has to do with the GCC version

Tom

June 15th, 2016 at 15:46

But I am getting 26 mh\s on opencl after an over clock . this is on the gtx 1080. What are the odds that performance can increase with driver optimization?

Bart

June 16th, 2016 at 00:34

Hi Tom,

I am getting 26MH/s with my GTX1070 by setting SMI to 4004,1911 but it should be able to go a lot further then that. I seem to be getting the same amounts without really changing anything. Still waiting on the other 17 cards to get my 3 rigs fully going.

Could you tell me your power usage at 26MH/s load? I am at 118W / 170W and still in a P2 state, still need to figure out correct overclocking and performance modes with this new driver.

I have the same problem with build Cudaminer on Arch, i am currently replacing my GCC 6 with GCC4.9(with Cuda7.5) as it seems you cannot use GCC6. You can use GCC5 with Cuda8.

Bart

June 16th, 2016 at 00:37

@mods:

Linux Arch (latest)
Driver Version: 367.27
GeForce GTX 1070
60% 62C P2 118W / 170W

Bart

June 16th, 2016 at 22:08

Hi tom / and mods

Ubuntu 16.04 + Cuda8
Driver Version: 367.27
GeForce GTX 1070
100% 54C P2 137W / 170W

Got:
m 22:05:11|ethminer Mining on PoWhash #aa614602 : 32.96MH/s [A6+0:R0+0:F0]

Any higher will result in a non responding or unstable system.

Tibidor

August 5th, 2016 at 11:10

Due to the Windows OpenCL implementation ov Nvidia, mining under Windows is bad. Under Linux it is way better. So Windows at this Point is no Option. Forget Windows and use it under Linus. (install Linux on a separat Partition and be done with, dual boot in this time of day is no big Thing). Check the Stats which Bart postet on June 16th 2016!

Tony Kuban

October 25th, 2016 at 14:45

If you are only getting 4Mh/s on a 1080 you aren’t doing it right. Should be 20+ for any 900+ series card.

admin

October 26th, 2016 at 09:11

Tony, you did not pay attention to the date this was posted on… the GTX 1×00 series had some driver issues in Windows with mining Ethereum that have since been resolved, that is the reason why the actual performance was much lower as shown under Windows, but was just fine under Linux.

geng

March 19th, 2017 at 21:55

i got ~20-21 Mh/s – win 10 gtx 1080 msi

bob

March 27th, 2017 at 01:31

23mh, 1060 3GB, Win7

Pat

June 14th, 2017 at 06:42

Hey guys, very new to mining. I’m using a gtx 1080ti gaming x and my hash rate for mining ethereum fluctuates between 12.7 and 50m/h. I am using claymore and duel mining Dec red although havnt properly set up decred wallet.
Would anyone have advice for some settings I could use in Afterburner to get a more stable hashrate?
Thanks

Oly

June 14th, 2017 at 17:33

27mh, 480 8GB, Win 10. It’s interesting to see why people are buying 480/580 stock so fast. You get a $500 card equivalent from Nvidia for have the price(mining wise). I picked mine up for $220.

Murtie

June 18th, 2017 at 01:53

Nvidia GTX 1070 SC @ 31 MH/z

Lafrosting

June 18th, 2017 at 20:21

how i can withdraw to my wallet

inerdtian

July 8th, 2017 at 18:09

Fore newcomers, this is an old thread, right now mining with a 1080 FE is giving about 20-25 MH/s (as of ethminer 0.11.0), July 2017.

inerdtian

July 8th, 2017 at 18:11

Fore newcomers, this is an old thread, right now mining with a 1080 FE is giving about 20-25 MH/s (as of ethminer 0.11.0), July 2017.

(without overclocking). I recommend downloading the EVGA Precision software to have fine-tune control over voltage, temperature and memory offset.

Erik Öhman

December 10th, 2017 at 17:09

With the latest drivers and my 2x 1080 GTX cards i get around. (Non SLI’d) currently GeForce Gameready Driver 388.31 (11/15/2017)
m 16:06:20|main Mining on PoWhash #05def209 : 41.29MH/s [A1+0:R0+0:F0]
m 16:06:22|main Mining on PoWhash #05def209 : 40.81MH/s [A1+0:R0+0:F0]
m 16:06:24|main Mining on PoWhash #05def209 : 41.29MH/s [A1+0:R0+0:F0]

Phillip

January 27th, 2018 at 17:57

Hello, i starte mining with my 6x Asus GTX 1080 Strix cards through NiceHash miner. Im getting like 4.5$ daily but in Bitcoin. Can someone write if this good way or i should change something? Thank you guys :)

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