Looking For The Efficiency Sweet Spot of GTX 1080 Ti

24 Mar
2017

When looking for the best settings for GPUs that will be used for crypto currency mining it is often considered a good practice to optimize them for better efficiency and not for maximum performance. Going for the maximum performance often results is overclocking and thus higher power usage for the extra few hashes, not to mention the additional heat and as a result the overall efficiency may not be as good. If you are looking for the optimal efficiency you will most likely try to reduce the power usage of the GPU to decrease the power usage and heat output and not sacrifice any or at the cost of just a little performance drop. This is exactly what we are going to be doing now with the recently announced Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition video card, trying to find the sweet spot in terms of efficient (best hashrate per Watt of power used)…

For the purpose of our tests we are using the latest NiceHash Excavator v1.1.4a miner running on the Equihash algorithm used by Zcash (ZEC). Do note that other algorithms may need different settings for reaching better efficiency than the one tested here. Currently the Equihash algorithm is among the most profitable to mine on Nvidia CUDA GPUs, so we are focusing on it. Since all recent GPUs from Nvidia have both a base operating frequency and a boost operating frequency and the video card is managing the optimal one based on factors such as TDP and temperature it is easy to look for better efficiency just by lowering the TDP limit. This will essentially result in lowering the maximum boost frequency of the GPU and is an easy and very good thing to start from, if you wan to dig deeper you may also try to lower the operating voltage of the GPU in order to further improve the efficiency by lowering the power usage.

In the table above we start with the GTX 1080 Ti running at the maximum TDP level that is allowed with the +20% increase of the Power Limit meaning 250W default TDP + 50W increase or a total of 300W allowed. At this maximum allowed level you cannot expect to be anywhere near the optimum efficiency, not to mention that the GPU may not be able to reach that power usage anyway without further overclocking. We are however going to stay at the default settings and not overclock, playing only with the boost frequency of the GPU by lowering the TDP. The final result showed that the optimum efficiency in terms of hashrate per Watt is with around 60% TDP or about 150W for the GTX 1080 Ti… that is for the Equihash algorithm used by Zcash (ZEC). With that setting the operating frequency of the GPU stays at just a bit shy of 1500 MHz, or to be more precise at the 1480 MHz base operating frequency. What essentially this means is that while the extra Boost frequency may rise the performance you get, the more it scales up, the less efficient the GPU becomes in terms of performance per Watt of power used. No wonder Nvidia has chosen this particular operating frequency as the base one for the GTX 1080 Ti, and the GPU manages to keep it up with a TDP of just 150W for mining the Equihash algorithm. Do note however that other mining algorithms, especially more GPU dependent, may need more power for their efficiency sweet spot on the GTX 1080 Ti.






Check Some More Similar Crypto Related Publications:

14 Responses to Looking For The Efficiency Sweet Spot of GTX 1080 Ti

lseder

March 24th, 2017 at 17:46

// efficient (best hashrate per Watt of power used)
you do not need efficiency.
you mine for money.
—
tdp hashrate usd per hash in day usd per wat usd hash-usd watt usd- hash-usd watt(+pc)
125 415 3.45 0.3 3.15 2.91
150 561 4.65 0.36 4.29 4.05
175 592 4.9 0.42 4.48 4.24
200 615 5.09 0.48 4.61 4.37
225 622 5.15 0.54 4.61 4.37
250 636 5.27 0.6 4.67 4.43
—
last column show your income minus electricity cost 0.1 per day.

4.43 is higher than 4.05. So put tdp limit 250, not 150.

in this test you have not reached power inefeciency.

if you test amd, you will find this point, where electricity start to get more money than
you earn by rising hashrate for a few hashes.

bathr

March 25th, 2017 at 14:34

^I was about to make the same numbers. Highest efficiency doesn’t mean highest profits.

Efficiency only really matters if your profit margin is very low either because electricity prices are very high or mining profitability is very low. Otherwise pedal to the metal earns the most.

admin

March 25th, 2017 at 14:54

Well, the above post was all about efficiency, not highest profit…

We are well aware that for most miners the max profit matters the most, but there are also people that are still interested in other things as well like heat, noise and power usage.

djeZo

March 25th, 2017 at 16:12

You can reach better efficiency with following settings:

Core: +150
Memory: -300
TDP: 60%

Make sure your keep temps at 50 C or below. 600 Sol/s @ 150 W = 4 Sol/W.

admin

March 25th, 2017 at 16:21

Thanks djeZo, these settings really do improve even further efficiency bringing it up to 4 Solutions per Watt.

reb0rn

March 28th, 2017 at 03:06

you know if you do some insane OC (+200-250) and limit TDP to ~70% you get more w/h but its a bit hard to find stable settings while there is no work card would boost more and crash miner

seljak

March 28th, 2017 at 09:43

Is there a simillar research for gtx 1070?
How does memory speed effect power usage?

I run my msi gtx1070 gaming x with:
56% tdp limit
+120mhz oc
+700mhz on memory

this results to:
1800mhz @ 0,875v
9000mhz memory

450Sol/s

djeZo

March 28th, 2017 at 11:59

Yeah, here is another one:

Core: +250
Mem: -300
TDP: 60%

625 Sol/s @ 150W. But you need water cooled card to reach this.

Cryptonews

March 31st, 2017 at 08:27

Nice article and many useful comments, thanks guys. I’ll try these settings and we’ll see how it goes :)

yorktronic

May 3rd, 2017 at 21:44

Just wanted to report that I’m getting about the same numbers on my 1080 Ti…

GPU: Corsair + MSI Hydro GFX 1080 Ti
Coin: ZCash
Pool: Slushpool
Miner: Excavator using equihash

Efficient Sweet Spot:
Core voltage: +0%
Power Limit: 55%
Core Clock: +0 Mhz
Memory Clock : +0 Mhz
TDP: 132.8 W
Hashrate: 502 H/s
Efficiency: 3.78 H/Watt

Balls to the wall:
Core Voltage +100%
Power Clock: 120%
Core Clock: +100 Mhz
Memory Clock: +100 Mhz
TDP: 250 W
Hashrate: 570 H/s
Efficiency: 2.28 H/Watt

I have higher overclocks but obviously the power consumption goes up.

James

June 17th, 2017 at 06:12

Currently running a AORUS 1080ti – getting a 3.45H/Watt ratio with the following settings using NiceHash Miner

Core Voltage = +0%
Power Limit = 75%
Core Clock = +50 Mhz
Memory Clock = +150Mhz
TDP: 172.888W
Hashrate: 628.325H/s
Efficiency: 3.634291 H/W

Kallum

June 28th, 2017 at 07:29

2 x MSI GTX1080Ti Duke using MSI Afterburner on Nicehash miner (No SLI)

Core Voltage = +0%
Power Limit = 60%
Core Clock = +150 MHz
Memory Clock = -300 MHz
TDP = 274W
Hashrate = 1.156 kSols/s Equihash
Efficiency = 4.22 H/W

I also live in a city with one of the highest number of sunlight hours per day in the world, even during winter. UV index often approaches 15 for 6 months of the year, and the government offers rebates to install solar power, which I’m currently looking in to. A 5KWh solar system will deliver roughly 23KWh per day where I live, solar panel system with rebate can be had for ~$AUD5K.

Wondering if setting up a commercial premise somewhere here and getting an industrial-sized solar array (they do anywhere from 10 to 100+ KW systems) and farming the shit out of 50+ GTX1080Ti would be profitable long term, or will nicehash returns start diminishing in the near future?

Jeremiah

July 8th, 2017 at 09:23

IMO, run it as hard as you can w/o overvolting and let it ride. Rates aren’t going to get better and might as well make what $$ you can.

bittrex

February 16th, 2021 at 21:54

Nice article and many useful comments, thanks guys. I’ll try these settings and we’ll see how it goes :)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

top