AMD Radeon RX 480 May Not be That Great for Mining

17 Jun
2016

amd-radeon-rx-470

With less than two weeks left before the official launch date of the highly anticipated AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs that are supposedly coming out on 29th of June with a recommended price tag of $199 USD people are getting anxious to get their hands on the hardware. The speculations are that the RX 480 will be doing great for mining Ethereum while also being quite power efficient and at the announced price it could be the killer ETH mining choice for multi-GPU mining rigs. So what could potentially make the Radeon RX 480 not so great choice for mining after all when the cards start hitting the market at the end of this month?

When AMD announced that the RX 480 will be priced at $199 USD everybody was surprised by the good news, yes, it is not top model GPU offering the highest performance on the market, but for the expected performance the price was great. Unfortunately with the upcoming release on the market we are hearing some not so good news that will make the RX 480 less attractive choice for mining and it is entirely related to the price point. It seems that the $199 USD price tag was indeed too good to be true, we are hearing from different sources that the actual end user prices will be more like 20-30% higher than that. Furthermore initially the availability of the new GPUs will most likely not be able to match the high demand that it is expected, so in the end it seems not very likely that will be able to get your hands on an RX 480 on 29th for $199 USD.

A few days ago AMD has also announced two lower-end Polaris-based models – the RX 470 and RX 460 GPUs that should be even more affordable and still manage to provide good performance (for gaming that is). What you should be more interested in however is the AMD Radeon RX 470 that is expected to be slightly cut down version of the RX 480 GPU, retaining the same PCB and 256-bit memory bus. So the chances that the RX 470 might be able to perform very similar in terms of performance for Ethereum mining like the RX 480 are pretty good and with the right price it might be even more attractive for crypto miners. However while AMD says that the RX 470 and RX 460 should be available at the same time the RX 480 launches, we expect that they will be a bit late with about a week or two on the market.

The focus of the RX 480 was mostly put on the Ethereum GPU mining, but we are still on the speculation phase and nobody knows for sure how much MHS the new GPUs will be able to provide. What you should also wonder however is how well these new video cards based on the 14nm AMD Polaris architecture will perform in other crypto currency algorithms and not just buy them because of possibly good Ethereum performance. With the recent issue with the DAO and the drop of ETH price this has become even more important and you should not forget that Ethereum will be mineable for probably up to a year more and then will be switching to PoS…






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5 Responses to AMD Radeon RX 480 May Not be That Great for Mining

deggy

June 18th, 2016 at 11:13

What does any of that even mean? Obvious NV Fanboy is obvious. This how you got yr 1080 to bench?

admin

June 18th, 2016 at 12:04

This is an objective and realistic look on the situation with RX 480, we still don’t know any real numbers, the expected hashrate is purely based on speculations. We already know that the new Nvidia GTX 1080 literally sucks for Ethereum mining, even under Linux the performance does not justify the high price tag, and the GTX 1070 apparently does just a bit better. However Pascal GPUs do scale up very well in other algorithms and we also don’t know anything about the performance of the RX 480 in other algorithms, so we are just reminding that people should not get overhyped.

We are miners, not some stupid gamer fanboys, we don’t care AMD or Nvidia, we care about good products that perform well for mining. And if you think that AMD or Nvidia cares much about mining, even though it may at times affect their sales, you are wrong and we actually buy ourselves most of the hardware that we test here, so that we can be really objective. Just like we are going to do with the RX 480 when it gets out…

Elwen

June 20th, 2016 at 02:15

Of course it will not be good for mining. Mining is all about pure power = Teraflops. The new RX 480 can do about 5.5TFlops (same as 290/390x) and it may seems as a lot, however the “old” Fury X can produce about 8.5+TFlops. So everyone who is mining bought a lot of Furies X a while ago and is not going to change their setups this year.
The new RX 480 is a beast for gaming. YES! It is a beast if you look at it’s price, because at the moment there is nothing in the market what can compete it with it’s low price, low power consumption and high performance. It will be more powerful than GTX 970 and as powerful as 390x, but with much better DX12 support, lower power consumption and for half the price. For it’s price it is a dream!

Wolf0

June 21st, 2016 at 05:40

Mining is all about TFlops – yeah, someone’s talking RIGHT outta their ass. Floating point operations per second – educate yourself. Integer ops are what matter is 99.9% of mining; the floating point speed has fuck all to do with it.

Eric

June 21st, 2016 at 09:38

bench can tell you how fast will be one gpu, the 480 is a bit above the 970, so it will be a bit faster on any algo, and much faster on etehruem, due to the fact that the 970 should have done 24MHon etheruem, so 27mH for a 480 is not overhyping it at all

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