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Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

First Impressions from the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G GPU Built for Crypto Mining

14, Jul 2017

Gigabyte NP106D5-6G is a variation of the Nvidia GP106-100 GPU targeted at miners and based off the consumer GeForce GTX 1060. Originally Nvidia had plans to sell these only to large miners, but apparently big partners such as Asus and now Gigabyte among others also want to sell these to small miners as well, so we actually managed to buy one Gigabyte NP106D5-6G from the retail channel at a price that is slightly lower than that of the regular Gigabyte N1060WF2OC-6GD that it is probably based on.

The Gigabyte NP106D5-6G comes in an anti static plastic bag, no box or any accessories. It has a GPU core running at 1506 MHz Base Clock and 1708 MHz Boost Clock and comes equipped with 6 GB GDDR5 video memory running at 8008 MHz. Just like a regular GTX 1060 GPU, though there are some important differences to note. The mining card from Gigabyte does not come with any mounting plate and that can be a bit of an issue for mounting, even though there are no video output connectors available… ASUS for example has it on their version.

The PCB of the mining card is pretty small and there is no backplate like on the consumer variation of the GTX 1060 from Gigabyte. It is normal, the idea of these cards is to make them cheaper and that needs some cost cutting, though you should still be careful where you cut from and not compromise on important things for miners. There are not warranty stickers on the screws at the back, but who would worry about that when you get the mining card with just three months of warranty instead of the regular 2 or 3 years (depending on the region).

The mining card NP106D5-6G is equipped with a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector for external power, the default TDP is 120W. This means that you shoud not be having much trouble with finding a suitable power supply for connecting 6, 8 or even more of these in a single GPU mining rig.

A quick look at the cooling solution of the NP106D5-6G. There is a small separate aluminium radiator on top of the voltage regulators that are locate on the left side of the PCB. The big aluminium cooling radiator uses a single copper heatpipe that goes through the GPU and memory chips as well – they are both in contact with the cooler. The heatpipe is in direct contact with the GPU and the big surface of the cooler does a pretty good job in keeping things cool.

Here is how the PCB looks like, the GPU is labeled GP106-100-A1 and the video memory is GDDR5 from Samsung. The video memory is really important here as this is a mining oriented video card and you need good chips that can handle overclocking for improved performance and the Samsung ones manage to do quite well in that department.

The final thing we need to note about the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G, a really important thing is about the cooling fans of the card. Gigabyte is popular with their pretty good in terms of cooling capacity and silently operating Windforce fans and it is no surprise that we also find them on this board as well. These fans however are not good for crypto mining and we do not like how they handle 24/7 operation under high temperatures, so we are not big fans of these fans.

The fans are 92mm ones made by Power Logic and are model PLD09210S12HH (12V, 0.40A) and they use bushings instead of bearings (single or dual). These are cheap fans that may start failing withing a few weeks of mining, we have seen that with other Gigabyte cards using the same cooling fans. We don’t mind as much that you get these with just 3 months warranty, but at least when you are making a GPU for mining use more reliable fans that will last longer (like ASUS does on their version of the P106).

All in all we can say that we are not too happy with how Gigabyte approached the situation with their NP106D5-6G mining GPU. They just removed stuff from their consumer GeForce GTX 1060 model and did not address the specific needs and requirements of miners at all. The lack of mounting bracket and the cheap crappy fans in terms of reliability and durability are not Ok. That fact, coupled with the just 3 months warranty, no resell value apart from mining use and just 10% lower price compared to the regular consumer GTX 1060 model does not really help in making this an attractive alternative to smaller home miners.

In the next post we are going to be sharing more details about the actual use of the Gigabyte NP106D5-6G for mining as well as what kind of performance results you can expect from it, so stay tuned…

Enthusiasts Designing Specific Hardware for Crypto Mining Needs

8, Jun 2017

The peak of interest in crypto mining in the last months has apparently sparkled the need for some interesting new products designed to help the users of mining rigs get things done in a better and more efficient way. As a result we are seeing enthusiast designed things like a power distributor board allowing the users to connect up to 4 power supplies that can be used to work together powering a single mining rig. Of course you can always go for a 2x PSU boards such as the Add2PSU, but what if you need to connect three or four power supplies? With Add2PSU you can use a number of devices to connect more power supplies together, but this will take up more molex connectors on the main power supply. Going for an optimized board that can use up to 4x power supplies together with a single molex from the main PSU is more convenient, especially if going for a 8x GPU mining rig with more powerful video cards that take up two PCI-Express power connectors.

Another commonly needed thing for multi GPU mining rigs is an easy way to connect multiple cooling fans to go along with the video cards by helping them get cooler air and eliminate the forming of hot air pockets around the GPUs. So getting an easy way to connect multiple fans, up to 6 for example via a single board powered by a 4-pin Molex power connector makes things much more simple and user friendly. Adding an easy way to select the operating voltages of the fans via jumpers and getting them to work at either 5V, 7V or 12V without the need of additional electronics is more than welcome. Of course you need not only to get good and useful functionality from a fan distributor board, but also make it affordable as with crypto mining extra costs are always considered.

While enthusiast designed products like up to 4x power distributor boards for multiple power supplies for a single computer or fan distributor boards with 6x fans and voltage control option may be interesting for regular users, however the real market for devices like these has opened with the boom of GPU mining rigs. The two boards that we are showing you here are just an example, there are other interesting products getting designed by enthusiasts for the crypto mining market as well. An interesting example of other such products is the SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter that allows for easy power cycling of multiple GPU mining rigs if they have an issue and hang up.

Quick Look at the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB 9Gbps

1, Jun 2017

Back in March when Nvidia introduced the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti it has also announced two upgrades – the GeForce GTX 1060 with 9 Gbps and GeForce GTX 1080 with 11 Gbps memory. These two new models with faster video memory did not get a lot of attention and they have just recently started becoming available on the market. The GTX 1060 with 9 instead of 8 GHz GDDR5 video memory is what caught our attention and more specifically the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB 9Gbps and we took one for a quick spin to see its crypto mining performance.

The faster GDDR5 memory from Samsung found in this model is what makes the GPU pretty interesting for the currently quite popular and profitable Equihash and Ethash crypto algorithms. We wanted to see the mining performance with ETH and ZEC, even though the memory bus on the GTX 1060 is just 192-bit and that is a bit of a limiting factor. The big question here is how this GTX 1060 model compares to GTX 1070 that uses slower GDDR5 memory clocked at 8GHz (like the regular GTX 1060), but with 256-bit bus and comes with significantly higher number of CUDA cores.

Going for the Ethereum (ETH) mining performance with the latest Claymore ETH miner we are not that happy with the performance we see – just about 17 MHS at stock settings. We kind of expected the lower result due to the 192-bit memory bus, but had hoped that the hgiher clocked GDDR5 memory could help for a bit better results. The GTX 1070 does about 25 MHS at stock settings, but can be pushed to about 30 MHs with some memory clock. Overclocking the GTX 1060 9Gbps helps a bit, but still that can push the performance to just about 19 MHs, so not that much better.

The situation with ZCash (ZEC) is a bit better with about 300 Sol/s at stock settings using the EWBF ZEC miner for the GTX 1060 9Gbps while the GTX 1070 does of course much more at over 400 and can go up to about 450-460 with some extra tweaking. It seems that the faster 9Gbps memory on the GTX 1060 does not do it that much good for mining, tough it might be more usable for gaming. With prices for the GTX 1060 9Gbps not that much lower than the price of GTX 1070 there is actually not that much reason to go for it the faster memory instead of the faster GPU in general.

Now, if Nvidia does tweak up the GTX 1070 with the faster 9 Gbps GDDR5 video memory things might get more interesting, especially for Ethereum mining using these, because of the the problems that AMD is having with Radeon RX series availability. At the moment Ethereum mining on a decently clocked in terms of video memory GTX 1070 can bring it to about 30 MHS with 600+ MHz on the RAM and with reduced TDP. So power/performance wise the next best thing as an alternative to an AMD Radeon RX 570/RX 580 with a good video memory that can get to about 28-29 MHS after modding is in fact a GTX 1070. There are already rumors that AMD may have a couple of months with stock shortages for the RX series of GPUs, so we might soon start seeing the demand for the more interesting for mining Nvidia GPUs increasing.


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