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One of the most popular NVidia RTX 30 series of GPUS for mining crypto and more specifically for mining Ethereum (ETH) lately has been the RTX 3060 Ti, so no wonder these are hard to find as they are generally cheaper than RTX 3070, but have the same memory and performance for Ethash as the 70s. We’ve managed to get our hands on one Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER (GV-N306TAORUS M-8GD) video card in order to play around with and share some interesting information, mining settings and performance results with anyone that might be interested.
The AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER model from Gigabyte comes with a really huge cooler that has three fans with interesting overlapping design, plus it offers six video output connectors and one interesting feature – a user controllable LCD display on the side of the card. And as already mentioned, thanks to the 8GB GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit wide bus this RTX 3060 Ti should also be capable of delivering about 60 MH/s hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH). The RTX 3060 Ti however has a more stripped-down graphics processor compared to the RTX 3070. While that shouldn’t be much of a problem for Ethereum mining, the video card however will be slower in more GPU-intensive algorithms compared to RTX 3070!
The user programmable LCD display on the side of the video card is controlled through Gigabyte’s RGBFusion 2.0 software that is also used for the addressable RGB operation for the motherboard RGB and fans connected to it. The software allows you to use the display to show things such as GPU Temp, GPU Usage, GPU Clock, Fan Speed, VRAM USAGE, VRAM CLOCK, TGP, FRAME-RATE and you can also put a custom image or animated GIF file to be shown on the display and some more. For a mining rig having a display that shows individual operational GPU temperature or FAN speed could be quite nice if you have the functionality already on the video card, no wonder the first thing with did with the LCD display was to set it to show the temperature of the GPU.
What about mining hashrate for this Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER 8G video card? This particular model is with 240W TDP by default (the 100% setting in MSI Afterburner) and you can go down as low as 100W and as high as 270W (-58% to +13%) and it is also clocked higher. As a comparison the reference design RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia has just 200W TDP, so 20% higher power usage by default for this Gigabyte card and we don’t need the extra power usage for ETH mining. Anyway, the out of the box performance this video card is delivering is around 51 MHS at stock settings, but why settle for it when you can easily push it to 60 MHS and even reduce the power consumption as we have already seen playing around with Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs for mining Ethereum.
Starting to optimize settings for better performance and higher hashrate for Ethereum mining on the RTX 3060 Ti we went down to 60% TDP with reduced GPU clock (-500 MHz) and increased memory clock (+1150 MHz) in order to get the expected 60 MHS hashrate. With Palit’s RTX 3070s we’ve seen similar settings, though there the TDP was lower at 50% TDP for the same 60 MHS performance. Do note that we needed +1150 MHz for the video memory here, even though out sweet spot of 1100 MHz will do just fine for 60 MHS when using a mining rig as the test setup was with a single card and the display connected to it – this means higher power load and a bit of a performance drop. So, in a 6x GPU mining rig running the memory with +1100 MHz you should still be able to get 60 MH/s Ethash mining hashrate.
Here we tested with fans running at 100% due to the small mini-ITX case the GPU was running in and the not so good airflow, though you should easily be able to run the cooling fans lower with the GPU in a mining rig with good airflow and still get things running cool. The massive cooler and the three fans do great job in keeping everything cool, especially with the optimized settings for mining that put the power usage of the GPU down to just about 140W as reported by the miner compared to the stock TDP of 240W.
– If You Are Interested in the ETH Mining Performance of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs…
- In: Mining Hardware|Tests and Reviews
- Tags: AORUS, Gigabyte, Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3060 Ti ETH hashrate, RTX 3060 Ti ETH mining setting, RTX 3060 Ti Ethash hashrate, RTX 3060 Ti Ethash mining hashrate, RTX 3060 Ti Ethash mining performance, RTX 3060 Ti Ethash mining settings, RTX 3060 Ti Ethereum hashrate, RTX 3060 Ti Ethereum mining settings, RTX 3060 Ti mining, RTX 3060 Ti mining settings
If you have spotted the recently forked VertCoin (VTC) to the new Verthash algorithm and are interested in mining it, then you might head on to download the latest VerthashMiner v0.6.2 to do so. This is especially important for owners of AMD Radeon RX 400/500 series of GPUs with just 4GB of video memory as these really need an alternative to mining Ethereum (ETH) and pointing them towards mining VTC could be just what you need. While you can Still Mine Ethereum With AMD Radeon RX 400/500 Series 4GB GPUs the performance continues to drop with each new DAG epoch and these cards are soon to be retired or moved to an alternative and more profitable crypto coin and VertCoin could be that alternative.
The new VerthashMiner v0.6.2 doesn’t bring any performance improvements, but instead addresses one very important issue that the previous version 0.6.1 had. With the new release you now can generate the verthash.dat file needed for the mining process just using the miner itself – there is no need to download it or use the VTC wallet to generate it before you can start mining. What you need is to just run the new VerthashMiner with the gen-verthash-data command line parameter and the name of the file you want to use such as verthash.dat:
VerthashMiner.exe --gen-verthash-data verthash.dat
Do note that the verthash.dat file generation is a time-consuming process that on a quad-core Intel Core-i5 6500T CPU with a SATA SSD can take around 10 minutes to generate using VerthashMiner v0.6.2. The good thing is that you need to generate the data file just one and then when you run the miner with the normal mining command line parameters it just loads it and starts mining.
SimpleMining OS (SMOS) has just implemented VertCoin (VTC) mining support in their latest update and has added verthashminer-v0.6.2, though mining VTC is still not going to be perfect there as the verthash.dat file will be generated on each run of the miner, but hey, at least it works and you can mine VTC using the dedicated Linux mining OS.
– To Download the Latest AMD/Nvidia GPU VerthashMiner v0.6.2 for VertCoin (VTC)…
There is a lot of talk going on around the new generation of Ethash ASIC miners for mining Ethereum (ETH) that are expected to be released for order in the following few months, although nothing is official or really 100% confirmed, but both devices are expected to have hashrate higher than 2000 MH/s. We are talking about the Innosilicon’s A11 ETH miner and an upcoming device from a newcomer on the mining market, a company called Linzhi that has been getting some attention for a while now. Linzhi Inc was founded by Chen Min, the former CTO of Canaan, a popular name for everyone that has been into crypto mining for a while already as this is one of the first companies to be making Bitcoin ASIC miners – the Avalon miners.
Currently the Innosilicon A10 Pro ETH Miner is the best performing specialized non-GPU-based miner for Ethash with 500 MHS hashrate and 950W of power consumption and a price of $4388 USD (or 0.125933 BTC) as per the official company website (currently all sold out). The alternative is using GPUs for mining ETH and you even might be able to get the same level of performance as the A10 Pro ETH Miner if you go for Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series – 8x RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 or 5-6x RTX 3080 or 4-5x RTX 3090 video cards, but unfortunately pretty much all GPUs suitable for mining are currently hard to find and more expensive than usual.
F2Pool did an unboxing and a test of a sample Linzhi Phoenix ETH miner (the video above). The device is supposedly capable of 2600 MHS hashrate for Ethash with a power usage of 3000-3500W. The Linzhi Phoenix E2600M ETH mining devices are supposedly to be up for purchase around March-April this year with a price in the range of 13-15 thousand USD. The main problem with the Linzhi miner is that it has 4.4GB of memory and Ethereum’s DAG file is already over 4GB in size, meaning that the life expectancy of these miners for mining ETH won’t be very long. If they start shipping as announced and you are among the first to get the device you may still end up with just 4-5 months of use for mining Ethereum, though you would still be able to mine other crypto coins with the Ethash algorithm and smaller DAGs. So, maybe everything was great when they started development 2 years ago, but now 4.4 GB is not enough and if they do not manage to increase the available memory by the time of release to the market things might not be looking very good for their sales.
The Innosilicon A11 ETH miner is the other upcoming next-gen ETH ASIC miner. Supposedly the A11 Ethash miner will be delivering 2100 MH/s Ethash hashrate with just 2300W of power usage and should come with 8GB memory. The not so good thing here is that the price will be higher, probably in the range of about 15-16 thousand USD with shipping expected to start somewhere in April-June time. The Innosilicon is probably the better choice if the final end-product specifications turn out to be as the values we are expecting, as even though it may be slower in terms of hashrate, and more expensive as a price, but is also more power efficient and better equipped for long term use with enough onboard memory.
You should also consider the fact that Ethereum (ETH) will be switching from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Staking) or with other words moving from mining to staking as a model of generating new coins. This transition has already been started, even though mining is still active and will be for maybe 2 years at least, but when looking for a long-term investment in mining hardware you should have things like that in mind. Not to mention that unlike the specialized ETH miners, going for GPUs allows for much better flexibility even though they may not be as efficient in terms of performance for a specific algorithm.
– Build of a 720 MHs Ethereum Mining Rig With 6x MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24G GPUs…