AMD GPU Shortages May Continue Longer Than Expected

5 Jun
2017

We are hearing information from different sources that AMD may have more serious issues with supplying enough of its Radeon RX 500 series of GPUs on the market for the next couple of months. It is not all about the increased demand from crypto miners as it seems that that the company may be experiencing some other issues that are causing it to not be able to produce enough GPUs to cover the demand. Looking at Ethereum’s hashrate and difficulty data however does not yet show a significant slowdown in growth, but the reason for that could easily be the move of existing mining power from other crypto coins to ETH.

With AMD GPUs hard to get for a while now miners are looking for alternatives that are good for Ethereum mining and while Nvidia GPUs are generally more expensive, there are some that are interesting for ETH mining. We are talking about the GTX 1070 that can do 25 MHS stock and 30 MHS or even a bit more after some memory overclocking and it can do it with a reduced TDP. As a result some miners have started looking at GTX 1070 as a solution to use for new mining rigs, again it might be more expensive, but with the high profitability mining now with a more expensive GPU than waiting to possibly secure some cheaper AMD cards in some days or even weeks…

Other more powerful GPUs from Nvidia are not so great for mining Ethereum due to the use of GDDR5X video memory instead of GDDR5 that is found on the GTX 1070. The GDDR5X memory is faster in terms of clock speed and offers more bandwidth, but apparently uses less aggressive timings and as a result is not much faster than the “slower” GDDR5 memory. As a result if you are looking at GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti for Ethereum mining their price/performance ratio is really not attractive at all as far as Ethereum mining goes. Nvidia on the other hand is faster on ZEC and many other algorithms, but then again people are currently crazy about ETH. So do your math and think about it and don’t overthrow the GTX 1070 as a good option for Ethereum mining.

Using a PCI-Express x1 to 3x PCIe x1 Slots Splitter

4 Jun
2017

Miners willing to increase the number of available PCI-Express slots on their motherboards and thus get a better density with more GPUs on their mining rigs are always looking for different options. One of these options is the use of the cheap Chinese PCI-Express x1 to 3x PCIe x1 slots splitter boards that can be found relatively cheap if purchased directly from China. These boards take up one PCI-E slot on your motherboard and provide you with three x1 slots to use, so essentially they are adding up two extra slots for you to try and populate with video cards.

Now, you should be aware of the limitations of these boards. First off they do not seem to work with Nvidia GPUs, only with AMD video cards, so have that in mind depending on the mining rigs you are building. The fact that these boards add two more PCI-E slots physically does not mean that you will be able to fill them with video cards and they will all work. You may need to try multiple slots on your motherboard when plugging the splitter board as not all slots may work properly with it. We’ve seen some motherboards work with no additional cards using such a splitter board, on some only one extra card is working and on others both extra cards will function.

It is best to try what works on a particular motherboard first and then decide if you are Ok with the results you are getting. Going for a motherboard with 6 PCI-E slots to be able to install 8 video cards with the help of such PCIe splitter is a nice thing, but then again not all motherboards will work with 8 GPUs this way. Some people are suing such boards to upgrade motherboards with just 4x PCI-E slots to six in order to go for a “standard” 6x GPU mining rig. Again, there is no guarantee that the motherboard will work properly with these splitter boards and add extra two PCI-E slots, even if you are able to get the extra slots the motherboard might still have trouble working properly with more than 4 GPUs. In general we are not big fans of solutions like these as they may have varying results, but sometimes a thing like these boards can help you overcome some limitations nevertheless.

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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