Testing the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition for Crypto Mining

24 Jun
2016

nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-founders-edition

Recently we have tested the new Nvidia Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition GPU for crypto mining and it is now the time to see what the little brother in the form of GTX 1070 is also capable of. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition is a little stripped down version of the current top model in the form of GTX 1080, but generally the two are not that different. The GPU on the GTX 1070 is a bit less powerful and the memory is regular GDDR5 instead of the GDDR5X used in the 1080. The cooling solution, the backplate, even the 8-pin power connector are the same on both and that should signal a good overclocking potential for the GTX 1070 and the significantly better price makes it the more interesting of the two for crypto mining. Do note that the TDP rating of the GTX 1070 is just 151W and the power limiter allows you for just 12% increase over the stock limit, so you get 169 Watts max without having to resort to something like BIOS modification for example in order to be able to get serious in terms of overclocking. We are going to cover the overclock for the GeForce GTX 1070 and the mining hashrate with OC in a follow up article, for now we are comparing only the performance at stock settings.

We have already discussed the not so good situation with Ethereum mining on the GTX 1080 and unfortunately things are the same with the GTX 1070. Mining Ethereum under Windows is pointless at this point as the hashrate is very low (issue with the video driver) and although this might be fixed at a later time with a driver update, for the moment the only option you have is Linux. The results under Linux are not great though the GTX 1070 apparently does perform better because of the GDDR5 memory even at lower frequencies as compared to the GDDR5X, especially when you overclock the GTX 1070. We are going to be doing some more testing for this under Linux at a later time in order to see what the new Nvidia Pascal-based GPUs are really capable of for mining crypto currencies based on the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm like Ethereum, but for now we are focusing on the other algorithms.

geforce-gtx-1070-hashrate

The results we’ve got for other popular algorithms besides Ethereum’s Ethash are pretty interesting as you can see from our summary in the table. It is interesting to note that the GTX 1070 is a bit faster in all algorithms besides Decred than the GTX 980 Ti and it does it with a significantly lower power usage. Price wise the GTX 1070 is still a bit more expensive than GTX 980 Ti, but the power savings on the long term should more than justify the difference. With that said we should note that the GTX 980 Ti has never been one of the popular Nvidia video cards among miners due to the pretty high price that it has been keeping. Compare to GTX 970 the new GTX 1070 is significantly faster, and the results of the 1070 were not that close to the ones from GTX 1080 as we’ve hoped they could be. With some overclocking however we expect that the gap in performance between a stock GTX 1080 and the OCed GTX 1070 cloud become pretty insignificant, but that would need some more testing to confirm.

Do note that we have not included results from Lyra2RE and NeoScrypt this time, because with both algorithms the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 did not perform well and would need some optimizations. In fact there is already an optimized version of ccMiner that fixes the performance issues with Lyra2RE that also brings quite big performance boost for older GPUs as well – ccMiner 1.7.6-r6 fork With Faster Lyra2RE, but for Neoscrypt the performance of the Pascal GPUs needs some work.

The Evolution of the Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC Miners

23 Jun
2016

innosilicon-a4-dominator

We have been keeping track on the development of the new Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC miners since the initial announcement back in November last year and it is time for another update. It seems that Innosilicon is starting to take pre-orders for the final ASIC miners with shipping expected to start in September and there is already a thread on Bitcointalk about a group pre-order that you might want to check out if interested. In the past we have tested the previous generation of Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC miners in the form of the 86 MHS A2BOX Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC Miner that was consuming about 1000 Watts of power, so we can see what the development is and how good actually the new generation is going to be. A solid first generation Scrypt ASIC miner that was built well and performed really good when it was released with the only drawback being the very high initial price of the device, so we were anticipating another good solid product with much better specs when the first A4 details surfaced.

The initial announcement from last year claimed that the A4 Dominator is so efficient that it should be able to deliver about 850 MHS for Scrypt mining with 1020W of power usage. This was really impressive number and really caught our attention, especially considering that the first generation A2 Terminator miners were able to achieve just about 1/10 of that hashrate with the same power usage. A little bit later, in March this year, there was an update on the power usage and efficiency of the new A4 ASIC chips that has significantly lowered the initial numbers – down to 400 MHS from 850 MHS per kilowatt of power. Although the expected performance was lowered more than half it was still a pretty impressive number, but unfortunately this was not the final change and now we have a new number available. Apparently the final product will only be capable of about 260 MHs per 1 KW of power and be available for about $1800 USD without shipping and with power supply not included in the price. While the final performance per KW of power usage is not that bad either, we are not as excited as we were with the initial announcement or the March update. At 260 MHS per 1000 Watts things aren’t that bad, but with these specs we are not going to be pre-ordering one of these miners for sure. Maybe we are going to try to get one unit to test when they come out if it is not a pain in the ass to secure a single unit order.

– If you are interested in the A4 Dominator ASICs group pre-order thread on Bitcointalk…

Possible Ethereum Hashrate for the New AMD Radeon RX 480

22 Jun
2016

amd-radeon-rx-480-ethereum-hashrate

We have received a tip from a reader claiming he was able to run an Ethereum hashrate test on the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs providing us with a photo proof that we are publishing here. Do note that for the moment we cannot confirm this result for sure, but it does seems legit enough for us to consider it as a highly possible. Unfortunately the hashrate that is apparently achieved at stock frequencies is a bit disappointing at just around 24 MHS for Ethereum Dagger-Hashimoto mining with about 100W, we are also told that with a memory overclock 26-28 MHS are possible with about 120W of power usage. If these results turn out to be true the Radeon RX 480 would not be that great for mining Ethereum as we suspected recently. On the other hand the RX 470 could end up being a much more interesting choice for low power Ethereum mining if it manages to achieve the same hashrate, but at a better price when it hits the markets sometime next month. Guess we’ll have to wait a bit more to see confirmations if this is the actual hashrate for RX 480 mining Ethereum, but with the 256-bit memory bus these results unfortunately are on track with the pessimistic expectations we already had instead of the optimistic version…

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