Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Overclocking and Mining Hashrate

18 Jun
2016

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Time to overclock monitor or even some overclocking of the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition and running the tests again to see what hashrate increase can we expect from the GPU with the increased operating frequencies. The Founders Edition cards are somewhat limited in the max power you can get by the presence of only one 8-pin PCI-E power, default TDP limit of 180W and a Power Limiter that allows for just 20% increase over the default TDP (216W max TDP). We already know that the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs are handling quite well overclocking and you can squeeze a lot more from them if you are not limited and don’t care than much about the power usage. Unfortunately for some more serious overclocking you will have to wait for the GTX 1080 cards that come with custom cooling solutions form Nvidia’s partners that will allow for more serious overclocking. Meanwhile we are pushing the GTX 1080 Founders Edition to what it can do without touching the core voltage and doing some benchmarks with: Power Limit + 20%, Core Clock + 240 MHs, Memory Clock + 125 MHs, the max settings that are running stable for 24/7 mining on our test card and the results are below.

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As you can see from the table of hashrate results with the stock settings and the overclocked GTX 1080 the average performance increase we are getting is about 12%. A result that is not bad, but a more serious overclock can help us get even more hashrate from the GPU, unfortunately making it less attractive in terms of hashrate per watt. The problem with low performance for Neoscrypt and not that great for Lyra2RE still remain and unlike with Ethereum where we see some, though not enough, performance boost testing under Windows 10, with these two algorithms Windows 10 does not help, so they really need GPU specific optimizations to max out performance unlike the other algos that already scale pretty well on the GTX 1080. Other algorithms also do not show any significant difference in results between Windows 7 and Windows 10, so no need to upgrade or downgrade your OS. Of course for Ethereum mining on GTX 1080 or GTX 1070 you would still need to go for Linux for the best possible performance as still Windows hashrate is not satisfactory at all.

AMD Radeon RX 480 May Not be That Great for Mining

17 Jun
2016

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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…

The DAO is Under Attack, Ethereum Price Suffering

17 Jun
2016

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If you are wondering what is the reason for the sudden drop of the exchange rates of Ethereum all around, well it seems that the DAO has been attacked an somebody apparently found a way to steal a lot of ETH coins. There is still not a lot of official information regarding the issue, but until the situation is resolved and everything is clear you should be very careful trading DAO tokens and Ethereum Ether coins. It seems that the smart contracts are as smart as their authors and wherever there are a lot of money stored with automated control they always attract people willing to find a way to steal them, especially if they are not secured well enough. This could as well be the end of DAO if the situation is not taken care of good enough, but it will undoubtedly also hurt Ethereum. Hopefully things will soon clear out and we would be able to continue with the usual things like mining etc.

– For more details about the current situation and how you might be able to help…

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