The Sony PlayStation 5 Game Console Mining Ethereum with almost 100 MH/s is Not True!

1 Mar
2021

The last few days there seems to be an interesting photo of what is said to be PlayStation 5 (PS5) game console hacked to mine Ethereum (ETH) achieving a hashrate of 98.76 MH/s with a custom mining software. The image has apparently originated from China and the text is in Chinese, but it turns out this was a fake image and the 2D barcode reveals the joke somebody tried to play on everyone. If you read the 2D barcode with your smartphone it will reveal the following text in Chinese language:

娱乐而已并没有此软件哈哈哈

For people that do not understand a word from the above, passing it through Google Translate to see what it means in English translates to the following:

There is no such software for entertainment hahaha

So, no the PlayStation 5 game console is not yet turned into a crypto mining machine for Ethereum (ETH), though it is not entirely impossible for this to happen, considering the gaming console has very good hardware from AMD in the form a Ryzen CPU and a RDNA 2 GPU inside and that can in theory be used for mining with the right software.

The software side on the console for the moment however is pretty closed, so developing a crypto miner is the hard thing to do and nobody apparently made one, otherwise something like 50 MH/s hashrate for Ethash might not be impossible if the hardware is properly utilized.

Maybe we could see PS5 mining farms in the not-so-distant future if the crypto mining craze continues, but for now it is not that time yet. According to Blackout Bingo reviews, console gamers are already not very happy with the PlayStation 5 shortages at the moment with the device not easily obtainable even at a premium over the recommended end user price. If the console becomes an attractive crypto mining device it will become even harder being a gamer and wanting to get a PS5 game console.

New AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU To Be Announced on March 3rd

28 Feb
2021

AMD has announced that on March 3rd at 11am ET will be introducing its newest addition to the Radeon RX family of high-performance graphic cards. The announcement will be a part of the Where Gaming Begins: Episode 3 online event and everyone is expecting to see the Radeon RX 6700 XT revealed and maybe the Radeon RX 6700 (non-XT model as well). The rumours circling around claim that the RX 6700 XT will have 40 compute units, 2560 cores, and 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6 video memory onboard while the non-XT model RX 6700 will have only 36 compute units and 2304 cores, but also equipped with 12GB GDDR6 video memory and a 192-bit wide memory bus (the VRAM could also e just 6GB, hopefully still with 192-bit bus though). The March 3rd will mark only the announcement of the new GPU(s) while market availability is expected for 18th with prices most likely not going to be anywhere near what everyone is expecting from this new mid-range GPU from AMD.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is probably designed to compete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, while the Radeon RX 6700 is probably targeted at the GeForce RTX 3060 as far as gaming is concerned. If looking at crypto mining capabilities, then both the RX 6700 XT and RX 6700 should be capable of providing performance similar to that of the RTX 3060, especially regarding the mining of Ethereum. Now, the good news for the new AMD GPUs is that they will most likely not have any kind of artificial limiter for the mining hashrarte like Nvidia did with their RTX 3060 GPUs. This means that the RX 6700 XT and RX 6700 should most likely be capable of delivering 40-45 MH/s Ethereum mining hashrate thanks to the 12GB GDDR6 memory with 192-bit wide memory bus. The RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 form Nvidia do use GDDR6 as well, but utilize wider 256-bit memory bus and are thus capable of higher mining hashrate for Ethereum mining.

While the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 6700 series of GPUs may become the Etheruem miners’ new best friend in terms of performance and efficiency (hopefully), they will most likely have limited availability and prices that are much higher than the recommended end user price. We’ve seen that with the recent release of RTX 3060 from Nvidia – even though the company has limited the mining hahsrate, it was still hard to find and was sold at a serious premium over the expected retail price. AMD probably does not have that much stock for their new GPUs and they were kind of in a hurry to come up with an alternative to the RTX 3060 at least on paper with actual market availability planned for a later time. Still, it will be interesting to see what these GPUs will be capable of not only in terms of Ethereum mining, but also in other crypto mining algorithms as well.

– Check the Mining Performance of Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition…

Mining Performance of Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition

26 Feb
2021

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 video cards are here and we managed to buy one quickly while there was some stock left to do some mining benchmarks and tests. We already know that mining performance for the RTX 3060 is limited for Ethereum, but what else can you mine with the full performance is something that we also wanted to find out for sure. As we have predicted availability and pricing of the RTX 3060 is off the charts as people expected these GPUs to be the sweet spot for mining Ethereum – high hashrate and low price. Neither of these did turn out to be true however and stock availability is low, so buying even just one of these new GPUs was pretty hard and we had to pre-order it and buy it bundled with a motherboard just to get our hands on it for testing.

Specifications wise – nothing unexpected. We already knew what to expect from the RTX 3060 GPUs in terms of hardware and GPU and VRAM specs. We also though we knew what to expect from them in terms of performance, but then Nvidia suddenly surprised us with their plans a couple of days ago. And although they are saying that they want to have the RTX 3060 available for gamers, what they are meaning is that they want to sell their new Nvidia CMP HX Dedicated Crypto Mining GPUs to miners instead of RTX 3060. In the end they will probably not succeed very well with either for a number of reasons…

When we run Phoenixminer on the ASUS RTX 3060 GPU with 70% TDP and +1000 MHz video memory in MSI Afterburner we are getting almost 46 MH/s hashrate for Ethereum, however the protective mechanism quickly kicks in and drops that to about 23-24 MH/s. Mining Ehtereum with 46 MH/s at just about 120W of power usage is probably some miner’s wet dream for a mining GPU, but unfortunately that is not going to happen at least for the moment. And it is not only affecting Ethereum mining, Ethereum Classic also gets the half hashrate reduction (it is very similar in terms of algorithm), even Vertcoin’s VertHash algorithm is affected and possibly other memory-intensive algorithms as well.

Affected Algorithms Performance:
– Ethereum – Ethash algorithm – 45 -> 23 MH/s
– VertCoin – Verthash algorithm – 850 -> 370 KH/s
– Ethereum Classic – Etchash algorithm – 47 -> 25 MH/s

All is not lost however as there are some profitable crypto algorithms that are not affected by the forced half hashrate for mining from Nvidia, so the RTX 3060 is still usable and performing quite well in some other popular algorithms…

Unaffected Algorithms Performance:
– Ravencoin – KAWPOW algorithm – 22 MH/s
– Veil – ProgPoW algorithm – 20.8 MH/s
– BitCash – X25X algorithm – 4.2 MH/s
– Conflux – Octopus algorithm – 42 MH/s
– Beam – BeamHashIII algorithm – 22.5 MH/s
– Aeternity – CuckooCycle algorithm – 6.6 G/s
– Grin – Cuckatoo32 algorithm – 0.39 G/s
– ZEL – Zelhash algorithm – 33.6 Sol/s
– Firo (XZC) – MTP algorithm – 2.4 MH/s

So, while the RTX 3060 may not be the best option for Ethereum mining, it can still perform quite well in some other mining algorithms, so not a total waste of money as far as crypto mining is concerned. If you are only focusing on Ethereum mining however, then you might want to think twice and leave the RTX 3060 to other miners or gamers instead.

– What performance other Nvidia RTX 30 Series GPU deliver for Ethereum…

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