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Specifications of the New AMD Radeon 300 Series GPUs
18, Jun 2015
Here are the official specifications of the new AMD Radeon 300 Series GPUs that should start appearing on the market any moment now, as expected they are essentially re-branded 200 Series GPUs. The more disappointing thing however is that specification wise and even price wise they are the same as their 200 Series counterparts, aside from a bit higher clocks maybe and possibly a bit lower power usage achieved with some optimizations of the manufacturing process. The new 300 Series GPUs come with the same amount of Stream Processors, the same number of TMUs and ROPs, even with the same memory bus width… so essentially we are getting pretty much the same thing, but with a new name and as a new product. So the AMD Radeon R9 390X is essentially an 8 GB version of AMD Radeon R9 290X, the AMD Radeon R9 390 is AMD Radeon R9 290 with 8GB VRAM, the AMD Radeon R9 380 is essentially an AMD Radeon R9 285, the AMD Radeon R7 370 is AMD Radeon R7 265 and the AMD Radeon R7 360 is essentially an AMD Radeon R7 260. Disappointing? Well we are, because we expected to actually see some more improvements that could actually lead to increase in performance, other than what you can do by overclocking the older GPUs yourself. So do not expect to get much different hashrate from these “new” AMD Radeon 300 Series GPUs for crypto mining…
Then comes the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, based on the new Fiji GPU with HBM Technology – the only actually new GPU coming from AMD this time. With it we are getting a new smaller, but powerful video card with 4096 Stream Processors and efficient and silent water cooling. What we expect from this new GPU from AMD is to offer crypto currency mining performance that is very close to that of the recently introduced Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and the price also seems to be the same. However the integrated water cooling of the AMD Fury X cards that is more silent and more effective than traditional air cooling solutions is making it the ore attractive choice for GPU mining needs. Of course we need to see how the new GPU will actually perform, but as we’ve already said our expectations are for very similar performance to that of the GTX 980 Ti. So if you are looking for new high-end GPUs from AMD to use for building GPU-based crypto currency mining rigs, than the Fury X could be a good choice, unlike the “new” 300 Series that are actually nothing new.
What to Expect from the Coming Soon New AMD GPUs
15, Jun 2015
There is already a lot of speculation about the new AMD GPUs that are supposed to be announced in the next week or so and among all of the unofficial information there is probably a lot that will end up being the truth. So far it seems that apart from the new high-end Fiji GPUs that will use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) all others will be a refresh of the currently available generation with maybe a bit more shaders or a bit wider memory bus, so you should probably not expect too much out of the net 300 series. The big question is about what level of performance the new AMD Fury video cards based on the Fiji GPU with HBM will be offering. AMD has been hinting that they are targeting a level of performance comparable to that of Nvidia Titan X, but it is not only abut performance, but also about power usage when talking about crypto currency mining and then there is also the cost of the video card. So if the Fiju GPUs that are to be used in the AMD Fury video cards are able to achieve similar performance with a bit higher power usage, but at a significantly better price they may end up be quite interesting. Especially if they do come with a water cooling solution already installed on them, ensuring cool and silent operation – perfect for GPU mining.
However we doubt that the price will be much lower than that of a Titan X and that will make it a bit too expensive for use for crypto mining, just like is the case with the Titan. On the other hand Nvidia has recently released the more affordable and slightly stripped down version of the Titan X in the form of GTX 980 Ti. The good news based on our initial testing was that the GTX 980 Ti was offering a performance very close to that of the Titan X at a much better price making it the more interesting choice for crypto currency mining, especially if you get the card as a gaming / crypto mining solution (mining while not using it for gaming). There is also already some talk that AMD will have two models based on their new Fiji GPU with HBM memory available, so the possibility to get one that will compete with GTX 980 Ti and one that will compete with the Titan X is actually quite high. Based on past experience with AMD GPU mining however it may take some time and maybe some tweaks to optimize the existing OpenCL miners to take full advantage of the new GPUs (not the refresh models). That is especially true considering that the open source miner development for AMD GPUs hasn’t been that active lately, unlike the developers of open source miners for Nvidia GPUs that are doing great job in optimizing and fixing issues constantly. Hopefully the new releases from AMD will finally spark some recovery in the AMD GPU mining ecosystem, well we are going to see pretty soon…
What Version of ccMiner to Use with your Nvidia GPU
10, Jun 2015
Last year we have published a quick guide to help people with Nvidia-based GPUs to go for the right fork of ccMiner based on their video card capabilities, so it is time we update that guide with the latest Nvidia GPUs. Below is a list of all of the Nvidia-based video cards and their Compute capabilities to help you figure it out depending on what video card you are using. Do note that the list does not include only the consumer Geforce series, but also Quadro and Tesla. You will find the cards that have at least Compute 2.0 capabilities as there is no way to currently make use of an older GPU than a one capable of supporting Compute 2.0 for mining with ccMiner. Furthermore you need to use a special build of ccMiner that comes with support for Compute 2.0 and 2.1 cards as the latest official builds only support Compute 3.0 or newer GPUs (not all of the more recent algorithms are supported). Below is the list of cards and their Compute capabilities you can find links for the respective versions of ccMiner to use…
Compute 2.0 video cards (Fermi – GF100, GF110):
GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 580, GeForce GTX 570, GeForce GTX 480, GeForce GTX 470, GeForce GTX 465, GeForce GTX 480M, Quadro 6000, Quadro 5000, Quadro 4000, Quadro 4000 for Mac, Quadro Plex 7000, Quadro 5010M, Quadro 5000M, Tesla C2075, Tesla C2050/C2070, Tesla M2050/M2070/M2075/M2090
Compute 2.1 video cards (Fermi – GF104, GF106 GF108,GF114, GF116, GF119):
GeForce GTX 560 Ti, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GeForce GTX 460, GeForce GTS 450, GeForce GTS 450, GeForce GT 640 (GDDR3), GeForce GT 630, GeForce GT 620, GeForce GT 610, GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GT 430, GeForce GT 430, GeForce GTX 675M, GeForce GTX 670M, GeForce GT 635M, GeForce GT 630M, GeForce GT 625M, GeForce GT 720M, GeForce GT 620M, GeForce 710M, GeForce 610M, GeForce GTX 580M, GeForce GTX 570M, GeForce GTX 560M, GeForce GT 555M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 540M, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520MX, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GTX 485M, GeForce GTX 470M, GeForce GTX 460M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT 435M, GeForce GT 420M, GeForce GT 415M, GeForce 710M, GeForce 410M, Quadro 2000, Quadro 2000D, Quadro 600, Quadro 410, Quadro 4000M, Quadro 3000M, Quadro 2000M, Quadro 1000M, NVS 5400M, NVS 5200M, NVS 4200M
Compute 3.0 video cards (Kepler – GK104, GK106, GK107):
GeForce GTX 770, GeForce GTX 760, GeForce GT 740, GeForce GTX 690, GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 670, GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST, GeForce GTX 650 Ti, GeForce GTX 650, GeForce GTX 780M, GeForce GTX 770M, GeForce GTX 765M, GeForce GTX 760M, GeForce GTX 680MX, GeForce GTX 680M, GeForce GTX 675MX, GeForce GTX 670MX, GeForce GTX 660M, GeForce GT 750M, GeForce GT 650M, GeForce GT 745M, GeForce GT 645M, GeForce GT 740M, GeForce GT 730M, GeForce GT 640M, GeForce GT 640M LE, GeForce GT 735M, GeForce GT 730M, Quadro K5000, Quadro K4000, Quadro K2000, Quadro K2000D, Quadro K600, Quadro K500M, Tesla K10
Compute 3.5 video cards (Kepler – GK110, GK208):
GeForce GTX TITAN Z, GeForce GTX TITAN Black, GeForce GTX TITAN, GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GeForce GTX 780, GeForce GT 640 (GDDR5), GeForce GT 630 v2, Quadro K6000, Tesla K40, Tesla K20x, Tesla K20
Compute 5.0 video cards (Maxwell – GM107, GM108):
GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GeForce GTX 750, GeForce GTX 860M, GeForce GTX 850M, GeForce 845M, GeForce 840M, GeForce 830M, GeForce GTX 960M, GeForce GTX 950M, GeForce 940M, GeForce 930M, Quadro K2200, Quadro K1200, Quadro K620, Quadro K620M
Compute 5.2 video cards (Maxwell – GM200, GM204, GM206):
GeForce GTX 960, GeForce GTX 970, GeForce GTX 980, GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX 980M, GeForce GTX 970M, GeForce GTX 965M, Quadro M6000
– Download ccMiner KBomba fork with support for older Compute 2.x GPUs
– Download the latest ccMiner tpruvot fork with support for Compute 3.0 – 5.2 GPUs…
– Download the latest ccMiner SP-MOD fork with support for newer Compute 5.0 and 5.2 Mxawell GPUs…