Posts Tagged ‘AMD Radeon R9 390

It is time to dust off those old AMD Radeon R9 290/290X and Radeon R9 390/390X GPUs with 8G VRAM you may have lying around and wondering what to do and make them mine Ethereum (ETH) with full power and some nice profit as well. The Hawaii and Grenada GPUs that these Radeon video cards use feature a 512-bit wide memory bus and that is more than welcome for mining Ethereum, even if they are already pretty old. You can be getting about 29-30 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) with these, although they are more power hungry than more recent GPUs that offer the same performance it is still worth it with high mining profit we have at the moment.

With Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs there is a bit of a catch in order to get 29-30 MHS Ethash mining hashrate with about 150-200W of power usage per video card (with optimized video BIOS for lower power usage). It is only possible to do it under Linux as the AMD video drivers for Windows 10 do not feature support for Compute Mode for Hawaii GPUs and you can get only 14-15 MHS, but the Linux drivers do and you get 29-30 MHS. What you need to do is to make sure you have up to date video drivers and that you are using the latest version of PhoenixMiner in order to be able to fully utilize the Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs for mining Ethereum (ETH).

If you are not very good with Linux you can make your life much easier with a dedicated crypto mining operating system such as HiveOS. HiveOS simplifies getting a mining rig with AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs ready for mining Ethereum (ETH) with the full 29+ MHS hashrate. Again, in order to be able to get the optimal mining performance for Ethereum on these Hawaii GPUs you need to stick to Linux, Windows is not an option for the full performance and HiveOS just makes it easy. Do note that for HiveOS you can use the promo code CMB10USDPROMO that will give you $10 USD in your account balance!

To Download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.5b Ethash AMD and Nvidia GPU miner…

amd-radeon-300-series-specifications

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…

amd-radeon-r-fury-x

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.


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