Crypto Mining Blog

We continue our series of tests of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition (reference design) for crypto currency mining after yesterday we have checked the situation for mining Ethereum with the new Pascal GPUs and have seen the not so great results. Ethereum and the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm it uses is still doing better on AMD GPUs, but Ehereum mining is set to end at some point with the altcoin switching to PoS only and the forks that use the same algorithm are not yet providing a real alternative. So with the growing difficulty and the switch to PoS at some point in probably less than a year you should also be interested in how the GTX 1080 performs in other new GPU mineable algorithms as well as in the more popular ones that. This is the reason we are now going to compare the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition with GTX 980 Ti and GTX 970 to see the difference in terms of performance in other algorithms as well. As you will probably see the GTX 1080 does provide a nice performance boost compared to the two other older generation alternatives, but with its currently high price even the power saving does not make it great option for building multi-GPU mining rigs for the moment. The more interestingly priced GTX 1070 will most likely be the better choice for building 6 GPU mining rigs succeeding the GTX 970 as the best Nvidia-based GPU for crypto mining, though we are yet to test the 1070 in order to confirm that.

The ccminer forks we have used for testing:
– Blakecoin (Blake256-8rounds), Decred (Blake256-14rounds), Vcash (Blake256-8rounds) ccminer
– Lyra2REv2 ccminer
– X11evo ccminer
– All other algorithms

Tests were done under Windows 7 with already existing ccMiner releases that are not compiled with CUDA 8.0 and with support for Compute 6.1 that the GTX 1080 uses, though without optimizations specific for GTX 1080 or the Pascal architecture in general we are probably not going to see much of a difference. Anyway, we do have planned to do additional testing comparing the difference in terms of performance with existing ccMiner forks compiled with CUDA 8.0 and Compute 6.1 against the results here achieved with CUDA 6.5/7.5 and Compute 5.2 releases that were tested here.

We had almost problem-free experience testing the above algorithms on the GTX 1080, though there are some things that we need to note. For example the Nist5 default intensity (21?) was crashing the miner, so tested with 20 where it was working fine. The very low Neoscrypt performance on the GTX 1080 is because the algorithm probably needs special optimizations to take advantage of the GPU. The Lyra2RE performance was not that much faster on the GTX 1080 as compared to GTX 980 Ti, so here some optimizations will most likely result in increased performance. Note that we have also tested X11, though now that is has moved to the ASIC phase you probably won’t want to GPU mine it anyway.

What is clearly seen from the comparison above is that the new GTX 1080 performs about twice as fast (on average) than a single GTX 970 and we are using Gigabyte Windoforce 970 OC GPU comparing to stock 980 Ti and GTX 1080. The GTX 1080 uses about the same power as a single GTX 970, but offers twice the performance, but the real issue here is the price at the moment. If the GTX 1080 was about twice the price of GTX 970 it might’ve been an interesting option for miners that are currently using Nvidia GTX 970 mining rigs, but it is unfortunately more like 2.5 and not two times. Comparing the GTX 1080 to the GTX 980 Ti shows an average performance advantage of almost 50% in favor of the GTX 1080, with not that great price difference between the two cards (the GTX 1080 is about 30% more expensive). So definitely no point in going for GTX 980 Ti instead of GTX 1080 for mining, though still both cards are not the best choice for multi-GPU mining rigs, then again if you are buying just a single GPU for gaming and want to also mine with it when not gaming the GTX 1080 might be much more interesting that for use on multi-GPU mining rigs.