Posts Tagged ‘Nvidia’

Nvidia has Introduced the New GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU

22, Feb 2019

Nvidia has introduced a new mid-range GPU – the GeFotce GTX 1660 Ti that is intended for gamers looking for an affordable option for reviving their older gaming system’s performance. According to the company the new GPU is 3x faster than a GTX 960, 1.5x faster than a GTX 1060, and offers comparable performance to a GTX 1070. So if it is comparable in terms of performance to GTX 1070, then why release a new GPU? Well, the new GTX 1660 Ti is built on the latest Turing architecture (still not named RTX and 2xxx series, but GTX and 1xxx series), which debuted with the top GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs. It also features the new GDDR6 video memory with a 192-bit wide memory bus at jus 120W of TDP. With the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti you can get an up to date GPU that is more affordable than the GTX 1070 with recommended prices starting at $279 USD.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Specifications:
GPU Engine Specs:
– 1536 NVIDIA CUDA Cores
– 1770 MHz Boost Clock
– 1500 MHz Base Clock
Video Memory Specs:
– 6000 MHz Memory Speed
– 6GB GDDR6 Memory
– 192-bit Memory Interface Width
– 288 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
Other Specs:
– Display Support: 7680×4320 @ 120Hz Maximum Digital Resolution
– Display Interfaces: DP 1.4a, HDMI 2.0b, DL-DVI-D Standard Display Connectors
– Graphics Card Dimensions: 4.37″ Height, 5.7″ Length
– Thermal and Power Specs: 95C Maximum GPU Temperature
– 120W Graphics Card Power

Although the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is intended for gamers with a more limited budgets looking for upgrading their aging mid-range gaming graphics, it might turn out to be an interesting choice for mining as well. If it manages to offer good performance for crypto mining similar or even better than that of the older GTX 1070 with the lower power usage and price range it might spark some interest. Of course for that to happen we need to see some movement in the profitability of GPU mining following some good and strong signs of crypto market recovery, prior to that the new GPU might not be deemed as very attractive by miners. Still we need to see some crypto miming results to get a good idea on what to expect in terms of actual performance…

First Impressions From Mining With the New Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU

10, Jan 2019

We have beeing playing for a couple of days with one of the new reference design Nvidia RTX 2060 video cards and tried how well it performs for crypto mining using various miners and mining algorithms and as expected with new GPU releases there is more to be desired, but more on that in a moment. We like the design and implementation of the whole cooling solution from Nvidia on their GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition cards, though there will be a lot of custom partner designs as well. The later should be available in a couple of days as well and start hitting the market pretty soon by the time Nvidia starts delivering FE cards in a couple of days. One thing that we don’t like very much with the latest RTX 20×0 series is the fact that the Founders Edition cards are only being sold directly by Nvidia and only available in a limited number of countries worldwide and the same goes for the RTX 2060 FE.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition is equipped with a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector (up to 150W power) plus the maximum power provided by the PCI-E slot (max 75W) which should offer enough headroom for additional overclocking over the stock 160 W TDP (100%). You can go up to 118% TDP or about 189 Watts with a tool like MSI Afterburner on the FE. We are yet to play a bit more with the overclocking capabilities of the video card’s GPU as well as the onboard GDDR6 memory, even though the memory bus on the RTX 2060 is just 192-bit the fast 14 Gbps GDDR6 video memory still manages to provide pretty high memory bandwidth. The cooling solution and the fans are doing good job at keeping the video card at below 60 degrees Celsius operating temperature even under 100% load with 160W TDP with 30 degrees ambient temperature. The cooler is well built with high-quality and durable fans, so this should ensure long lasting and problem free operation as we are used to with FE cards unless there is some factory issue or a design flaw, something that unfortunately can always happen.

In the table above you can see some of our initial tests with various miners and using some of the different algorithms they support. As expected with the GPU releases the miners are not yet optimized or may even not support the new GPU at all like in the case of Bminer that spits out an error regardless of the algorithm. Other miners tend to crash on certain of the supported algorithms when ran on the RTX 2060 with the default settings. Since it is a new GPU after a bit of time we can see additional performance boost when the new video cards hit the market and miner developers get access to them and start playing around. For now the new RTX 2060 does not seem very attractive for crypto mining, but hopefully soon it will be better supported and offer even better hashrates. Until we also see some more positive move and the crypto market starting to recover however the demand for the new RTX 20×0 series and not only for the RTX 2060 probably won’t be big for sure.

Nvidia Has Announced Their New Mid-Range GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs

8, Jan 2019

Nvidia has announced their new mid-range GPUs, namely the GeForce RTX 2060 as the fourth GPU in their new RTX range following the release for RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 that are already available on the market. Specifications wise the new RTX 2060 is something in between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 from the previous generation, along with the new Tensor and RT cores on top of the CUDA cores. As far as crypto mining goes however there is not much use of the new gaming technology built into the RTX graphics cards, but the new architecture does bring some extra performance as we have already seen with he earlier RTX models… especially with miners already getting optimizations for the 2000 series.

It will be interesting to see what kind of performance you can currently get from an RTX 2060 GPU and we are soon going to have some results to show, so stay tuned for more information. Meanwhile the new GeForce RTX 2060 should be available from January 15th with prices starting at $349 USD. It is pricier than what the GTX 1060 was released at its launch, but then again you are also getting more with the GeForce RTX 2060, will the extra features be worth the price for mining though, that is entirely different question. With the current low profit for GPU mining that has been going on for quite some time already it is hard to justify the purchase of new mining hardware…


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