Posts Tagged ‘Nvidia’

Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28, May 2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…

Mining Performance of GTX 1080 Ti with ccMiner 2.0 RC2

12, Mar 2017

Time for another group of tests of the newly released GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition video card by Nvidia. This time we have used the latest released of the ccMiner 2.0 RC2 fork by Tpruvot in order to test how all of the supported algorithms perform on the new GPU. Do note that not all of the supported crypto algorithms by this miner may be performing the fastest, so you should use the results as a reference if comparing results from 2.0 RC2 release only. We have managed to successfully test the hashrate on most of the supported algorithms by this miner, though we still did have trouble making some of them work, but that is to be expected with a new GPU release…

We have used ccMiner 2.0 RC2 by tpruvot in benchmark mode with all of the default settings for intensity on all algorithms supported by the miner. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU was running at the default 100% TDP or with other words a Power Limiter at 250W, though on the Founders Edition GPUs you can increase it by up to 20% all the way to 300W (mind the cooling though). The tests were performed on stock operating frequencies of the video card with the fan set at 100% in order to keep the GPU cool and prevent thermal throttling (dropping of the boost frequency) because of high temperature that might be reached with auto fans.

As you can see in the table with performance results above we have posted the hashrate and the power usage for each algorithm tested (if the test has successfully passed). The power usage values are the ones reported by the video card itself only and are based on its TDP limit, not the actual values measured at the wall (these will be higher). The algorithms pushing the 250W TDP limit might be able to benefit from a power limit increase, though you might want to be careful with that in terms of being able to properly cool down the card. On the other hand forcing the TDP limited down might bring significant power reduction with a little sacrifice in terms of hashrate thus giving you better performance per Watt than the stock settings.

With the BMW algorithm we got an error at the default intensity of 21, and we’ve had to decrease it down to 15 in order to make it work, resulting in very low hashrate. With Cryptonight we got an error at the default intensity of 10.75, but down to 10.25 it worked and you can see the result in the table. With the Jackpot algorithm we also got an error at the default intensity of 20, however lowering it did not seem to help at all and the same thing also applies to the Quark algorithm. With the Wildkeccak algorithm we had trouble making it work properly in benchmark mode due to the specifics of the algorithm needing a scratchpad file.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Crypto Mining Performance

9, Mar 2017

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the latest addition in Nvidia’s lineup of high-end gaming GPUs, but here we are more interested in another aspect for using these video cards – crypto mining. Tomorrow, March 10th, the sales of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti should start priced at $699 USD, though initially there will be only Founders Edition models only with availability of non-reference designs expected to start showing for sale in April. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is based on GDDR5X memory clocked at 11 GHz, so the memory timings might not be the best for memory-based crypto algorithms, but the serious number of CUDA cores is there to compensate in terms of performance. Do note that the TDP of the new cards is set at 250W, though we expect that you should be able to lower the Power Limit a bit and get a better results than at stock settings.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Specifications:
– Graphics Processing Clusters: 6
– Streaming Multiprocessors: 28
– CUDA Cores (single precision): 3584
– Texture Units: 224
– ROP Units: 88
– Base Clock: 1480 MHz
– Boost Clock: 1582 MHz
– Memory Clock: 5505 MHz
– Memory Data Rate: 11 Gbps
– L2 Cache Size: 2816K
– Total Video Memory: 11264MB GDDR5X
– Memory Interface: 352-bit
– Total Memory Bandwidth: 484 GB/s
– Texture Rate (Bilinear): 331.5 GigaTexels/sec
– Fabrication Process: 16 nm
– Transistor Count: 12 Billion
– Connectors: 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI
– Form Factor: Dual Slot
– Power Connectors: One 6-pin, One 8-pin
– Recommended Power Supply: 600 Watts
– Thermal Design Power (TDP): 250 Watts
– Thermal Threshold: 91° C

We have managed to do some quick testing of the new GTX 1080 Ti and the results do seem promising. Starting with the currently more profitable algorithms on NiceHash and benchmarking with their NiceHash Miner that uses various fast performing miners (the miner used is noted after the algorithm). Not all of the latest and highest performing miners may be included, so we also ran some additional tests using the Claymore ETH miner that managed to provide a stable hashrate of about 31.8 MHS with stock settings of the card as well as the latest EWBF CUDA miner that managed to squeeze a bit more at about 625 H/s from the GTX 1080 Ti.

You can use these numbers as a reference, including the expected daily profitability if selling the hashrate form a GTX 1080 Ti on NiceHash that their miner also reports. Hopefully we are going to be able to run some more benchmarks in the next couple of days and play around to see what the GPU is capable in terms of overclocking, though with the pretty high boost frequency and a TDP of 250W you should not be expecting a lot more at least from the Founders Edition version that is launching first. Do note that properly powering and cooling six of these GPUs in a mining rig is not going to be as easy as with GTX 1070 Founders Edition for example that consume much less power and are a much more popular choice by miners using Nvidia GPUs.

Do note that with the launch of the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia is also going to have a new pricing for the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition and GeForce GTX 1080 partner boards that will get a bit more cheaper. There is no word on reducing the prices of the GTX 1070 as well however. Furthermore two new models with higher clocked video memory should be available soon, the GeForce GTX 1080 with 11 Gbps along with the already available 10 Gbps model as well as GeForce GTX 1060 9 Gbps along the already available 8 Gbps versions. The faster memory variants might be of interest especially for the miners that are into mining crypto currencies based on algorithms that are more memory dependent such as ZEC or ETH for example.


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