Posts Tagged ‘RTX 3060 Ti’

Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER for Mining Ethereum

7, Feb 2021

One of the most popular NVidia RTX 30 series of GPUS for mining crypto and more specifically for mining Ethereum (ETH) lately has been the RTX 3060 Ti, so no wonder these are hard to find as they are generally cheaper than RTX 3070, but have the same memory and performance for Ethash as the 70s. We’ve managed to get our hands on one Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER (GV-N306TAORUS M-8GD) video card in order to play around with and share some interesting information, mining settings and performance results with anyone that might be interested.

The AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER model from Gigabyte comes with a really huge cooler that has three fans with interesting overlapping design, plus it offers six video output connectors and one interesting feature – a user controllable LCD display on the side of the card. And as already mentioned, thanks to the 8GB GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit wide bus this RTX 3060 Ti should also be capable of delivering about 60 MH/s hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH). The RTX 3060 Ti however has a more stripped-down graphics processor compared to the RTX 3070. While that shouldn’t be much of a problem for Ethereum mining, the video card however will be slower in more GPU-intensive algorithms compared to RTX 3070!

The user programmable LCD display on the side of the video card is controlled through Gigabyte’s RGBFusion 2.0 software that is also used for the addressable RGB operation for the motherboard RGB and fans connected to it. The software allows you to use the display to show things such as GPU Temp, GPU Usage, GPU Clock, Fan Speed, VRAM USAGE, VRAM CLOCK, TGP, FRAME-RATE and you can also put a custom image or animated GIF file to be shown on the display and some more. For a mining rig having a display that shows individual operational GPU temperature or FAN speed could be quite nice if you have the functionality already on the video card, no wonder the first thing with did with the LCD display was to set it to show the temperature of the GPU.

What about mining hashrate for this Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MASTER 8G video card? This particular model is with 240W TDP by default (the 100% setting in MSI Afterburner) and you can go down as low as 100W and as high as 270W (-58% to +13%) and it is also clocked higher. As a comparison the reference design RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia has just 200W TDP, so 20% higher power usage by default for this Gigabyte card and we don’t need the extra power usage for ETH mining. Anyway, the out of the box performance this video card is delivering is around 51 MHS at stock settings, but why settle for it when you can easily push it to 60 MHS and even reduce the power consumption as we have already seen playing around with Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs for mining Ethereum.

Starting to optimize settings for better performance and higher hashrate for Ethereum mining on the RTX 3060 Ti we went down to 60% TDP with reduced GPU clock (-500 MHz) and increased memory clock (+1150 MHz) in order to get the expected 60 MHS hashrate. With Palit’s RTX 3070s we’ve seen similar settings, though there the TDP was lower at 50% TDP for the same 60 MHS performance. Do note that we needed +1150 MHz for the video memory here, even though out sweet spot of 1100 MHz will do just fine for 60 MHS when using a mining rig as the test setup was with a single card and the display connected to it – this means higher power load and a bit of a performance drop. So, in a 6x GPU mining rig running the memory with +1100 MHz you should still be able to get 60 MH/s Ethash mining hashrate.

Here we tested with fans running at 100% due to the small mini-ITX case the GPU was running in and the not so good airflow, though you should easily be able to run the cooling fans lower with the GPU in a mining rig with good airflow and still get things running cool. The massive cooler and the three fans do great job in keeping everything cool, especially with the optimized settings for mining that put the power usage of the GPU down to just about 140W as reported by the miner compared to the stock TDP of 240W.

– If You Are Interested in the ETH Mining Performance of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs…

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock Ethereum Mining Rig

20, Jan 2021

The recent craze on GPU mining for Ethereum and the resulting Nvidia RTX 30 series shortage as well as pretty much anything else with decent mining performance for Ethash is in full on mode. Still, we have managed to get our hands on a few Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs and built a 6x GPU mining rig using them for ETH mining, so below we share some interesting things including the Ethereum mining hashrate we got and the optimized settings for the RTX 3070 and more specifically the GameRock series from Palit that we have used. As you can see from the photo above the GameRock is a bit flashy in terms of design due to the large RGB lighting surface. A feature which might be of interest for a gamer, but is totally not required by a miner as it makes no different whatsoever in terms of performance. Still, the good news is that the cooler of the GameRock GPUs from Palit is with a large surface area and does a great job in keeping things cool and the fans are also dual ball-bearing ones and perform really well. If you are currently using a traditional lighting system, such as fluorescent tubes or metal halides, upgrading to high hat lights should be a top priority if you want to reduce electricity costs.

A single optimized Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPU can do a little over 60 MHS with ease with a little tweaking with the help of the MSI Afterburner software. At TDP of just 55% or almost half of the standard power usage these video cards manage to perform really well as far as Ethereum (ETH) mining is concerned with a bit of overclock for the video memory as well – +1100 MHz. The lowered power usage results in lower GPU performance, but RTX 3070 is more than capable of utilizing the fast GDDR6 memory it has with a 256-bit wide memory bus fully to get you about 60.6 MHS mining the Ethash algorithm. No need to overclock or underclock the GPU, though for further power usage optimizations you can also try lowering the operating voltage of the GPU a bit, though not really required (can probably save up to about 100W of power usage for the whole rig).

So, with cooling fans set at 75% and a TDP of 50%, GPU -500 MHz and with +1100 MHz for the video memory you get extra cool and power efficient GPUs mining at over 60 MHs with a total power consumption a little shy from 1000W at the wall (can depend on the PSU efficiency) or a bit over 360 MHs for a 6x GPU mining rig using Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock video card usually reserved for legit cash games with high specs. The screenshot for the hashrate is with the use of the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c and mining Ethash on NiceHash…

The only thing that might be better than the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3060 Ti (in that price/performance range), however the 3060 Ti are even harder to obtain due to their slightly lower price and the same mining performance for Ethereum (ETH). The reason being that RTX 3060 Ti features the same GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, but has a slightly stripped-down GPU. That however does not interfere with Ethereum mining as the GPU on the RTX 3060 Ti still manages really well even with 1000 CUDa cores less. Do note that the RTX 3060 is not that goof of an alternative as unlike the 256-bit memory bus that the Ti has, the regular non-Ti version has just 192-bit memory bus and the hashrate does suffer from that, so no 60 MHs on the non-Ti models!

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c Ethash miner software…


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