How to choose a graphics card for mining? Nvidia or AMD

How to choose a graphics card for mining?. Of course, “home” mining now can not be as profitable as it was a couple of years ago. However, there are still a lot of enthusiasts who, for various reasons, choose this way of mining the crypto currency.

From a technical point of view, the farm for mining is a normal computer. However, in connection with the characteristics of the crypt, which is, in fact, the selection of encrypted crypto-currency code, the desired combination for which is formed by the method of enumeration of a set of numerical variations, the requirements for “hardware” in it are seriously different from the usual desktop or laptop.

Unlike a regular computer, when the system requirements for such components as the CPU, the amount of RAM or the amount of hard drive are very high, the main thing for a mining farm is video cards, more precisely, their capacity and quantity.

Another difference between the farm for mining is the correct choice of the motherboard, which can support the work of, for example, five video cards simultaneously.

And, finally, the power supply: since video cards consume a large amount of electricity while operating and require powerful cooling, a conventional power supply is more than enough.

In order to explain why graphics cards need to be mined, we’ll figure it out in some detail.

The CPU is the most important part of the computer, which “points” to all other parts of the computer, what they should do in accordance with the program and user commands.

In turn, the traditional role of the graphics card (GPU) is the rendering of graphics and visual effects.

Thus, the GPU and CPU are designed to perform a variety of tasks.

CPU, in the first place, was developed in order to “take” a wide variety of solutions. Here is a simple example: when saving a document, the CPU function is to convert this document to the appropriate file type and instruct the hard drive to save the file. Simply put, the processor operates on the principle “if this happened – do it, otherwise do something else.”

The graphics processor is not designed to solve various tasks. Technologically, the meaning of video processing is the rapid execution of large volumes of the same type of work and a huge number of repetitive operations.

Mining of the crypto currency, in general, does not require the adoption of various solutions, but represents repetitive mathematical operations. It is for this reason that the use of the graphics processor as the main part of the farm for the mining of certain types of crypts is the optimal solution. The GPU should “answer” only one question: “there is a block” or “there is no block”.

But how to choose the “right” graphics card for mining? Of course, for an approximate calculation of earnings from mining on specific video cards, there are special calculators of income and payback. But it is difficult to rely on them: the course of the Crypto currency is constantly changing and it is unlikely that it will be possible to obtain exact values.

So which video card for mining should you choose?

When choosing a video card for mining, first of all, it is necessary to consider four basic characteristics of the GPU.

It:

GPU frequency;
The amount of video memory;
Memory bus frequency;
Energy efficiency indicators.

The first three parameters directly affect the production rate of the crypt, the fourth – determines the cost of electricity.

As in the gaming industry, two AMD and NVIDIA vendors compete for the championship.

To date, the most suitable video cards for mining are called, basically, five.

This is the most expensive in the list of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, giving out up to 700 Sol / s (from English Solutions per second – solutions per second).

Slightly inferior to the leader of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (with correct overclocking – up to 500 Sol / s).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is also a very interesting option: Depending on the hashing algorithm, it can deliver up to 470 Sol / s.

AMD’s only representative on our list is AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. It’s slightly inferior in performance to NVIDIA GPUs, but it’s not worth dropping it.

And, finally, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. Theoretically – the weakest video card from the presented. However, some of the miners consider its price-performance ratio to be optimal: there are a lot of statements on the network, compared to 1080 (considering the higher cost of the latter), the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 can pay off faster.

However, our top five – it’s the most expensive. Many believe that in the budget segment, you can find a video card, although inferior in performance to the leaders, but much cheaper.

Advise on how best to do: build a farm for mining on one, but very powerful and expensive graphics card or choose something simpler (but their relatively low cost allows you to buy 4-6 video cards at once) – very difficult. The effectiveness of the work can be affected by improper selection of the pool for mining, and network failures, and cooling problems and other components.

Among other things, in order to assemble a farm for mining, the following components are required:

Winchester (most miners believe that it is preferable to choose SSD-drive – stability and speed of its operation exceed conventional hard disks);
CPU;
The module of operative memory (not less than 4GB);
Emulator monitor;
Actually video cards;
Powerful power supply (with a margin of 20-30% of the maximum energy consumption of the farm);
Risers, that is, devices for connecting several video cards to the motherboard.

However, the complexity of mining popular crypto-currencies (including bitcoins, but the mining of this coin occurs on specialized processors) has now grown to such an extent that the use of GPU farms for these purposes has practically lost its meaning in the past year. Extracted coins will be enough unless to pay bills for electricity.

However, not everything is so bad

Although with less efficiency than recently, farms can be used for mining “ether”, lightcoin, DASH and many other altcoyins.

A major disadvantage of using a farm for mining is the cost of equipment. Most of the miners consider that at least 4-6 graphic processors should be used in the farm, the cost of which today, depending on the performance, starts from 15 thousand rubles. Do not try to save and buy already-used video cards: it may happen that the graphics processor will fail very quickly – after all, it has been working for a long time around the clock.

Thus, only for the GPU will have to shell out from a thousand dollars. Add to the list the rest of the “hardware” and it turns out that the minimum cost of equipment for mining will not be less than 100 thousand rubles.

Count on a quick payback of the invested funds, too, is not necessary: it will be very lucky if the money will be “repulsed” in six months or eight.