mining Reviews AMD Radeon, AMD Radeon RX, VEGA, Vega 56 / Vega 64 CRAZY MINING ORG 5 years ago

Overview on AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 for mining

AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64

The new AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 graphics processor is officially released, and now we can share our first impressions of cryptocurrency mining on this video card. There was a lot of information and rumors about the mining performance of the new AMD VEGA, but since we have this instance, we will share what are the actual results “out of the box” that we received.

The new HBM2 memory used in AMD VEGA GPUs is perhaps the most interesting part of the new product line, but, unfortunately, out of the box it is not very good in memory intensive algorithms. Of course, we all know from the AMD Polaris line that with some changes and modifications, additional performance will most likely be available to miners, but this can take some time.

AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 – mining Ethash (Ethereum ETH)

Probably the most important performance to be aware of is the hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies based on the Ethash algorithm. Unfortunately, the standard performance of the Radeon RX VEGA 64 using the latest Claymore Dual Eth miner, which comes with official Vega support, is only about 31-32 MHS. We have seen that statements of much higher performance are theoretically possible, but we have yet to confirm whether this is so and whether these statements are real or are mere assumptions. It is also important that this hashrate is achieved with rather high power consumption, and the higher the temperature of the GPU, the lower the performance, and the VEGA 64 air cooler really heats up easily.

AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 – mining Zcash (ZEC)

Here is the situation with Zcash mining (ZEC) using AMD’s new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU, only about 475-480 H/s. However, not very good performance in these two algorithms that use memory intensively, even with HBM2 memory, is not the most interesting. What worries us more about the new AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPUs is the fact that they are energy-intensive GPUs and quickly heat up, so properly cooling them for around-the-clock mining can be a difficult task, at least for air cooling of this model. The amount of energy used does not justify the level of performance that we get for mining out of the box at this stage …

To summarize

You can say that the new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU out of the box at standard settings really works, in terms of performance, very similar in power to the well overclocked Nvidia GTX 1070 when mining ETH and ZEC. However, the AMD GPU does this with significantly higher power consumption than what the Nvidia card requires to provide very similar performance for mining. As for games, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 is apparently closer to the GTX 1080 in performance, but again consumes more power than the Nvidia card.

What remains to be seen is what the initial availability will be and what the actual price of the new VEGA GPUs will be, given the fact that the demand from miners may not be so high, although you never know … with the market prices of Polaris. GPUs at the level at which they are available, now the official recommended price for VEGA 64 seems unreasonably low, so be sure to expect higher starting prices. On the other hand, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 can also perform better in algorithms with more GPUs than in the case of memory. The option of dual mining with one algorithm that uses memory intensively and one GPU can also be a pretty attractive alternative, despite the low performance only in mining algorithms with heavy memory use.