The cryptocurrency mining craze is still going strong and it doesn’t look like the party will end anytime soon. With the prices of graphics cards (GPUs) slowly climbing back to normal after a year-long shortage, you might be ready to jump on the bandwagon and start building a rig. However, making a good GPU mining rig is about more than just throwing some cards into a board and running some software.
If you don’t take the time to find out which GPUs are still decent choices for mining, you might end up spending way too much money on your graphics cards, only to be disappointed later when it’s time to start mining. Here are three of the best graphics card options for keeping your system profitable throughout the rest of 2018 and beyond.
1) Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB
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We’re not going to lie; Nvidia cards are still king, even though AMD Radeon cards have been crushing most other GPUs in both profitability and performance recently. You can argue with us all day about whether or not this will last, but one thing is for sure: the 1080 Ti will still be making a profit in 2022, perhaps even more so than it does in 2018. That’s due to the fact that it uses GDDR5X memory, which is still more expensive than HBM2 memory used by AMD cards like the RX Vega 64 and 56.
Even though its performance per watt isn’t as good as some of Nvidia’s other recent releases (i.e., 1070 and 1070Ti), this card performs almost as well as those two while mining Ethereum or ZCash. With 11GB of video memory, you can mine Ethereum at 70 mh/s without any issues whatsoever on Windows 10, and with overclocking you can push that up to 80-90 mh/s (what we’ve been able to get in our testing) on Windows 10.
2) Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB
Whether you’re looking for something a bit more affordable than the 1080 Ti but don’t want to skimp completely on mining performance, the 1070 Ti is your best bet. Not only does this card use GDDR5 memory like its older brother (the original GTX 1070), it outperforms it by about 5-7% when mining Ethereum due to having 3840 CUDA cores compared to 1920 CUDA cores on the original GTX 1070.
Like all of Nvidia’s recent releases, the 1070 and 1070Ti both perform well under pressure and can be overclocked for even higher mining speeds without becoming unstable. While it doesn’t quite match what the 1080 Ti is capable of mining Ethereum, you can push it up to around 70-75 mh/s with some tweaking. Given that the original 1070 doesn’t even mine at half of this rate, this is a stellar showing by Nvidia’s team.
3) AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB
Though not as energy efficient as its younger brother (the Vega 64), AMD’s RX Vega 56 is an absolute monster when it comes to mining Ethereum or other CryptoNight coins like Electroneum and Monero. For most people, the 32 mh/s to 35 mh/s range is more than enough for solid profitability with this card, though there are some tweaks you can make that will raise that number to 40 mh/s or higher (including disabling one of the two BIOS chips on the card for lower power consumption).
One of our biggest gripes with Vega cards is that they’re difficult to overclock, but overclocking the RX Vega 56 has actually been pretty simple for most people using AMD’s Wattman software. You can mine ZCash at a rate of 440 h/s without too many problems, and if you turn your computer off when you’re not using it (i.e., sleep mode) then expect this number to rise even further – up to about 600-650 h/s in some cases!
Best Mining GPU Under 500$ in 2022
These are not only good graphics cards for mining but also very good gaming GPUs, and we hope this article adds to your knowledge about graphics cards.
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1) Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB
2) Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB
3) AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB
Conclusion
We hope you found this mining GPU comparison 2016-2020 useful! If you have any more questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment section below.
Best Ethereum Mining GPUs Reviewed – 3 Miners up to 400 h/s
AMD’s next-generation graphics cards are pretty much upon us, making now a great time to invest in a midrange AMD card for mining. As per usual with new hardware releases, prices are still rather high at the moment due to low availability but expect them to drop in price over the coming weeks and months as availability increases. There is also speculation that these will be rebrands of Vega chips with some customizations made by AMD themselves, so if that turns out not to be the case then they will still perform very well in the marketplace. When it comes to mining Ethereum, hash rates can vary from as low as 25 Mh/s all the way up to a staggering 60 Mh/s or higher if you’re willing to crank up some serious GPU core voltage and memory clock speeds. One of our favorite things about this particular card is that it comes with a “dual BIOS” switch – an additional BIOS chip on the back of the graphics card that lets you swap between two separate configurations for high-powered gaming versus Ethereum mining performance. This means no more having to blindly tweak your GPU core clock speed settings just get your mining rig running at full capacity – instead, you can simply flip over into another BIOS mode to crank up gaming power.
