Bitcoin Mining GPU Performance Comparison @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Bitcoin Mining GPU Performance Comparison - Bitcoin mining is a new form of virtual money. The economics of it are fascinating, but the real interest for us is that you can use your GPU to accelerate the mining process, and you'll be shocked at the difference between NVIDIA and AMD GPU performance. If you want to setup a Bitcoin box, this article will get you moving in the right direction.
 
Interesting stuff. The bitcoin kids are going to flood in here telling you how much more mhash/s you should be getting using x,y, and z tweaks. You heard it here :)
 
I'm gonna try this out for a month on a single 6970 and see if it's worth the increase in the electricity bill :p and if so go run it on both 6970s.

Thx for the comparison.
 
Just FYI to all those out there who are considering mining; be aware of your electricity costs. If the value of each bitcoin stays above $15, then you'll probably make a little money if your power is < $0.10 kW/hr.

the bitcoin craze is keeping the value of the 5850's nice & high; snap them up for $160. Typical used value is $180-$200 now.
 
Yeah, a bit muffed really that my GTX 570 is worse than a 6850 in Mhash/sec. LOL

Actually just on par to the 5770/6770.

Stopped after getting my first bitcoin (which took days LOL).
 
jebo_4jc said:
Interesting stuff. The bitcoin kids are going to flood in here telling you how much more mhash/s you should be getting using x,y, and z tweaks. You heard it here :)
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Without overclocking all the results look pretty normal. Not many people mine at stock clocks tho. It would have been nice to have another page with overclocked results but that would have been a lot more work.
 
knowing diddly about bitcoins

how long does it take to earn one? how many Mhashes?
what is the "exchange rate"? *EDIT* about $14 USD atm. https://mtgox.com/trade/sell
Can you turn them into cash or just buy stuff? *EDIT* can turn into cash

say my power is 6cents per KWh and i spent $1000 building a mining rig. how long before i break even or turn a "'profit"
 
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Kardonxt said:
Without overclocking all the results look pretty normal. Not many people mine at stock clocks tho. It would have been nice to have another page with overclocked results but that would have been a lot more work.
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Lot of folks downclocking the VRAM to get higher GPU speeds as well. No sense in pouring the power to the card's RAM if it not being used.

I don't see the benefit in doubling or tripling our testing time to do overclocking on these. It is obvious that these types of operations are almost linear with the clocks. Yes, overclocking will get you more operations per second. :)
 
MetalDwarf said:
knowing diddly about bitcoins

how long does it take to earn one? how many Mhashes?
what is the "exchange rate"?
Can you turn them into cash or just buy stuff?

say my power is 6cents per KWh and i spent $1000 building a mining rig. how long before i break even or turn a "'profit"
Click to expand...

I would like to know too. This seems like it would be a fun reason to build out a box. If I can get my money back in a few months, I think it would be worth it. Also would it be wise to use a less powerful CPU since your are not really going to be using it much.
 
manwdaplan said:
I would like to know too. This seems like it would be a fun reason to build out a box. If I can get my money back in a few months, I think it would be worth it. Also would it be wise to use a less powerful CPU since your are not really going to be using it much.
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I would like to know as well. If I could even kill half the cost of a system over the avg life between upgrades (~1yr) I would be in.
 
MetalDwarf said:
knowing diddly about bitcoins

how long does it take to earn one? how many Mhashes?
what is the "exchange rate"?
Can you turn them into cash or just buy stuff?

say my power is 6cents per KWh and i spent $1000 building a mining rig. how long before i break even or turn a "'profit"
Click to expand...

  1. It can take several weeks to find a single bitcoin (that's if you're mining solo). I would advise joining a pool (Deepbit, Slush's, etc.). The amount of Mhash is dependent upon your hardware. Check out wiki for a good comparison list.
  2. Depends on where you want to do your business at but Mt Gox it's $14/coin.
  3. The great thing about this virtual currency is you can do anything you want with it. That's to go without saying that many users resort to selling illegal items such as drugs (weed, prescription). Stick to selling them for money.
  4. You can determine how much you'll make a month using this calculator. If you were generating ~2000 MHash/s, then you'd make $547 a month. Say your rig consumes about 1.2 kW. At $0.06/kWh, that's $1.73 a day on electricity. If an average month is 30 days, that will be about $52 solely on mining. So you would pay off that $1000 rig in little over 2 months. When the difficulty increases, it'll get harder and harder to generate coins.
 
Wow guys, great write up. This is some great exposure for the bitcoin project. Us believers can't thank you enough.
 
SolidBladez said:
  1. It can take several weeks to find a single bitcoin (that's if you're mining solo). I would advise joining a pool (Deepbit, Slush's, etc.). The amount of Mhash is dependent upon your hardware. Check out wiki for a good comparison list.
  2. Depends on where you want to do your business at but Mt Gox it's $14/coin.
  3. The great thing about this virtual currency is you can do anything you want with it. That's to go without saying that many users resort to selling illegal items such as drugs (weed, prescription). Stick to selling them for money.
  4. You can determine how much you'll make a month using this calculator. If you were generating ~2000 MHash/s, then you'd make $547 a month. Say your rig consumes about 1.2 kW. At $0.06/kWh, that's $1.73 a day on electricity. If an average month is 30 days, that will be about $52 solely on mining. So you would pay off that $1000 rig in little over 2 months. When the difficulty increases, it'll get harder and harder to generate coins.
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interesting, however none of listed machines hit 2000MHash/s. Is there further tweaking to increase GPU performance (apart from overclocking)?
 
shocking difference between the fastest cpu, and the cheapest gpu. I knew there would be a huge gap many times over, but such an exponential advantage was not expected. this really justifies those applications like gpu based physics, for all those physx haters out there.

makes me wish amd would just bite the bullet and use the cuda/opencl apis to dev their own compatible gaming physics platforms, even porting physx directly would give them so much leverage over nv the way things are going right now. most gamers can't really see the advantage in buying amd when they get left out of key features, what good is a blazing fast card when you don't get the eyecandy? nvidia is hanging on a thread here, such wasted opportunity for competition.
 
I would recommend doing this on a system that won't be used at all. I killed two cards, on one card I was just browsing the internet when it failed. My brother also killed his 5750, but that was running constantly at over 100 degrees Celsius.
 
I find it hilarious that I sold each of my 5870's for more than a 6970's retail value and yet the 6970's perform better. Sense? Bitmining makes none.
 
the best bang for buck for bitcoin is to buy 5830 for $99, downclock the ram to 300 mhz up the gpu to 1000-1100 mhz and then you get 330mh/s. stick 3-4 of them in a box and you have serious power. Oh, and run them at work so you don't have to worry about the electricity :p

bad time to get in though, bitcoin mining is not really worth it for anyone joining up now unless you have piles of hardware just laying around.
 
manwdaplan said:
I would like to know too. This seems like it would be a fun reason to build out a box. If I can get my money back in a few months, I think it would be worth it. Also would it be wise to use a less powerful CPU since your are not really going to be using it much.
Click to expand...

You don't really need to spend that much to get a basic mining rig. The logic behind it is to maximize expenses on the hardware that matters and spend as little on the stuff that you don't need. It's all about efficiency.

This may sound like heresy for hardware enthusiasts but a common mining rig consist of the following:

AMD Sempron single core CPU (cheapest you can find)
Any AM3 mobo with at least 4-5 PCI-e slots (cheapest you can find)
2GB RAM (yup cheap too)
Small HDDs, big enough for OS and drivers. SSDs are of no use here since they do not influence mining speed at all and are too expensive.
4-5 AMD video cards (5970s/6990s for all out performance or 5830s/5870s for max efficiency) all connected via PCI-e riser ribbon cables.
PSU powerful enough to handle the load 24/7 (do not skimp on this)

Digital Viper-X- said:
interesting, however none of listed machines hit 2000MHash/s. Is there further tweaking to increase GPU performance (apart from overclocking)?
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Lots. Head over the to the thread at the DC forums. I got my 6970 to >460Mhash/s (can go much higher) with various kernel tweaks and overclocked to 950Mhz core. Some people have hit 500Mhash/s with overclocked 5870s.
 
Kyle...

Since you're bringing up an article like this... are you going to measure bitcoin hashing performance with the HD7K and GTX600 and beyond? Seems as you can add a little burb on the power, heat, and sound noise page and it wouldn't take that long to do.

In all, thanks for the write up.
 
MetalDwarf said:
say my power is 6cents per KWh and i spent $1000 building a mining rig. how long before i break even or turn a "'profit"
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Lucky you. I just checked, and I'm paying 12.6¢ per kWh.

MetalDwarf said:
So you would pay off that $1000 rig in little over 2 months. When the difficulty increases, it'll get harder and harder to generate coins.
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That's the problem. The mining rate is a moving target, making it slowly less cost effective.

Aseras said:
run them at work so you don't have to worry about the electricity :p
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Aren't there people who have gotten in trouble for stuff like that? Make sure you have permission first.
 
entropy13 said:
Not really. It's hotter than "typical gaming" yes, but not as much as Furmark. Bitcoin mining is somewhere in between.
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Actually mining pushes your GPU to 100% load and most people do it 24/7 with overclocked video cards so it is at least just as bad as furmark.
 
It seems the valuation of Bitcoin varies wildly. To quote The Curious Capitalist from Time Magazine, June 29, 2011:

"In mid-June, Bitcoin, a virtual currency many lauded as a model for the future of money, plunged in value after a hacker nearly stole $9 million of the digital dollars. The exchange rate had reached $30 per Bitcoin, up from $5 as recently as April. After the hack, the value dove to penny, but has rebounded to $16.
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Full article here:

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/06/29/bitcoins-does-an-internet-currency-mean-the-doom-of-the-dollar/
 
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Thanks to Bitcoin I sold the 5870 I bought in Nov Black Friday for profit. I knew I should of bought 2 at the time. Chitown rates for electricity suck, with the difficulty increases totally crushed my single 5870 setup for bitcoining.
 
hajalie24 said:
I would recommend doing this on a system that won't be used at all. I killed two cards, on one card I was just browsing the internet when it failed. My brother also killed his 5750, but that was running constantly at over 100 degrees Celsius.
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If you put a UVD load on the GPU while it's mining it automatically locks up. Always makes me nervous. :(
 
someone want to buy my 5850?? ^^ i wouldn't mind getting a 6870 instead or a 6950 *whistles.
 
ok let me ask this, I have a 5770 1GB just sitting around, a old dual core low power AMD CPU, could i build out a little system, about how much would it generate me (ruff guesses are fine with me) I mean if it can get me 30 to 40 a month (pay for my internet) it wold be worth it to me.
 
$60 a month in a pool... minus $15 electric to run the whole thing @ 300 watts from the wall.
 
This is interesting. Really makes me want to go out and buy a couple 6870's and put them in the spare computers I have laying around lol.
 
Bitcoin doesn't need more miners, it needs more vendors to accept them as currency so adoption increases. Right now a lot of people are mining and hoarding which doesn't help prices or the long term viability of bitcoin.
 
mas said:
shocking difference between the fastest cpu, and the cheapest gpu. I knew there would be a huge gap many times over, but such an exponential advantage was not expected. this really justifies those applications like gpu based physics, for all those physx haters out there.
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QFMFT

I always laugh at people who think the CPU can handle decent physics. It fakes decent physics for sure, and the reason it seems like the GPU doesn't offer any better physics is because of two reasons

1. No game to date has been built from the ground up with hardware physics in mind, they've all been console ports with physx added after the fact.
2. GPUs are brute-forcing the physics they are simulating. CPUs are mostly calculating predefined actions with very minimal actual Newtonian physics calculations going on. In 2 to 3 years, the gap between the two will become painfully obvious. That is if nvidia can pay them enough money to put it in decently, and I suspect once the GPUs reach that point, that will be the last time they'll have to pay anyone to do it.
 
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