Bitcoin Mining GPU Performance Comparison @ [H]

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.

unlike physix, this actually has a purpose and just goes to show you that ATi has the superior compute platform for these type of applications.
 
unlike physix, this actually has a purpose and just goes to show you that ATi has the superior compute platform for these type of applications.

One application. Look at all the others where CUDA is king.

Isn't this more shader oriented?(Which is why everyone wants HD 5870s since they have the most).

Oh and what is the purpose of this? Is this helping anyone in the world? Not really, you give the electric companies more money and you get more money to spend somewhere else. So I guess you are kinda helping the economy, but not really benefiting anyone but yourself.
 
Lucky you. I just checked, and I'm paying 12.6¢ per kWh.



That's the problem. The mining rate is a moving target, making it slowly less cost effective.



Aren't there people who have gotten in trouble for stuff like that? Make sure you have permission first.

That happened to a fool that works for the AnandTech website many years ago. He worked in IT and installed folding stuff onto university computers and was promptly busted when they investigated why their bandwidth usage was way up. Stupid fool lost his job, rightfully so. He then crated a thread about it and I told him to suck it up and learn from his mistake.......lawl promptly banned ahahha

besides very few work computers have the GPU compute capacity.....
 
One application. Look at all the others where CUDA is king.

Isn't this more shader oriented?(Which is why everyone wants HD 5870s since they have the most).

Oh and what is the purpose of this? Is this helping anyone in the world? Not really, you give the electric companies more money and you get more money to spend somewhere else. So I guess you are kinda helping the economy, but not really benefiting anyone but yourself.

where exactly is cuda king/ All games that impliment it suffer a frame rate hit.......
 
One application. Look at all the others where CUDA is king.

Isn't this more shader oriented?(Which is why everyone wants HD 5870s since they have the most).

Oh and what is the purpose of this? Is this helping anyone in the world? Not really, you give the electric companies more money and you get more money to spend somewhere else. So I guess you are kinda helping the economy, but not really benefiting anyone but yourself.

Aside from the gimped folding app, ATI GPU apps are either REALLY good (Bitcoin, Dnet, MW) because of the chip design, or average (folding). Cuda is easier to use, but generally average across the board.

Not benefiting anyone but yourself is capitalism exposed, what is wrong with that?
 
Oh and what is the purpose of this? Is this helping anyone in the world? Not really, you give the electric companies more money and you get more money to spend somewhere else. So I guess you are kinda helping the economy, but not really benefiting anyone but yourself.

What is the purpose of your job, or do you even have one? Do you work for other people, or work for your paycheck so you can pay your bills? Guessing by your post, Id say you are still living off your parents "selfishness."

Let people who want to burn electricity folding for "mankind" do so without ridicule, and let the people who want to burn electricity to make a little bit of money do so with the same consideration.

Edit:
Wait, in fact, feel free to make Bitcoin mining look as stupid as possible, so there's less people doing it, which means more for me. Thanks.
 
Ok, how can I pull a Bernie Madoff with Bitcoin?

Too late...check out the code for compute4cash. That guy is a genius...why didn't I think of it?

Could have had 150 cards mining for ME...
 
So if the ATI card is this badass at bitcoin and from what I heard could do physx in games if ATI coded for it. Why doesn't ATI allow it? It's FREE.
 
"this really justifies those applications like gpu based physics, for all those physx haters out there."

The only reason why phsyX works better on an (nVidia) gpu as opposed to a cpu is because nVdia deliberately hobbled the coding so that it would be that way. The idea that there is some inherent superiority in this field was debunked as marketing myth(lies?) sometime ago.

http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/
 
"this really justifies those applications like gpu based physics, for all those physx haters out there."

The only reason why phsyX works better on an (nVidia) gpu as opposed to a cpu is because nVdia deliberately hobbled the coding so that it would be that way. The idea that there is some inherent superiority in this field was debunked as marketing myth(lies?) sometime ago.

http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/

While I don't disagree with what you're saying Charlie Demerjian isn't exactly sane when it comes to nVidia and Microsoft.
 
I'll leave this discussion saying this, you guys go ahead and do bitcoin mining and have fun with the extra money you get. I just find it odd how a currency like this works, out of the blue you try to verify transactions and somehow its worth more than other currency($$$). AMD GPUs > Nvidia GPUs in Bitcoin mining.
 
I'll leave this discussion saying this, you guys go ahead and do bitcoin mining and have fun with the extra money you get. I just find it odd how a currency like this works, out of the blue you try to verify transactions and somehow its worth more than other currency($$$). AMD GPUs > Nvidia GPUs in Bitcoin mining.

It works as long as people want Bitcoins. It's no different than people wanting official currencies like US Dollars or Euros, just the reasons. The main reason that Bitcoins are desirable is that they are relatively hard to trace, and ultimately that my be their biggest problem and lead to their downfall. The other has to do with the current economic environment and the zeitgeist of distrust in government and traditional financial institutions.
 
I don't see this as sustainable for any more than 6 more months with the difficulty increases unless the value of bitcoins skyrocket.

If it stays at the current $10-$15 range, GPU mining will be dead and those who can afford powerful custom FPGA (low power consumption) and custom ASIC rigs will monopolize it.

For now, mining is just there to get me some free hardware by paying for itself over the next two months.
 
You guys complaining about electrics rates have no idea how bad it is in Northern California. Rates are simply ridiculous. For the highest tier which you will probably hit running 1 computer with a few cards in it 24/7 is 30 cents a kWh and 50 cents per kWh during "peak hours" which are 12-6pm. These are the reduced rates that went into effect last month from 37 cents and 57 cents...

Wow. That's pretty impressive. I'm surprised every single house doesn't have solar panels at those rates. The payback period would only be about 2 years.

This is probably another reason why Businesses are leaving California in droves.
 
I don't see this as sustainable for any more than 6 more months with the difficulty increases unless the value of bitcoins skyrocket.

If it stays at the current $10-$15 range, GPU mining will be dead and those who can afford powerful custom FPGA (low power consumption) and custom ASIC rigs will monopolize it.

For now, mining is just there to get me some free hardware by paying for itself over the next two months.

There is a lot of talk about custom FPGA & ASIC. If anybody has pulled this off, they will keep it low key to gain maximum profit.

Once difficulty reaches the maximum difficulty an AMD GPU can sustain it will just oscillate there until something better comes along. Similar to when bitcoins were CPU only. Until then only the parts of the world with cheap electricity will be worthwhile to mine in. I can keep going for a while yet at $0.05 to $0.07 kw/h. Similar to manufacturing stuff in China cause it's cheap. Market prices will adjust to this.
 
It works as long as people want Bitcoins. It's no different than people wanting official currencies like US Dollars or Euros, just the reasons. The main reason that Bitcoins are desirable is that they are relatively hard to trace, and ultimately that my be their biggest problem and lead to their downfall. The other has to do with the current economic environment and the zeitgeist of distrust in government and traditional financial institutions.

The main reason why bitcoin is desirable is that it has recently been going up in value rapidly. The speculators, who make up almost all of the buyers, don't care about anything else regarding bitcoins besides that.
 
The main reason why bitcoin is desirable is that it has recently been going up in value rapidly. The speculators, who make up almost all of the buyers, don't care about anything else regarding bitcoins besides that.

Speculation will drive the price of anything for a time I believe are you are correct. I was thinking more of Bitcoin's value long term.
 
The only reason why phsyX works better on an (nVidia) gpu as opposed to a cpu is because nVdia deliberately hobbled the coding so that it would be that way. The idea that there is some inherent superiority in this field was debunked as marketing myth(lies?) sometime ago.

http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/

"the coding" eh...
why not read somthing a bit less biased and more well informed:

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/physx-an-easy-target/

booo some hardware vendor is using proprietary technology, let's copy paste this "conspiracy" all up and down teh internets for great justice! nevermind that the original author is speaking purely from speculation, with zero real world testing. why bother to recompile your theoretical "optimisations", when you can just post some really complicated looking charts of random instruction calls. numbers mean proof!

then it's mission accomplished for amd, why compete when you can just sit on your ass and do nothing, while people badmouth the competition for you. let's just make some super fast cards that devs will have no idea how to use, while nvidia pampers them with license free code, to outsell you with WORSE HARDWARE. oh wait I believe the correct term here is "bribe", nvidia pays devs to use free features :rolleyes: .
 
Well. using 1 x MSI 6990 1 x MSI 6970 and 3 x XFX 5870s I am pushing 6,840 WU/hr. Been at it for about 33+ hours. So far I've made about $7.40 ... BUT ... had one of the boxes come down on me a few times that I did not catch right away.

I'm going to run these for 30 days then see where I'm at. I think I should make about $190 dollars. I am not 100% sure on my math. I am using the compute4cash client across 2 boxes. I will say as soon as I try and launch a video I get a hardlock and have to manually reboot.
 
Hmm. This looks interesting. Power rates aren't too terrible either. I think I'd go for efficiency over raw power. I could stick some of these out in my detached garage, power used out there isn't metered in my apartment.

Energy Charge ($/kWh):
Tier 1 - up to 500 kWh/month $0.1083
Tier 2 - 501 to 1,000 kWh/month $0.1541
Tier 3 - greater than 1,000 kWh/month $0.1756

Hydroelectric Adjustment ($/kWh) (1) $0.00000
Environmental Compliance Charge ($/kWh)(2) $0.00500
State Energy Surcharge ($/kWh) $0.00029
 
Speculation will drive the price of anything for a time I believe are you are correct. I was thinking more of Bitcoin's value long term.

Bitcoin is like a stock but one that is highly volatile and shows all the sign of a very likely bubble burst given the slightest shock to the system. When MtGox was hacked, the value of bitcoins fell to being only worth a few cents!

With this kind of currency, the wisest choice is to sell some every month at a decent price and not hoard expecting the value to be $1000/bitcoin in 10 years.
 
MtGox is one exchange and the incident was just a speed bump. Is your cash bad when Springfield Savings Bank goes belly up? Bitcoin is here to stay - the tech is just that good - get used to it.

With my cores OC'd to 815mhz and mem @ 300, my single HD5970 hashes over 700Mh/s :D
 
I'm going to run these for 30 days then see where I'm at. I think I should make about $190 dollars. I am not 100% sure on my math. I am using the compute4cash client across 2 boxes. I will say as soon as I try and launch a video I get a hardlock and have to manually reboot.

Disable Hardware Acceleration for Adobe Flash.
 
MtGox is one exchange and the incident was just a speed bump. Is your cash bad when Springfield Savings Bank goes belly up? Bitcoin is here to stay - the tech is just that good - get used to it.

With my cores OC'd to 815mhz and mem @ 300, my single HD5970 hashes over 700Mh/s :D

BitCoins is quite possibly the most obvious example of a bubble. I have no idea why you can't see it.

Mine all you want and take advantage of the system right now while you still can. No one is arguing that. But if you decide to invest heavily or transfer over all your savings (as some people have already done) to BitCoins, then you'll have no sympathy from the rest of the world.
 
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If some of you are making cash off this right now, great, fine. Good for you!

I'm going to stay away from this little pyramid scheme.
 
I'm going to give this a shot since I generate more electricity from my solar panels than I use. I have a file server that I just need to add video cards to.

I was wondering if my PSU will be enough. I have an XFX 650 Watt (Seasonic)

My setup:

Sempron 140
4gb DDR3
6x2TB 5400 Green HDs (Hitachi)

Will be adding 2 6970s crossfire (890GX chipset).

Do you think my PSU can handle this kind of upgrade? I know it's being under utilized right now and my other components are low power more or less.
 
Crossfire doesn't work for bitcoining so you have to disable it but you do run a separate client or window for each GPU. Just need a monitor or a dummy vga plugged into the second card and the desktop extended.

I dunno about your PSU, though. The power draw isn't variable like gaming, bitcoining takes your GPU to 100% solid for hours straight, and a 6970 has been measured to draw like 290 watts at full tilt. A couple of them and you won't really have much headroom for anything else, it's a 600 watt system. Though I guess you might be able to squeak it if you scale back to one hard drive and a single stick of ram it's really not so good to run your PSU so close to the redline all the time.
 
Crossfire doesn't work for bitcoining so you have to disable it but you do run a separate client or window for each GPU. Just need a monitor or a dummy vga plugged into the second card and the desktop extended.

I dunno about your PSU, though. The power draw isn't variable like gaming, bitcoining takes your GPU to 100% solid for hours straight, and a 6970 has been measured to draw like 290 watts at full tilt. A couple of them and you won't really have much headroom for anything else, it's a 600 watt system. Though I guess you might be able to squeak it if you scale back to one hard drive and a single stick of ram it's really not so good to run your PSU so close to the redline all the time.

Thanks for the reply... Maybe a 6970 and a 6870 would be a good idea? I'd like to keep all the hard drives in there.
 
Math time!

Yeah know, I just moved into a new office where electricity is included in our rent (no limits in the contract, hey hey hey!) and they expect some power usage from servers.

*ponders the thought*

Besides the initial card investment (to put them in the workstations), it's pretty much down hill from there.

I calculated this out:

CARD PRICE OUTPUT PRICE/OUTPUT ($/mHash)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
6990 $650 779 $0.83 / 1mH
6970 $300 396 0.76
6950 $200 329 0.61
6870 $160 280 0.57
5870 $280 381 0.73

(Wish they would have done that in the article) - Looks like 6870 might be the best bang for your buck, but if you have limited space then the 6950 is the next step. Also should consider the overclocking ability of the cards, a 6970 might be towards it peak where a 6950 has more headroom to get more for your money.

Here's a good profit calculator: http://bitcoinx.com/profit/

It's an interesting topic, obviously has a risk of going belly-up. But if you have no overhead (solar panels, etc) and access to the systems your initial investment is small. You should break even with the cards (if you buy the right ones) at 60-75 days and then see pure profit. Not to mention that the cards will retain a fair amount of value for resale - for my calculations I estimated that the cards would be 33% of their initial value at 1 year or 66% depreciated, so $300 would be worth $100 resale.
 
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So when does Bitcoin2 start? Or another rival system?

They are already out there, namecoins and some other thing.

If there is another thing besides Bitcoins and namecoins, I haven't heard of it.

Namecoin is not a 2nd bitcoin, it's some other odd thing which uses the bitcoin software. It's an attempt to set up an alternative DNS, which uses the bitcoin software and mining to set up domain registration. Namecoin miners receive namecoins, the same way that bitcoin miners receive bitcoins. To buy domains within this alternative DNS system, you must spend namecoins.

So people who want a .bit domain (which is the one they're using) must buy namecoins so they can spend them to buy the domain, which would theoretically give namecoins some value.

The problem with this is that there is absolutely no reason for the general public to switch away from the current domain name system. Nobody can just point their browser at blahblah.bit, you've got to go to a special DNS server which accepts .bit. And if a bunch of people actually did start using .bit, ICANN would simply take the whole thing over and start handling domain registration the standard way, and all the namecoins would become worthless.

Also, amusingly, starting next year, anyone with $185,000 can buy .bit and start selling off .bit domain names for whatever amount they want to charge. So if Namecoin takes off, it is a guarantee that the namecoin system itself, and all of the coins, will become worthless.
 
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no point predicting future profit for bitcoin as difficulty is changing every 11-12 days, making earnings predictions on false premise leads to tears :) Laying any large amount on hardware to profit from bitcoin now is potentially a big loser. We are not seeing a large upswing in price to compensate for greatly increased difficulty the last 3 months or so.
 
So how much money can you make off bitcoin mining before earnings level off to point where it can't keep up with energy bills?
 
Easy to do predictions...

Current difficulty * 1.07 for a low difficulty increase
Current difficulty * 1.20 for a medium difficulty increase
Current difficulty * 1.35 for a large difficulty increase

Or the easier way is to predict out where your cards stop making you money, (I.E. the card production = electricity to power card.)

My 4850 stops around 5 Million Difficulty, 5830's are 11.5 mil, my 6950 is 14 mil.

If you're talking about judging market price... yeah that's harder to do... but above numbers are low balling $12 per bitcoin.
 
So how much money can you make off bitcoin mining before earnings level off to point where it can't keep up with energy bills?

Depends on your electricity costs, worldwide there are some nice spots.
 
"this really justifies those applications like gpu based physics, for all those physx haters out there."

The only reason why phsyX works better on an (nVidia) gpu as opposed to a cpu is because nVdia deliberately hobbled the coding so that it would be that way. The idea that there is some inherent superiority in this field was debunked as marketing myth(lies?) sometime ago.

http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/

The guy who made an original articel about "hobbling" in reality just made a coding Gedankenexperiment and concluded that if Nvidia switched to SSE code, PhysX execution on CPU would be 2x faster. Just like that - out of the blue.
No benchies, no tests 2-4x times faster.

Then Demirjan went into another madman analysis, generous for NVidia he says:) and concluded that todays CPU are in all honesty 4-8x faster then GPUs - If only PhysX was properly optimized for CPUs :mad:

Proof is there, now AMD owners and the rest of us with SSE CPUs just need to wait for Nvidia to optimize :D
 
So is the 5830 the best overall work horse for mining considering the cost of running it?

I have 6970's running it right now 24/7 but have considered putting together another system , but I don't wanna spend a fortune on cards and power ..

Also is solo mining a more profitable setup? Or is that only worth while if you have a decent sized farm with a high has rate?
 
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