Calling all miners! Which to Choose? amd xfire vs nvidia sli

T

Thorin08

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
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I've decided to turn a pc station I have into a bitminer and have the option of purchasing a second video card to either sli or xfire. The video cards in question are:

Gigabyte 7970's windforce (3GB) or EVGA 680 GTX (2GB)'

so which would you guys perfer?
 
A single 7970 is about five times as fast as a GTX 680 for bitcoin mining.
 
Agreed with 7970 its the best for bitcoin minin.. Also try to find the GHZ edition...
 
I'm amazed! Even cheap ass 5xxx series are faster than a GTX 680! Hell, a 4890 is faster! WTF?! How can a GTX 680 be slower than a years old card? Hmmm...looks like Nvidia has some work to do! Sheesh...
 
Ya I was shocked as well, definately puts my 680 in new light....or nvidia cards for that matter.

I wonder how they compare to folding as well now too...
 
Here's an article that attempts to at least partially explain why Nvidia cards do so poorly on bitcoin mining. I won't pretend to understand it.

If you believe that ASICs will ever hit the market in meaningful numbers, then AMD vs Nvidia bitcoining performance will become irrelevant when that happens. The 7970 does 550 MHash or so; the ASICs are being spoken of in terms of GHash and THash. That would force the difficulty so high that AMD cards would be making pennies per month instead of dollars per month.

Nvidia is probably aware of this, and sees no reason not to continue to stay the course on reserving serious compute performance for the professional and supercomputer lines to separate them from the consumer line.
 
In simplest terms, bitcoin mining places a very specific stress on the GPU that is reliant on integer performance. AMD cards are better suited to handle this type of work because they've been adding features to improve this type of performance. When gaming, integer performance is much less important than floating point performance, and this is where Nvidia slightly eclipses AMD.
 
nvida kills this stuff. with the drivers. the chip in the titan is the same but sucks doing it compared to tesla. but when the chip is something nvida wants ti do it works like iray close to the tesla. they uae other drivers for this. plugins like furry ball work tge aane. tge pro card have open cl better they want you to buy the Tesla so they are gimped by drivers. this is also a dumb move sense the ecc ram is enough to get the people that want to use it for that is enough.
 
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I am.on.my phone but toms hardware has a guide on the 680 and titan doing pro graphics work and rendering tgat uses open cl and task like that use code close to bit coin mining compares to ati
 
evilsofa said:
If you believe that ASICs will ever hit the market in meaningful numbers, then AMD vs Nvidia bitcoining performance will become irrelevant when that happens. The 7970 does 550 MHash or so; the ASICs are being spoken of in terms of GHash and THash. That would force the difficulty so high that AMD cards would be making pennies per month instead of dollars per month.
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This why Scrypt mining (Litecoin and its variants) is nice.
 
Metrocall said:
Nvidia is terrible for mining.
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Nvidia cards are terrible for just about any Distributed Computing Project, except Folding@Home and even that is now changing with FahCore17.

Go AMD for distributed projects. It's cheaper and faster.
 
Buying hardware for bitcoin/litecoin/etc. mining is a dubious proposition at the moment really. If you need a new GPU anyway than by all means go for it (if your power is cheap, anyway), but building a system with new cards isn't likely to pay itself off any time soon, if ever.
The sweet spot price/hash wise is 7950s I believe.
 
It's actually for a competition between a circle of tech buddies and the prize is really just bragging rights. You'd be surprised how much that is worth around in my circle lol
 
dandragonrage said:
Reverse your decision. It is a bad one.
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Not really, there are other factors involved in me wanting that much gpu power anyways. and for the sake of my original OP...I don't need advice to why "NOT" do it. I want advice on best possible results WHEN I do it.

thanks for your opinion though.
 
And before you start lecturing me on asics miners, I'm very well aware of them thank you.
 
miners are weird. i was gonna try a dedicated system for this and then decided after looking at my electric bill and then averaging out what it would cost per month to run it compared to what bc is worth and how long it takes to produce them that it is cheaper just to buy them.
now if there was a way to run the miner strictly off solar or battery power, maybe an efficient generator then it would be worth it. in my case i would have to set each scenario up from scratch so i just gave it no more thought.
if people end up getting rich from bc then i might regret my decision, doubtful though.
 
>GSXR<mrbusa said:
miners are weird. i was gonna try a dedicated system for this and then decided after looking at my electric bill and then averaging out what it would cost per month to run it compared to what bc is worth and how long it takes to produce them that it is cheaper just to buy them.
now if there was a way to run the miner strictly off solar or battery power, maybe an efficient generator then it would be worth it. in my case i would have to set each scenario up from scratch so i just gave it no more thought.
if people end up getting rich from bc then i might regret my decision, doubtful though.
Click to expand...

In the long term I think mining BC with video cards is obsolete already because of new technology.

But I guess I should clarify why I even started the OP in the first place. It was not to make money, or make it lucrative to even be profitable. I apologize to those who are confused. The reason I made this thread is b/c I wanted to know which of the two options I have would be best for a performance evaluation in BC mining. A analysis based upon a circumstantial situation of events. Example Given: A private party competition for bragging (read ego) rights.

The link that Aphotic gave me showed me the necessary information I needed to answer my OP question.
 
AMD is cheaper...so go with it. I'm pro Nvidia all day long...but you don't want to kill the bank.
 
I don't need your validation to merit my thread as I already got what I needed to know. If you need me to tell you ok, for the sake of yourself then

ok.
 
As far as I know you dont enable crossfire on mining operations, dont they run a client on each seperate gpu?
 
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