Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

Vigile writes "For users that have known about the process of bitcoin mining the obvious tool for the job has been the GPU. Miners have been buying up graphics cards during sales across the web but which GPUs offer the most dollar efficient, power efficient and quickest payoff for the bitcoin currency? A series of tests over at PC Perspective goes through 16 different GPU configurations including older high-end cards through modern low-cost options and even a $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."

Comments

Re:folding@home etc

[Vigile]

We did a follow up based on finding out how much it costs to run these Bitcoin operations and looked at retail energy prices across the US! I think the results are a big hindrance for mining... http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Bitcoin-Mining-Update-Power-Usage-Costs-Across-United-States

Re:$1700+?

[WaywardGeek]

I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.

That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.