Slashdot Mirror


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."

16 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Thank god by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Did you know that it's been nearly a week since the last Bitcoin story on Slashdot? I was worried that the standards were changing and blatant slashvertisements for bitcoin were no longer getting through! Never been happier to be proved wrong.

    1. Re:Thank god by geekd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bitcoin is the PERFECT Slashdot topic:

      Open Source
      Peer to peer
      Cryptography
      Computer Hardware
      Libertarian

      THAT'S why it shows up so much. What's not to like?

    2. Re:Thank god by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Several reasons:
      - It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment.
      - The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
      - You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players).
      - Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.

      I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come, which is exactly why I see this for what it is. Bitcon.

      If it makes you happy to play this game, by all means go ahead, but do yourself a favour and don't invest more than you can comfortably afford to lose.

    3. Re:Thank god by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Great topic, I concur! I've got one dedicated mining rig with two 6870's. I'm getting more than 300Mhash a card, but that's tweaks I can't talk about. :)

      Listen pal, I'm talking to you as a friend here.

      You need to get out and mine for some pussy instead. I realize the odds are just as bad but you never know when you run into some gal just on the edge of alcohol poisoning and you might end up with a little something... At most it'll cost you $100 (plus the antibiotics a few days later) which is a lot less than a pair of 5870s and SSD drives and all that bitmining kit.

      And you never know. It's how I met my wife 21 years ago.

      (Hey, I'm just kidding, hon. Having a little fun with the slashdot fellas. I realize I was the one on the verge of alcohol poisoning and you were the one trying to empty my wallet while I was passed out.)

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re:Thank god by mandark1967 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Great topic, I concur! I've got one dedicated mining rig with two 6870's. I'm getting more than 300Mhash a card, but that's tweaks I can't talk about. :)

      Listen pal, I'm talking to you as a friend here.

      You need to get out and mine for some pussy instead. I realize the odds are just as bad but you never know when you run into some gal just on the edge of alcohol poisoning and you might end up with a little something... At most it'll cost you $100 (plus the antibiotics a few days later) which is a lot less than a pair of 5870s and SSD drives and all that bitmining kit.

      And you never know. It's how I met my wife 21 years ago.

      (Hey, I'm just kidding, hon. Having a little fun with the slashdot fellas. I realize I was the one on the verge of alcohol poisoning and you were the one trying to empty my wallet while I was passed out.)

      Hell, that's how I met your wife last night.

      --
      Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
  2. folding@home etc by jaymz2k4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With all that computation power being used I can't help but think about projects like Folding@Home and think it's a bit wasted on the sort of margins you'd be getting back - even at the optimistic high end (which don't factor in power costs).

    --
    jaymz
    1. Re:folding@home etc by Vigile · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

  3. Misleading Article by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given that the difficulty increases exponentially you're not going to be making their calculated B$/day for the whole year, so while the quickest to pay of is 70 days if the difficulty increases at the usual rate, you'd probably want to add on another month or two.

    For the ones taking nearly half a year to pay off at the current rate, you'll probably spend closer to a year before you'll even break even.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  4. Why should we care? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Other than being a decent applied cryptography experiment, BitCoin has no real use in the real world. It isn't anonymous, it isn't backed by anyone that matters. The currency is too unstable to trust for anything. Its architecture gives a lot more power to people who come on early, and whom likely are going to cash out if people catch on.

    I'd rather hear about an Amiga emulator, checkered ball spinning while formatting an 880K floppy disk running on the nVidia hardware than yet another BitCoin article, because BitCoin reminds me a lot of the old MAKE.MONEY.FAST posts of yore.

  5. Slashgold? by MikeTheGreat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.

    I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".

    So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!

    As in:
    Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
    You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"

  6. Nobody cares about bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nobody cares about bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about bitcoin. Please stop posting stories about bitcoin. I don't know how many other ways there are to say it, but we don't give a fsck about bitcoin.

    1. Re:Nobody cares about bitcoin by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They have to keep the hype going, it's the only way to feed the bubble.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  7. I'm going to issue my own Fiat currrency by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  8. That's precisely what it is by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All this hype is not coincidence, and it is not because bitcoins became useful suddenly. It is people hyping it to try and get others in to the market. They want to cash out, but can't in any large amount without tanking the value. Need to get new suckers lined up.

  9. Re:I get it by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oil can be burned for energy. Gold is always in demand as a means of exchange, is a de facto symbol of wealth and is used in jewelry and has great use in electronics. Housing has a purpose - shelter. Tell me again what the point of bitcoin is, apart from greed? Even something as silly as a US dollar has more point to it than bitcoin - because people do not acquire US dollars with the intention of dumping their US dollars as soon as some exchange rate reaches a pre-determined level. They see US dollars as a store of value and a means of exchange, not a means of wealth acquisition.

    People who are mining bitcoins have the SOLE INTENTION of dumping their bitcoins at some time in the future. They far outnumber people who use bitcoin for everyday trade. Therefore the collapse of the bubble is built in to the inflation of the bubble. The minute sellers > buyers, the price will go down. And the minute the price goes down, everyone who was counting on an ever inflating price is going to panic and try to cash out right away. In fact this has already happened.

    --
    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  10. Correction. by denzacar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

    A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.

    No real investment, products or services? Check.
    Promising participants payment? Check.
    Priority in enrolling other people into the scheme? Check.
    Non-sustainable business model?
    Hmmm... Converting electricity into ones and zeroes of highly volatile value and no practical use beyond said value, which can't be readily converted to goods, services or even monetary units...? Oh, SO check.

    There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.

    Seriously?
    You'll be the one to pull the "kids don't know what words mean" AND "metaphorically" card(s)?
    When arguing about lite-FUCKING-ral meaning of a meta-FUCKING-phor for a FUCKING SCAM?

    For fucks sake... Kids these days...

    --
    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens