Bitcoin Forum

RusselJohnson said this in another thread of mine:
My 5850 mines at 360MH/s, paid $135
My 5870 mines at 420MH/s, paid $100
My 6970 mines at 370MH/s, paid $300

Granted he got a good deal on the 5870 but still. Here's the question: Which cards yield the highest mining power but are also some of the cheaper ones to buy?

This page (http://btcnetwork.com/wiki/index.php?title=BitCoin_Mining_Hardware_CPU/GPU_Comparison) has a lot of good information but no average prices.

Prices are custom to your location and accessibility of providers/resellers/upgraders.

To help you out create a new google doc and add your models, good hashing rates (like expected results with little overclocking efforts), average price (for example how much it would cost to get them off ebay or your local community bazaar) and power usage at given hashing rates.

You can then generate 3 charts:
- Mhash/s vs Mhash/j: Decide to pick either low power costs boards or high performance ones
- Mash/s vs $$$: Decide to pick either best power per price (multiple boards scenario), or biggest price per board (single/few boards scenario)
- Mhash/j vs $$$: Decide to pick best price and lowest power consumption, or the costly and less efficient versions

While graph 3 is obviously biased, the first two depend on your requirements for "Best GPU".

he was ridiculously lucky to get that gpu at that price (just like I was lucky to get my i7 860 for $20 on craigslist because the dude thought it was broken), the gpu cost prices should be figured based on the actual prices at e-tailers...

right now it's easily the 5850...

you need to look at my link here:


http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9674.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9674.0)

The 5850 is a disappearing model. There was one cheap enough for me to buy, but it was sold, now i am left with such that are a tad bit more expensive.

I thought maybe getting the 6950, but it uses 200 watts for almost the same performance of 25 mhz clocked 5850(725 stock) with these settings

-k phatk DEVICE=0 VECTORS BFI_INT WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=9 FASTLOOP=false = 290Mhash/s

:(  the xfx 5850 I got only goes around 290MH and the OC options only go up to 775 for the clock.

The 5830's look pretty good.  I see alot of them on ebay for around $100 and they seem like they perform well from the chart's I've seen.

5770's seem ok for smaller builds.  I have one that gets 190 and you can pick them up for around $70-80

5850s, are great for 150 vs 335 mhash, if you can't find any 5830s are decent deal, although they require more power and have lower hashing

Use Radeon Bios Editor to raise your clocking limit.  You should be able to get 335 Mhash/s minimum out of that card.

6950..around 250$.find one that unlocks..clock it at 970mhz..hashrate: 415 mhash

From another thread i saw earlier :


at ~$100 that's really good bang

Not tryin' to make you dissapointed, but not every single card is 100% bios editable. Some will just crash below 350MHz memory, others are revisions that don't allow messing with voltage and corresponding core frequency

mem clock?

5830 is a good option if you can't get a 5850. My Sapphire 5830's use about 5-10 watts less than my Sapphire 5850's, so not sure why everyone mentions a 5830 uses more power than a 5850. Perhaps a review comparing different brands or something. Anyway, for $100 and 300 Gh/s on stock vcore, pretty good deal.

@ Mechanizm :

I'm about to receive 2 Saphire 5830's in the mail in the next couple of days.
Can you give your settings to achieve that 300 MH/s?

No problem..

965 / 300 @ stock voltage (on Afterburner)
Phoenix Rising 1.3 (phatk, aggression=12)

PM if you need more info.

Thanks,
What are your temperatures?

low 60's on 60% fan, ambient is ~27C

300Mhz. I now have the card running at 60C in the basement.

interesting..my xfx with 975/340 wont hit 300, its doing 288 (-v -w128 -f0)

try phoenix -phatk?

Ill give that a try thanks

is -f0 actually better than -f1? I haven't tried it yet but -f0 doesn't make any sense.

I thought the same as well, for some reason, it works well on my machine.

So, I've got the option of buying a:
6870 for about $220,
5850 for about $250,
5870 for about $360.

According to this:
https://i.imgur.com/VhgVh.gif
the 5870 is the best and by far the most cost effective. But is it worth the extra $110 per card?
820MH/s is way better than 628. What say yee?

I bought an unlocked Sapphire 6950 1GB card for $175CDN about 2 weeks ago....
I've been able to run it run to 1000/1325 hitting about 428Mhash with a I7 920 @ 2.6
but have been running it at 800/1250 for a hashrate ~340Mhash and I7 920 @ 2.6

but when the I7 is overclocked to 3.8 I can hit ~360Mhash at stock speeds...

I think that is a steal..... ;D

switch to -w256  5830's like it better.

Wow, 292! What mem clock again are you using?

that got me over the 300 mark.  went from 295 to 307

My advice, don't buy any of those. Those are awful awful prices. Unless you live in the UK and you're converting GBP to USD. If you live in the US just pop over to newegg.com and buy some 5830s, $109.99

I can attest that 5830's seem to BEG you to overclock them.  A little RBE work and I've pushed mine as high as 320 Mhash/s stable.

I agree that the 5830 are awesome.  I was going to get a couple 5850 but couldn't find any, then newegg had their sale on 5830...

Hard to beat 300+MH for $100-110.

Wow, that is a good price/ option. I only have two PCIe slots though, that's the down side. Granted, with the $400 saved, I could probably build a second miner :P

Jeeze, 2 5830's = $260, rather than 2 5850's $484

seems like the 5830 is on par with the 5850 in mh/s anyway...

It is not, 250 vs 300mhs is disappointing.

Someone said they were hitting 300mhs with the 5830

is the perforamnce of the 5970 correct? It would put it right into the sweet sport in performance and wattage and price. Thinking of getting a 6990 and the 5970 mhs is shocking me here. Seems wrong.