Bitcoin Forum

which is the most value for money video card to buy now to mine?

thanks

7950s, hands down.

QFT

At what price and model?

7770s' cost $80 with the sale of the crap game = 170ish M/hash  2.125 M/Hash per $1
7950s' cost $270 with the sale of game = 580ish M/hash  2.148 M/hash per $1

BUT PSUs' have dramatic price jumps over 1000 watts. So I believe mixing the 2 cards is best. Also mixing them allows for more rebates to be valid. Also in theory selling them is easier since its targets multiple markets

7770s are the most bang/$ but they're horrible for density.  7970s are probably the best for density (7990s suck for now it seems)

If you wanna buy a 7770 and a 7950, that's fine. 7950s are not that far off for the the best bang-for-buck, and they're also not far off from the density of those 7970s, so there's a reason you see all kinds of people building 4x 7950 rigs, for both BTC and LTC.

Simran loves his 7770s  :P

5770s mine 90% as fast as 7770s and you can find them used for < $50...

Yes but for $10 more after selling the game code a 7770 with a warranty and lower energy usage is a better deal.

The 7xxx series cards are good because of their lower power consumption. I use 7950s and 7970s. Probably the biggest disadvantage to the 7970 is the higher cost for the PSU if you're putting together a high density (4+ GPU) mining rig. Also, if you're on residential power, you have to be creative in not overloading your household circuits. Been there, done that. :)

It's always been been the Ati 5830. (2.9MH/$)

260Mh/s for about £60/$90 (some people even claim to run them at 300Mh/s)

That's 1Gh/s for <£240/ $360  ;)

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Graphics-Video-Cards-/27386/i.html?_sop=15&_from=R40&LH_Complete=1&_nkw=5830&_mPrRngCbx=1&_udhi=99

I would not recommend any 5xxx cards. It's not 2011 anymore. They're old, which means their expected lifetime is coming to a close. They're also draw a lot more power, which can make a significant difference.

A 7850 pulls more MH/s than a 5830, and uses about 2/3 the power. Plus, 7xxx cards aren't 2-3 years old, and many of them have warranties!

The 7850 are nice cards, I use them too, but I can have 2x 5830's for the same money which is an extra 220MH/s (300MH/s vs. 520MH/s). *

*no volt overclocks.

5830 is perhaps the most power-inefficient 5xxx series. The 5850 and 5870 are quite efficient with proper voltage settings (as are 57xx cards).

Still, warranties and free games make 7xxx more desirable.

The 7790's are better deals.  I love my dual ASUS HD7790 cards.  They are less than $130 each after selling the game codes.  I overclocked them to 1190Mhz (stock 1075) at stock voltage and they run cool (62°C) with an ambient temp of 78°F (I am in So Cal).  They mine bitcoin at 290Mh/sec.  That's almost as fast as my old 6870 cards at half the power usage and runs much cooler.

6950.  You can get a visiontek 6950 here for 169.99 when they are in stock: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7581172&Sku=V261-6954&csid=ITD&recordsPerPage=10&body=REVIEWS#CustomerReviewsBlock

I have mine running at 450 kh/s each.  Thats 2.647khps/$

I'm amazed the games are worth anything.

U get a free video card with the game so they are worth it  :D

i have had good experience with the 7870 tahiti core cards, 500+ mh/s, low wat usage too.

keep in mind tahiti, not normal 7870.

Is Sapphire PowerColor the only company that sells the Tahiti version?

I was getting a solid 342 Mh/s out of 2 of my 5830's... and 346 Mh/s out of another one. (They were all the exact same model sapphire card, no idea why one would go higher.)

Yup, a 5830 is a 5850 with less transistors or something, pulls more power than a 5850 I believe. There are threads all over the place about this.

A 5870 has 10 clusters of 160 Stream Processor Units (SPUs).

A 5850 has 9/10 of these clusters enabled, and at a slightly lower clock speed, so you should get 85-90% of the performance of a 5870.

A 5830 has 7/10 of them enabled, which is even worse? However, they increased the stock voltage of those remaining 7 clusters, and raised the clock speed. It ends up being about 70-75% of the performance of a 5870, even at higher clocks than a 5850.

Dunno about anything about the above.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/xfx-radeon-hd5830_4.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/xfx-radeon-hd5830/xfx5830_power.png

you can run them at 330-350mhash if you want to overclock them a whole bunch and (probably) lose money, unless your electricity is free or really cheap.   mine usually run at 290-305 @ 1.063v

but i think the best value for money right now are the 7850 and 7870s which you'll see on special pretty frequently now.  

selling the game coupons are easy for $40-$50.  if  you dont mind wasting... er, spending time doing the mail-in rebates that's another $20 or $25 on most of these deals.  so, something like a 7870 for around $150.   you could sell a used 5870 for more than that, at least as of 3 weeks ago (havent checked since then).  used 5830 was still around $100.

i considered the 7770's but it would have taken too many mb slots....  if you throw out the whole limited space factor, the 7770's are best

I have 2 Asus HD 7850 running, they both get to 390-400 kh/s at 400w total system power draw (I have to say that is with a Phenom ii x4 965BE @4.2 ghz and a Antec 900 case with a shitton of fans. So with mining cpu's and stuff it will be 350w.)

The Asus ones are a bit more expensive but hell do they cool, at 50% fan they never go above 60 degrees with the high OC I have.
They are definantly a good card.

I have 7950 tahitis from HIS

all 7900+ are tahiti,   the 7870 xt / myst  (saphire, msi and powercolor sell them I believe)  they have 1536 stream processors.  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tahiti-le-7870-7930-benchmark,3401.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tahiti-le-7870-7930-benchmark,3401.html)I believe its even possible to unlock all 2048 stream processors as  25% of the chip is disabled.


Also as far as big and upcoming, I hear the 7790 with the new Bonaire (AMD's GCN 1.1 architecture, as opposed to the Pitcairn and 1.0 of the 7750 and 7770) is pretty efficient.

Secondly I heard the 2nd generation 7990 Malta+ is actually good for power usage.  ~150w per 2048 stream - GPU.   Don't get 1st generation 7990.

Lastly, getting back to the Tahiti LE found in very limited 7870 XT  GPU, I believe maybe a bios flash would maybe unlock all 2048 stream or maybe there is a pencil trick, who knows?  :D

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au-5jsYGHc29dG94ekRvbEl1WEUxcnFYMU14eDRRV3c#gid=2 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au-5jsYGHc29dG94ekRvbEl1WEUxcnFYMU14eDRRV3c#gid=2)

I made this for Litecoin but I'm sure it's still fairly relevant.  It only covers the 7770-7970's 3-7 card setups.

The 7850 becomes slightly more power efficient in 5+ setups compared to the 7950. The 7950 gives you the best hashing power per dollar across the board and the best power efficiency up to 4 card setups, beyond that it lags behind the 7850 by less that .1 KHash/s per watt which is practically nothing when you factor in that 7950's get you more than 50% more hashing power in the same physical size.  As someone else mentioned though, the 7950's will require a larger power supply which for some reason get dis-proportionally more expensive above ~1000 watts. Anyway, just my 2 cents.

the power efficiency of cards like a 7950 is hard to determine. first of all I've seen 7950's that run at a stock reporting voltage of 1.25, 1.125,  and 1.17. Also it seems (at least with reference cards) a higher asic quality will see a lower actual voltage at the same software reporting voltage with the same model. Really its a luck of the draw. So in the end is a 7000 series miner going to be more efficient than a 5000 series miner,  probably? but an undervolted 5000 series will probably still beat mhash/$ and mhash/watt, and since the 7000 do not undervolt in a stand alone linux rig the question gets hard to answer.

Forgot to link to the original post I made about the spreadsheet which includes information about it.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2870.msg18910.html#msg18910 (https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2870.msg18910.html#msg18910)

Quick notes - Power efficiency was calculated from Max power based on Techpowerup.com's reviews, card hashing and frequencies were taken from the Litecoin Github user database.

As far as determining power efficiency, without people taking the time to test different makes of each model it can be hard to find the most power efficient values but generally speaking in order to get more hashing power you have to overclock the core or memory or both and at some point you have to increase the voltage.  The values from Github don't indicate those settings or power consumption but I've read that for 7950's the power draw can be as much as 220 when overclocked. 

You can change the values of the cards to see what the numbers look like, that's part of why I wasted so much time making that spreadsheet!  You can input the power draw for the card you are specifically configuring or in the first table with all of the cards, you can change the max power draw values there which will then be reflected in the tables below for the 3-7 card configs. 

Going to try to throw in 2x 7870XT for a total of 6 cards ~ 3GH/s.  I swear I'm stopping soon :D

Other cards
2x7950
2x7870 (normal)

Yeah, but 5830s are complete losers when it comes to power efficiency.

My 7970 ghz ed pushes 700-710 MH/s and came with 3 games for a total of 439.99 after MIR. Not sure what I could have sold the games for, but I wanted to play them anyways, so I'm looking at a cost of what, $1.61 per megahash (or is that 1.61 Mhash per $, I'm bad with math)

What brand of 7950 is considered the best for mining? I heard that Gigabytes are voltage locked, which sucks for downvolters.