Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I have the opportunity to buy a mining rig with 4GB  RX 570 and 580 cards at a decent price. That will work just fine for ETH for now but how about 1 year out?  Is this a good investmen or should I better pay more and get the 8GB versions?

4gb cards will last for three more years on ETH, but it could switch to proof of stake before then. On other ethash coins 4gb cards will last much longer https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size (https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size)

You'll be just fine on 4GB though performance may be marginally better on 8GB with some algos. Whatever's cheapest and easily memory moddable is what you should be going for when picking cards for mining. DAG size was explained in the post above.

If you plan to mine ETH only with 4Gb RX series, related to DAG size, you have time until 2020 or in the middle of 2021. But everybody knows about ETH going to switch to POS, it can be this year or next years. Don't worry, you can mine other coins with those cards.

8 Gb cards would be better.

The only thing that will be obsolete is your brain, any video card size can mine most coins.

There are a ton of options to mine coins. 4GB cards will be good for a long time. Some coins they may produce less or be obsolete, but there are plenty of other options.

Thanks guys, got it, plenty of time left and many other coins to mine anyway.
Now I'll have to make the decision if I pull the trigger to buy it or not. Mining calculator shows the investment will pay for itself in about 10 months mining ETH, but still it is a significant amount of money to commit.

that only prediction for the price at this time, you know price a coin changeable. If the price coin increases, of course, would pay itself 10 months or faster from that. but most important you don't stick on one coin.

That is right. The ZCash mining uses very little memory.

Just an update, I ended up buying the mining rigs, 19 GPUs total. It runs quite stable for ETH or ETC, but did not have much luck until now with smaller coins though. The rigs keep disconnecting when trying to mine MUSIC, ETN, ... which use different miners like claymore or sg-miner-xmr. I think it's something with the software miner settings, but did not have much time to dig deeper into it

For now 4gb GPUs are still reliable but as GPU technology pushes to higher vram along with the algorithms used in mining opting to utilize it then the 4gb GPUs will be having difficulties on mining different altcoins.

4 or 8 Gb is important only for the Ethash algorithm. There are other algorithms.
The question was rather in return on investment. Conditionally, the first year pays off the second year net profit. The size of the DAG will be enough for two years for the 4Gb. https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size
But no one knows what will really happen or what next generation of cards will be released tomorrow. This can greatly change the balance of power.

Big memory amount needed only when gpu(chip) can operate with this memory.
Buying 8Gb RX580 useless, and remember about first appointment of video cards )

Hi. As pretty much everyone said, do not mind the 8gb version. The extra gigabytes are useless and often the 8gbs versions perform even worst (in terms of consumption).

I would also like to add that since this is used materials your should mind who you are buying from.
Those cards (especially AMD ones) performances may vary due to the so-called "silicon lottery", meaning that some cards can be pushed far beyond that others, so check what you are buying.

Also, check fans. All the electronic parts will work just fine for years if they are well treated, the same cannot be said for fans.

yes agree,
except VRAM type doesn't can check before but can check after buy. especially AMD card more powerful if doing modded and OC(about the hashrate), but power consumption high if compared an NVIDIA. yeah, every series of GPU has deficiencies and their respective advantages.

lol