Bitcoin Forum

What can R9 390 with 8GB memory do today? I can't find the graphic card on whattomine, any new algorithm that this old beast is still good for? Do you think have one of this old graphics card.

I have a MSI R9 390 8GB and stopped using it because of the power draw. Was doing about 30/31 MH/s on ETH 160W and with the electricity costs here €0.36 kW/h it's a no go.
Unless you have free electricity I would't use a R9 390 anymore. Using it now in a HTPC better to get/use a RX 580 8GB as that would do about the same hashrate but at abt. 95W or even less.

Also have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuvMVhZxc7I

That is really old as a card despite the hash rate of it being 30-31 Mhsh it is not worthy to run right now where prices of cryptos are going down and the difficulty skyrocketing for ETC which many people will flock into it after ETH mining ends in mid September approximately.

Unless you have an electricity like in Washington at 0.02-0,03 kwatt/hour (at least this is how ti was a couple of years ago) this card is better used as a relic or at an old gaming workstation,this uses near 350 Watt the same as an 3080 ti uses but the 3080 ti can do 120 Mhsh approximately or 4 times better in hash rate.

My mining calculator says 15MH per R9 390 graphic card if mining Ethereum, the most profitable is ravencoin but I doubt it is worth trying because of power consumption, this card use up to 160watts and that's like the power of three GTX 1660 that can do 25-27MH on ETH, that's 75MH for 160watts to 170watts, waaaayyy better...

Wait until winter and you can use it to help heat your house. That will help compensate for the high power usage.

This is why AMD cards are superior. Back when I was mining litecoin/zcash with my 280x/290s, I never turned on the radiator, my cards took care of my house heating.

Every graphic cards dispense heats when mining lol, stop making this look like only AMD gets the job done, even Asic miners are better too but I wouldn't burn electricity just to get warm if I can't afford to pay the bills.

That's an absurd argument, it's not about brand wars or being able to pay the bills. It's about improving the profiability of inefficient hardware.
The heat from mining in the summer is wasted but in the winter it reduces the heating bills.

You sure it only used 160 watts? Was it at the wall?

I had a few of these and no matter what I did the power consumption was at least 200 watts. I tried everything, different memory straps, undervolt, underclock and was impossible to get it to consume less.

R9 390 can use up to 275watt max,  if you are getting 160watts in a mining software I am sure you are already at 200+ watts from the wall, this is why watt-o-meter is very handy when it comes to running mining rigs.

Never said it was at the wall. I had it running together with a RX 580 8GB and also mining monero with a AMD 3600, at the wall it was abt. 365/370W total.

It depends on the user, if free electricity is available there is no reason not to keep using this graphic card for anything the owner likes to use them for, I had a solar set up and I couldn't play PC games while mining because my GPU for gaming with the CPU and motherboard takes 400watt from wall and its the exact amount one of my mining rig uses, I had to sell the GPU (3070ti) for a smaller GPU so that I can game while mining too. I went with gtx1660 Super, so it depends on the R9 390 user.

This video card mines ethereum well, about 27-30 megahash, but its real consumption from the wall is about 215-230 watts and it is very hot. After 15 days or more, I think it will not be relevant for mining even at a price of 5 cents per kilowatt. I sold these video cards a long time ago, before buying the RX 480

I had a few of the 390 and many of the r9 290. The only way how to make it efficient you need to undervolt it to the max, I forgot how low I set the voltage and you need to underclock it so low that it'll hash at like 20-22mh/s or something. By doing so it'll be efficient however VERY slow.

However the GPU will run cool and if you got the reference models you can use it in your room and it won't be loud as a vacuum. However keep in mind this is a GPU that came out in late 2013, so its almost a decade old. It will never be as efficient as some of the GPU cards of today.

It is built like a tank however. They will never die. Unlike the Vega or Fury GPUs from the day.

Great, when I had these video cards, there were no firmware for the BIOS. After I sold these video cards, bios modification appeared.
If it is possible to get 20 megahash by consuming 150 watts, then this is also very bad. Probably better to buy a 1060 6 GB video card, which will give 23 megahash at 90 watts and it will be much younger.

I've had like 5 die (280x and 290s), though I did mistreat them back in the day by having them run extremely hot and I also flashed 390 bios on the latter ones. That being said it's normal, no card lives forever.
Fun story is, I took an old working one out of my warehouse to check it out for ETC mining, and after plugging it in there was like a small burst of fire inside it(lasted for less than a second), then the house started smelling like something was burnt. Once again, not the card's fault, I used to be pretty rough with it during ltc/zcash days

What brand was it? Was it aftermarket AIB or the AMD reference models?

Most of my R9 290 were reference models and I didn't have any issues. I think the only issue I had was that one of them had a bad fan after running for 5 years straight. However it was like $10 from eBay and was perfectly fine.

I had some bad r9 280x but it was models like the Sapphire Dual-X 280X which many miners had isses with burnt MOSFETs. Then I had a bunch of Gigabyte 7950/7970 which all had fried capacitors but they still functioned.

My mistake, it was actually a Gigabyte 280x(the one with the three fans).

Yeah I had like half of mine have burnt capacitors. They were hard to find because they were under some cover. And the weird thing is the GPU worked like nothing happened.

Since it was under warranty I figured I might as well send it in. I was hoping they would send a new replacement. And guess what they did. They sent the same GPU back, all they did was remove the entire row of capacitors in that area where one of them burnt. It ran fine.

Wondering why put it there in the first place.

this calculator still has a video card R9 390
https://woolypooly.com/en/best-gpu-for-mining