Bitcoin Forum

Can I know what is the best Radeon brand to mine Bitcoin/Litecoin?  MSI, Sapphire etc?  Actually is there any difference?

As far as I know, there is no difference between manufacturers for the reference cards (apart from the graphics printed on them).

There are minor differences between the non-reference cards, but there is no single manufacturer that is consistently better than any other (as far as I know).

My advice would be to get reference cards (or non-reference cards with voltage control). You can undervolt them and save a significant amount of power without losing much of your hashrate.

I've got Gigabyte, Sapphire, Powercolor and Asus.

The Asus cards are nice, but not very fast and they're expensive.  Sapphire are OK, but the fans wear out very quickly.  Powercolor, well one of them popped it's VRM (5870), and the other overheats all the time (6970).  The Gigabytes (7950 with the 3 fans) are the most consistent - they mine well, they run cool, and are quite quiet.  

I run my main mining rig in the living room, behind the sofa.  It's got 3 Gigabyte 7950 in a Define XL R2.  It's quiet enough to leave on while watching TV, and it does a great job of warming the downstairs of the house.  I used to have it upstairs, but it ended up that upstairs was about 28C and downstairs was 18C.  Now the house is an even 24C. :)

stay away from xfx and powercolor at least for scrypt mining they both run extremely hot. i bought them because they were cheap and sold most of them because they were running hotter and hashing lower than other cards

sapphire, gigabyte, msi are nice cards

I think that's an issue with the cooler, and not the maker. I'm sure there's a pretty big temp difference between this 7950 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131458) and this one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131478), the latter of which is famous for getting notoriously hot.

I've had good luck with Gigabyte, Sapphire, Powercolor, and MSI. Haven't had good luck with Diamond or XFX or VisionTek.

I haven't had any issues heat or otherwise with 79xx cards from either XFX, MSI or Visiontek. Powercolor 69xx cards do run hotter and don't OC as well as other brands from my experience. Looks like everyone's mileage varies.

I have negative experiences with Powercolor and more so with XFX.  Powercolor is simply built very cheap, but gets similar hashes to other higher end brands but at higher temps.  XFX was well built, but the cards would not over/undervolt which made overclocking very difficult.

My positive experiences have been with Sapphire, MSI, and Gigabyte.  MSI and Sapphires are very nicely built with quality heatsinks and nice fast fans. For Sapphire, this goes even for the single fan models...amazing quality.  Sapphire cards are nearly all voltage unlocked, some MSI cards may be voltage locked.  Gigabyte has a very nice heatsink and fan system and get excellent hashes, but the cards are voltage locked.

IMO its worth the extra 20-30 bucks for a higher end card.  They usually will overclock or cool better than the cheaper ones.  You will sometimes get what you pay for when buying up.  Do enough research for the specific brands you're interested in to find out if the one you choose is worth it.

MSI never leads me down and this gen of Gigabyte 7950 is really good as well.

i have worked with;

Asus 7970
Sapphire 7970
MSI 7970
Visiontek 7970

out of all of the top brands i worked with i definitely would recommend MSI second comes Asus then Sapphire. Visiontek did not appeal to me and the hash rate was not as high as the others.

I don't know the warranty policies of the other brands, but for MSI at least the warranty is based on manufacture date... so you can sell it used & it can still have a year, 18 months or whatever on the warranty.

Only other thing I can think of is that I hate the Gigabyte 5870 card with two fans

oh, there are those sapphire 7970 vapor-x cards on newegg for like $325 right now.  regular for $300