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June 14, 2017, 07:21:44 AM |
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The RX 470/480/570/580 are all in VERY VERY short supply at this time, AMD discontinued production on the 4xx models when they brought out the 5xx (or perhaps a bit before), but they haven't gotten the 570/580 production ramped up enough to handle the demand.
The current cryptocoin mining boom isn't helping any - it's reminding us older-timers of the Litecoin "boom" of 2014 more or less and the shortage of AMD cards we saw happen THEN.
ETH is considered to be an AMD coin because when the RX 470/480 was in the ballpark $200 range they could match the GTX 1070 on hashrate closely (the 1080 did NOT do better, GDDR 5x latency is higher and ETH is very sensitive to memory) and VERY close on efficiency while costing about half the price. At CURRENT AMD card pricing, Nvidia is now probably a BETTER choice, unless you manage to sneak in a AMD 470/480/570/580 purchase at a lot lower than most current pricing.
ZEC was actually somewhat of a tossup - the NVidia cards can get to be a little more efficient with proper tuning, and the higher-end cards DO mine a lot faster than anything AMD in current production (the Pro Duo has been out of production for a while, but it and the Fury line are pretty competative on efficiency and the Pro Duo argues well vs anything NVidia on sol/s), but it wasn't a huge difference that made AMD totally uncompetative - 'till the recent AMD shortage and resultant price gouging.
Most coins that show a MAJOR preference one way or the other tend to be small - DGB for example is very nice to NVidia running skein OR groetsl algos but a mid-size miner like ME can move the profitability noticeably by swinging all of my rigs in or out of that. There was a point for a couple hours that I was almost 5% of the total NETWORK hashrate on DGB-Groetsl, 2-3 weeks back.
Also, when you compare hash/$ and hash/watt you really need to compare it at the "total system" level, sometimes the power and cost of the system make what appears to be a "better" card more of a "about the same" or even a "worse" card when ALL power usage and costs are added in. This is why most miners don't use the GTX 1060 unless they already have some, it's a nice card on a "raw card stats" basis but when you factor in productivity of a 3+ card rig running 1060s vs the same rig running 1070s or 1080s or in some cases 1080tis, it doesn't come out quite so well....
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