GPUs for mining?

[theGECK]

Hello everybody!

Does anybody have thoughts about a GPU that gives great bang for your buck with Bitcoin mining? Assume any budget. I'm currently happy with my rate, I'm just wondering what other's thoughts are.

[1714041472]

1714041472

[1714041472]

1714041472

[MrMagic]

http://pastebin.com/AvymGnMJ is a link to list of GPUs and their MHashs/sec MHash/watt compiled by someone else. Someone posted it in another thread and I found it useful. I look at http://www.newegg.com for good prices.

[dust]

Radeon 5970's are the the best cards for mining if you can get them at their "normal" price of ~$500usd.  Now, it looks like they stopped making them and most new ones are on sale for $600-700, or out of stock.  Radeon 5870s are currently a good choice (especially if you have cheap or free electricity) as they are available for around ~$200 and have a bit more than half the hash/s of a 5970 at stock clocks.  The disadvantages of 5870's are that you can fit less hash/s on a single motherboard and that they are less energy efficient compared to the 5970s.

[Transisto]

What about 6950 @ 250$ , it has 500M more transistor and twice the ram.

2154M vs  2640M

[xenon481]

What about 6950 @ 250$ , it has 500M more transistor and twice the ram.

2154M vs  2640M

Notice from the chart that the 6850 only runs a little over 2/3rds as fast as a 5850 and is less efficient from a MHash/Watt perspective. It is not transistor count nor RAM that matters, but integer performance. And more importantly, integer performance with regards to wattage because the card cost is singular and up front, while the electricity cost is on going. The difference in MHash/Watt can eventually erode any initial up front savings.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Here's a 52 gpu cluster of HD5970's hacked together for GSM phone hacking http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=45 ... seems like the 5970 is far superior to anything on the open market for integer performance.

I wonder why that is since it is ostensibly sold in graphics cards? Maybe the NSA had some input with AMD on that one ...

[[Tycho]]

The disadvantages of 5870's are that you can fit less hash/s on a single motherboard and that they are less energy efficient compared to the 5970s.

I doubt about energy efficiency, it's only few percent of difference because in Windows at stock frequency 5970 has only 1.5-1.7 times more hashing power than 5870 and consumes 1.5 times more watts. When you overclock and overvolt 5970 it will take considerably more watts than it's specified <300 W.

5870's default frequency is 850 Mhz and it usually runs fine at 950 without any modifications or special cooling.
5970 is clocked at 725 Mhz and usually needs voltage rising to run faster than 800 Mhz. You'll also need serious PSU and cooling.

[os2sam]

Well mining by gpu is not as such profitable.  But one cab begin with it. When mining at 1 GH/s in a pool you earn somewhere between 0.00001-0.00005 Bitcoin per day, worth approximately 1 cent. The cost of electricity far exceeds 1 cent per day when mining Bitcoin with a GPU.So it’s simply not worthwhile to mine Bitcoin with a CPU or GPU. Currently the only way to profitably mine Bitcoin is to use an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), so why to do when you don't get much profit..  I prefer  ASIC over GPU.

This thread you resurrected is almost 7 years old.  It has no bearing on mining today.