Do I need specific graphics cards to mine certain altcoins?

[dd2017]

Guys:

I'm somewhat new to this. I keep seeing on this and other forums that people recommend specific graphics cards to mine certain altcoins. For instance, Radeon RX 470/480/570/580 cards to mine Ethereum, GeForce GTX 1060 cards to mine Zcash, etc.

I'm curious, is it that specific? Can I mine Ethereum with a GeForce GTX 1060 card and vice versa?

Can someone explain. Thanks in advance!

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[puwaha]

Yes, you can mine Etherium with nVidia cards, and conversely mine Zcash with AMD cards.  It's jut that nVidia cards typically do better with Zcash algorithms for the money and watts you invest, and AMD cards do better with Etherium algorithms for the money and watts.

GPU miners are always trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their rigs, so it's easy to see why one card is favored over another for mining a specific algorithm.

[ahmedjamal1998]

Of course you can but mining is all about maximizing the profits from your hardware.
That's why people suggest specific gpu that give you max profits with the coins that you intend to mine.

Basically eth is good with amd and zec with nvidia.
Why? I have no idea but I just know that this is how it is.

[dd2017]

I see. Thank you, both.

Well, I'm assuming that prices for those specific cards also shot up astronomically these days, didn't they? So one has to take that into account as well.

Also I can't seem to find those specific cards anywhere on Amazon or Newegg (US sites.) Where do you guys buy them?

[QuintLeo]

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....