Memory - 4GB or 8GB?

[pjp007]

The more, the better?

Should I spend some more and get a 8GB (or even 11GB) memory card? Is it worth the extra money? Or is 4GB enough?

[gotminer]

Are you talking about GPU Memory or Motherboard Memory?  I assume you mean GPU since you mentioned the 11GB figure.  I wouldn't be buying video cards with 4gb of memory on them right now.  The more the better, but I'd go with the 8GB cards.  I don't have any experience with 11GB cards, but I assume they would boost mining performance that much more.

[Deathwing]

Heavily dependent on the algorithm you are going to mine but if we want to give examples off Ethash higher, the better. DAG size is constantly increasing which will result in some 3-4GB cards not being able to mine after a certain period.

[beskid]

AAt present, 4 Gb of memory in the video card is enough. I bought for 6 Gb with the calculation for the next year, because more people come to mining.  There is no big difference in the profit between video cards for 4 and 6 Gb of memory.

[Undefined31415]

The amount of graphics RAM is important to consider alongside the power of the chip itself. For example, one doesn't purchase a 1080ti just because those cards have 11GB of graphics RAM.

In addition, a 6GB GTX 1060 isn't necessarily superior to a 4GB RX 580 in virtue of it having additional graphics RAM. Whether or not the amount graphics RAM is the bottleneck is a question specific to the application.


Since your thread specifically mentioned 4GB vs. 8GB, might I ask what specific cards you're considering? Are you comparing cards based on 470/480/570/580 GPUs?

[MagicSmoker]

The DAG size for Ethereum seems to be a red herring to me - 4GB will suffice until some time in 2021 and I suspect that no consumer grade graphics card will survive 3+ years of mining, but even if they did would you still want to use them 3 years from now? Also, most (all?) mining algorithms don't benefit from more memory over and above what is needed to do the funky calculations. In other words, more memory does not automatically result in faster algorithm execution.

BUT... while I am a power electronics engineer by profession, so presumably semi-literate when it comes to tech, I've only gotten interested in mining very recently so take whatever I write here with the proverbial grain of salt...