Does GPU ram matter?

[Ferris419]

I'm looking to buy a new video card I'm interested in 2 of them they are the same identical cards except one is 4gb and the other is 2gb the only other difference is price the 4gb is $50 more .... I guess what I'm asking is the extra 2gb worth $50 when it comes to mining?  It's gigabyte r9 x270 they make a 4gb and a 2gb .

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[nastybit]

I am not sure if there is much difference on hashing to justify the $50 more but if you look at the resell value there is, for sure.
My advise is to buy the 4gb version

[Jcw188]

They say the RAM doesn't matter so much for BTC mining but it does for alt coin mining as the alt coin mining relies more heavily on memory.  That's what I've been told and found out from my research.

[Peacefrog]

From what i have heard since i began mining is that SHA-256 benefits more with having less ram but more core power (shaders + core clock etc.)

I can say for a fact that scrypt needs more RAM. When i overclock the memory on my gpu the hash rate doesnt really change much but the efficiency of my hashes really seems improved.

If i were you i would get the 4gb version incase you want to mine scrypt. Plus the 4gb version is a better card therefor has better resale value

Hope we helped

[pontiacg5]

More memory should let you run a higher TC, which should make for a better hashrate.

There's a point where more ram won't help, basically you need enough ram to store future hashing work. If you've not enough memory GPU time is idled while RAM is loaded. At some point the GPU won't be able to pull work as fast as it's loaded, that's the perfect memory size.

A higher TC "stages" more work, if you don't have enough memory the GPU will overwrite data it needed to hash still so CGminer doesn't start with a memory error.

I've wanted to get some of the 6gb 7970's just to toy around with, but they are expensive and used... I don't know if a 7870/270 would benefit from a extra 2gb or not, might not be fast enough to need it?

All for scrypt, sha doesn't need much ram at all.

[Ferris419]

Thanks for all the replies! I appreciate it looks like I'll just take the leap and by the 4GB version!! Right now eBay is doing quadruple eBay bucks so I'll save 20$ anyway!! Lol

[alivecrypto]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

[Ferris419]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

Well I ended up buying it because I got $20 off and I will mostly be mining altcoins considering I will probably only be around 700 kh/s I have a gigabyte hd7770 and now a gigabyte r9 270x I'm getting 200 kh/s from the 7770 I assume I should get around another 500kh/s from the x270 .

[undeadbitcoiner]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

Well I ended up buying it because I got $20 off and I will mostly be mining altcoins considering I will probably only be around 700 kh/s I have a gigabyte hd7770 and now a gigabyte r9 270x I'm getting 200 kh/s from the 7770 I assume I should get around another 500kh/s from the x270 .

As i have read some thread in other forum sometime Different GPU's dont work together so are you sure you can run 7770 and 270 together?

[Ferris419]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

Well I ended up buying it because I got $20 off and I will mostly be mining altcoins considering I will probably only be around 700 kh/s I have a gigabyte hd7770 and now a gigabyte r9 270x I'm getting 200 kh/s from the 7770 I assume I should get around another 500kh/s from the x270 .

As i have read some thread in other forum sometime Different GPU's dont work together so are you sure you can run 7770 and 270 together?

Oh I wasn't aware of that? I guess if I can't I'll just put the 7770 In a different computer .

[doc12]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

Well I ended up buying it because I got $20 off and I will mostly be mining altcoins considering I will probably only be around 700 kh/s I have a gigabyte hd7770 and now a gigabyte r9 270x I'm getting 200 kh/s from the 7770 I assume I should get around another 500kh/s from the x270 .

As i have read some thread in other forum sometime Different GPU's dont work together so are you sure you can run 7770 and 270 together?

Im running a 280x an two 7790 , and its running fine. You just have to run each card in a seperate cgminer instance.

My *.bat looks like that:

start cgminer.exe -d 0 --scrypt -I 17 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8000 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.1 -p x
start cgminer.exe -d 2 --scrypt -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8196 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.2 -p x
start cgminer.exe -d 1 --scrypt -I 17 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8000 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.3 -p x


The advantage is you are able to set optimal settings for each card. If I run all cards in one cgminer instance, i just have 800kH . With 3 instances i get 1200kH.

[Ferris419]

If its for mining alt coins I think its better to choose 4gb. Don't just see 50 $

Well I ended up buying it because I got $20 off and I will mostly be mining altcoins considering I will probably only be around 700 kh/s I have a gigabyte hd7770 and now a gigabyte r9 270x I'm getting 200 kh/s from the 7770 I assume I should get around another 500kh/s from the x270 .

As i have read some thread in other forum sometime Different GPU's dont work together so are you sure you can run 7770 and 270 together?

Im running a 280x an two 7790 , and its running fine. You just have to run each card in a seperate cgminer instance.

My *.bat looks like that:

start cgminer.exe -d 0 --scrypt -I 17 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8000 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.1 -p x
start cgminer.exe -d 2 --scrypt -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8196 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.2 -p x
start cgminer.exe -d 1 --scrypt -I 17 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8000 -o stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.us:3358 -u user.3 -p x


The advantage is you are able to set optimal settings for each card. If I run all cards in one cgminer instance, i just have 800kH . With 3 instances i get 1200kH.

Cool thanks for the heads up ! I was wondering how that would work out!

[efx]

The neat thing is that these GPUs have unmatech compute power per dollar, so mining certainly isn't the only way you can make money from these cards, nor is it the only thing driving the resale market (and I don't meant games).


99% sure you're going to see zero hashrate benefit from the extra ram on that GPU unless you are running one of the 'cpu only' coins that uses excessive amounts of cache. You don't have enough stream processors to effectively utilize all the operations that would be queued by a thread concurrency value high enough to use more than 2gb.

Either way, when the time comes to sell our GPU, 4gb of ram is going to be far more attractive to those of us that use pure GPU opencl rendering engines.
I would say you made the right call, an additional $30 (after rebate/discount you mentioned) for 2 more GB is pretty reasonable.