Which card for mining?

[Sherkel]

I'm considering asking for a GPU for mining for Christmas this year (yep I'm still that young,) and based on this page, I think a Radeon 5830 looks the best budget-wise. Seeing as I'm still a total noob, though, I want to get the inputs of some more experiences and/or knowledgeable users before I make my final decision. I hope this is in the right place (a bit worried about that seeing as there are apparently very few threads like this,) but I didn't see anywhere better to ask this.

[dark_st3alth]

A little tricky topic.

ATI (ahem really AMD) are cheaper and might be what you are looking for.

nVidea has better quality cards, but can be more expensive. I'm sure people have tested the brands, so you should be able to go find information.

If your looking for pure hash to coin ratios, ATI cards will serve that purpose - but the question is how long if a card is that cheap?

[RyNinDaCleM]

^Wut?  

ATI/AMD 5xxx and 6xxx series cards definitely. nVidia is complete garbage for mining. The 5800 series is the best bang for buck period.

I personally prefer XFX lifetime warranty.

[worldinacoin]

5970 if they are on offer from newegg.  Fantastic prices.

[RyNinDaCleM]

^Or that!

[dark_st3alth]

^Wut?  

ATI/AMD 5xxx and 6xxx series cards definitely. nVidia is complete garbage for mining. The 5800 series is the best bang for buck period.

I personally prefer XFX lifetime warranty.

I'm sure there's something up if Nvidea is charging more...

For profits it comes down to how many hashes you can do in an amount of time - I have no problems with that. Finding the cheapest card to do the job is an important point to back that up.

Out of curiosity has anyone compared ATI to Nvidea cards? I'm running an old nVidea card of mine at about 4.50 MHashes/sec, and use the other one for games.

[worldinacoin]

I use my 6970 purely for games, it is super quiet and fast.  Have only the basic Nvidia cards from Dell, never tried the expensive cards from Nvidia as the mining guide does not show them to be great for bitcoin mining.  When I stop playing, my 6970 can have dual use as bitcoin mining with 300+mh.

[dark_st3alth]

Seem like I answered my question myself...

I looked at the https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison page. Even my i3 would be able to do a lot of MHashes/sec since I've over clocked it.

[DeathAndTaxes]

For profits it comes down to how many hashes you can do in an amount of time - I have no problems with that. Finding the cheapest card to do the job is an important point to back that up.

Out of curiosity has anyone compared ATI to Nvidea cards? I'm running an old nVidea card of mine at about 4.50 MHashes/sec, and use the other one for games.

Yes and NVidia sucks for mining.  The cheapest lowest entry level AMD card runs laps around the highest most expensive NVidia card.

Don't want to turn this into an AMD vs. Nvidia flamefest.  NVidia makes fine cards but the architecture they use is complete poop (a technical term) for mining.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

[DeathAndTaxes]

If you find a 5000 series card generally they are cheaper and better for mining.

If you are in the US you pretty much can't beat the 5970 on MH/W or MH/$ or MH/slot.  Watch newegg.  Their normal price is $500 but on Black Friday they dropped it to $300.  They might have another sale.  If you snag a 5970 for $300 it is pretty much unbeatable.

[dark_st3alth]

NVidia makes fine cards but the architecture they use is complete poop (a technical term) for mining.

So technical

[Gabi]

nVidea has better quality cards

Uhm no.

[dark_st3alth]

nVidea has better quality cards

Uhm no.

I'd like to point the their cards don't need hearing protection to use..

Just take a little good search as I can't seem to find the video I was looking for: http://www.google.com/search?q=loud+ati+card

Anyways, wasn't my idea to start a war on this topic. It's about which card is better for mining.

[Sherkel]

Thanks, guys! I guess it looks like I was right after all, and I don't want one that costs too much so I'll go with the 5830.

[Eveofwar]

Pick some 5830s up from shakaru.  Buy with trust

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52506.0

[Sherkel]

Pick some 5830s up from shakaru.  Buy with trust

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52506.0

Nice! I'll be sure to show whoever I ask that link. I hope he doesn't run out anytime soon.

[Qoheleth]

NVidia makes fine cards but the architecture they use is complete poop (a technical term) for mining.

So technical

A more technical explanation would be a combination of two factors:
1) ATI and nVidia chose different tradeoffs on how to get good graphics performance; ATI maximizes the number of shaders on the chip, whereas nVidia prefers more complex shaders running at higher clock speeds. For 3D rendering, which one of these is better depends on the application... but for the kind of work that is done by the SHA-256 algorithm, having 3x as many shaders is better than each shader running 2x as fast.
2) ATI's SPU architecture happens to have a "rotate right" opcode, whereas in nVidia's SPU architecture it takes 2-3 operations to do. SHA-256 uses bit rotation a lot.

[Eveofwar]

NVidia makes fine cards but the architecture they use is complete poop (a technical term) for mining.

So technical

A more technical explanation would be a combination of two factors:
1) ATI and nVidia chose different tradeoffs on how to get good graphics performance; ATI maximizes the number of shaders on the chip, whereas nVidia prefers more complex shaders running at higher clock speeds. For 3D rendering, which one of these is better depends on the application... but for the kind of work that is done by the SHA-256 algorithm, having 3x as many shaders is better than each shader running 2x as fast.
2) ATI's SPU architecture happens to have a "rotate right" opcode, whereas in nVidia's SPU architecture it takes 2-3 operations to do. SHA-256 uses bit rotation a lot.

Correct.

ATI Shaders > nVidia CUDA Cores (for mining)

[jflegare]

That's funny, I found out that my ATI cards were performing 3-4x better than my Nvidia equivalent cards...

Maybe I'm not using good engines ? I even used CUDA, which was supposed to help Nvidia cards..

[Gabi]

It's a hardware thing, no matter what code or language you use.