Will Nvidia be the new king of Mining? Cuda has a Comeback with Maxwell

[WYP]

From the start GPU coin mining has always favored AMD cards, allowing AMD users to profit most from cryptocurrencies.

With Nvidia's release of the Maxwell based 750 and 750Ti GPUs , Nvidia have finally made a card which gives AMD a challenge in the coin mining market. The OC3D GTX 750Ti review is here

This challenge is not seen in the traditional Open CL based mining tools, which most GPU miners use today, but in CudaMiner an Nvidia specific application designed to best use Cuda cores for Scrypt and Scrypt-Jane based coin mining, (Litecoin, Dogecoin etc) which offers up to 200% performance gain compared to an Open CL based mining application.

This allows the GTX 750Ti to give a mining hashrate of 263KH/s, similar to what can be done on AMD's R7 260X, at a much lower TDP than the AMD equivalent. This can allow miners to be able to profit more here by decreasing their electricity consumption while mining, decreasing the day to day cost of running a mining pc.

That being said AMD is still the king of the hill, with their higher end GPUs still being able to perform at vastly higher hashrates, compared to their nearest Nvidia competitor (see below).

Please bear in mind that CudaMiner has only just released a version supporting the Maxwell based GTX 750 series cards, the result here should improve with upcoming releases and future more powerful Maxwell based cards should be able to compete with AMD in the high end mining scene.

Hopefully the release of Maxwell will continue to innovate the coin mining industry, allowing them to sell more cards to these users and hopefully prevent further inflation in the prices of AMD GPUs.

Anyone interested in learning more about Coin mining should look at the OC3D Crypto-currency Mining thread (located here)

Source - PCPER

 

[Damien c]

Hmm might be worthwhile grabbing a two for my spare AMD rig sat collecting dust.

 

[barnsley]

Yay now everyone will be affected by mining driving up gpu prices. FFS.

 

[SieB]

Yay now everyone will be affected by mining driving up gpu prices. FFS.

This ^^^^^

Although it's good that Nvidia users also get a chance to mine, it is also a bad thing because not only are AMD's prices going to be high but now also Nvida's prices are going to be high as well.
Seen as Nvidia already charge more than AMD you can expect to see some even stuplidly higher prices for Nvidia cards.
Imagine if the 780 and 780Ti were just as good for mining as a 290 or 290x and then imagine how much they would cost, 290s are going for up to $600 in the US as it is.

I doubt people are going to change their AMD cards for the 750Ti though, people who are mining seriously to make money aren't using 7850/260Xs, they are using 290 and 290X cards. Unless Nvidia release a high end Maxwell card that can mine well, which wont be for a while, then people are still going to be using the 290 and 290X.

 

[SeekaX]

why the hell do people even still bother with buying $500+ GPUs for mining, these days it will take you forever to make your money back.

 

[Seb.F]

why the hell do people even still bother with buying $500+ GPUs for mining, these days it will take you forever to make your money back.

It's the same mentality for every business.

You can't expect to invest £5000 in a business and make it back within a few months. The same goes for mining rigs, I don't understand why some people seem to think it's an instant buck or something.

 

[SeekaX]

It's the same mentality for every business.

You can't expect to invest £5000 in a business and make it back within a few months. The same goes for mining rigs, I don't understand why some people seem to think it's an instant buck or something.

it's probably going to cost you more to power these cards than they are going to make.

 

[barnsley]

it's probably going to cost you more to power these cards than they are going to make.

Obviously not considering how popular mining is becoming(especially in the US, where energy is probably cheaper). If you're mining on your own your statement might be true but as a group its still profitable. USB miners and dedicated mining equipment is starting to become more viable so gpu mining might die relatively soon.

 

[LiquidAtoR]

Nooooooo.....

Stop this craze, it's artificially raising prices on items that are 'not worth it'.
It's these things that make 'cheap' but worthy GPU upgrades unreachable for the average jack or jill (The GTX750Ti is capable of turning an average shelf rig into a gaming rig).

So besides the AMD prices being rediculous, now the Nvidia ones are going to hell as well.

 

[ashley_dude00]

people arent going to change as the 250-300 hash rate just isnt enough to make a profit.it would take an age to make that money back on such a small hash card.i know people are in it for the long haul.but the smaller power consumption i dont think will make much of a difference

 

[WYP]

people arent going to change as the 250-300 hash rate just isnt enough to make a profit.it would take an age to make that money back on such a small hash card.i know people are in it for the long haul.but the smaller power consumption i dont think will make much of a difference

Given that CudaMiner still has room to optimize for Maxwell, hashrates may increase with future versions.

As for lower power consumption, the 750Ti only has a TDP of 60w, compared to the R7 260x with a 115W TDP. Half the power consumption for a similar hashrate, great improvement for Nvidia.

Future Maxwell GPUs will definitely be a good option for miners if this kind of performance scales up with higher end Maxwell.

 

[ashley_dude00]

Given that CudaMiner still has room to optimize for Maxwell, hashrates may increase with future versions.

As for lower power consumption, the 750Ti only has a TDP of 60w, compared to the R7 260x with a 115W TDP. Half the power consumption for a similar hashrate, great improvement for Nvidia.

Future Maxwell GPUs will definitely be a good option for miners if this kind of performance scales up with higher end Maxwell.

agreed if it gets tuned a bit more and these cards produce over 300kh/s and also if the elder cards are making a large hash rate but with a significantly
lower power consumption then they could well take it.these cards will definitely win if the price of bitcoin stays low. but if bitcoin suddenly rises in value a lot(which has been previously seen) the lower power costs would not make up for the higher hash rate.as the higher hash rate will close the gap on power usage to coin produced/profit
percentage

 

[RamboOC]

I mine with a gtx 570 at 230kh/s @220w tdp. In the end its not me that pays the power bills its my parents.
It helps a bit that i have solar panels

 

[SieB]

The thing is as well is how will Maxwell stack up against AMD's 20nm GNC 2.0 cards for raw mining power?

Nvidia is only just catching up but AMD are already ahead. When the GNC 2.0 cards come out it could be the same story again with Nvidia behind and AMD in front.
The AMD cards proberley won't be as efficient as the Nvidia cards although they will be more efficient than they are now and not to far behind Nvidia. But when it comes to raw mining power it will probably be AMD in front again.

Only time will tell though, it doesn't really bother me because I don't really care about bitcoin. Who knows if GPU mining will even still be around by the time the highend cards come out, it is already dying as it is.

 

[Madrocker]

I mine bitcoins with an ASIC, it costs about £40 for the USB device itself and mines at 2GH/s using 2 watts of power. GPU mining has been dead for a while so I'm surprised to see this thread popping up.

 

[Zoot]

The only thing the 750 and 750Ti have going for them is power efficiency, and I doubt anyone really cares about power consumption too much if you're running a mining rig.

High-end Maxwell might bring some improvements, but I doubt AMD is going to stand still either. The picture is a bit murky as regards new releases this year though.

Who knows if GPU mining will even still be around by the time the highend cards come out, it is already dying as it is.

The ship for solo mining has certainly sailed a long time ago, that's for sure.

 

[cmasupra]

GPU mining is pretty much dead for Bitcoin, but it's still live and kicking for Scrypt-based currencies such as Litecoin. Also, if you're GPU mining just because you don't pay the power bill, then you're just stealing money from whoever does pay your power bill.

 

[NeverBackDown]

I find it sort of ironic how a Cuda based mining scrypt still allows AMD to perform better by quite a stretch. AMD performs better because of its architecture though so i guess it is expected.

 

[RamboOC]

I mine bitcoins with an ASIC, it costs about £40 for the USB device itself and mines at 2GH/s using 2 watts of power. GPU mining has been dead for a while so I'm surprised to see this thread popping up.

You cant mine scrypt based coins with ASIC miners, therefore even a 750 ti doing 263 kh/s mining scrypt based coin like dogecoin would bring more profit than your 2gh/s asic miner mining SHA coin like bitcoin.

you need to invest a lot of money these days if you want to get into SHA mining $$,$$$, if you want to get a good profit out of it.

 

[mazty]

Obviously not considering how popular mining is becoming(especially in the US, where energy is probably cheaper). If you're mining on your own your statement might be true but as a group its still profitable. USB miners and dedicated mining equipment is starting to become more viable so gpu mining might die relatively soon.

Anyone with any sense wouldn't use a GPU but would look into PIC mining - using GPUs is ridiculous as the initial investment + energy costs means that it'll take months to simply get back your investment, let alone any profit. And this is all working on the unlikely assumption that coins rates don't dive.