Topic: Best Graphics card for monero? (Read 4066 times)

It depends alot on the memory manufacturer of your card. For example i had a few 7950's with Elpida memory and Hynix. The ones with Hynix have like an 80-120 h/s advantage over Elpida.

Same story with Rx 570's

^But right at this minute we have to consider capital cost, so it's not just hash/watt but also hash/euro or hash/dollar invested (there's a difference).  

Remember the football book, "One knee equals two feet"?  One GTX 750 ti equals two RX 480's, with the main cost driver being how many of those suckers you can cram onto a node.

Linux infrastructure for a four GPU node is about $100 (I use HP server PSU's to keep the cost down).  Windows + 6-slot motherboard alone will run you like $180 at a minimum, not counting the extra RAM and HD.  

If I had to get into GPU mining right now today, I think the older cards are winners.  Never tried a 750, but the numbers work right on a Linux system.  Believe it or not the 6850 deserves a look for the same basic reasons.  

Only thing is, the hashrate data on 750ti is kinda old.  And I don't think they have enough RAM to mine ETH (do they?) and technically if you're gonna do GPU mining, these days it's more profitable to mine ETH (and on some days, ZEC) and flip it to XMR or whatever you want.  

290x can churn and burn any of those things.  Clear winner for some European miners due to low cost of electricity and ready availability of 220/240V (because you can squeeze a little more juice out of some PSU's, and run more machines without burning the house down).

The math isn't that complicated, but you can't just eyeball it, gotta run the numbers. (That's why God invented OpenOffice, and no Bill Gates is not God.)

GTX 1080 in my view

I think the good card that will perform well is the nvidia 750 ti and it is also budget friendly, the price is cheaper than the other cards and another thing is that it does not consume electricity that much because its only in the mid tier card. But if your'e looking for the best card that really mine alot. That will be gtx 1080 ti because this is the top tier card now a days.

The 290x is a monster, great card, uses a lot of power though.  I get like 740h/s out of it, compared with 650 for my 480's.  Love that card, but it's best if your energy costs are subsidized.

Advantage of linux is
- low hardware overhead
- great for networking
- easy to run headless
- reliable
- free

Advantage of windows
- more tools in windows to optimize GPU performance
- more compatible with some modern motherboards
- less learning curve initially (I guess.  I wasn't eager to maintain a windows network)

Consider old, refurb business or workstation motherboards.  HP makes good ones, just make sure they have standard power connectors.  Old is good for linux, you really don't want to have to deal with UEFI if you don't have to.  

That said, I've had good luck with MSI UEFI MB's.  They tend to come from the factory with the right settings.  Still helpful to add "iommu=soft" to your kernel parameters (google it up).  If you don't, sometimes half your USB ports go dead, which doesn't bode well for your USB drives.  You don't run into those issues with older pre-UEFI MB's.  

Long as linux plays well with your MB, USB drives work fine.  Check out Clonezilla, which is a nifty linux timesaver.

I like AM3 sockets with inexpensive, low power sempron or athlon chips.  2g of RAM is enough.  

Tricky part about mining with the 290x is choosing the right power supply.  For a 4 GPU rig you'll probably need 1200w to get enough overhead, and enough connectors.  The 290x is such a beast, there's an argument for running 3 to a motherboard.  Get by with a less expensive PSU.  Just depends on what your various components cost.  Gotta do your own math but the bottom line is, don't skimp on your power supply, or on your risers.  Get the best you can buy, don't burn the house down.

290x is a great card for XMR but to maximize profit, consider mining to an exchange, mine whatever is most profitable at the time (ZEC is looking good these days) and then flip to whatever you want to hold, whether it's XMR, BTC whatever.  

Xubuntu 14.04 (trust me; I suffered so you don't have to).  Set up fixed IP address and DNS server ( 8.8.8.8 ) make sure internet is working.  Turn off updates once you set location and language.  Radeon drivers are in the repository.  Install your graphics cards one at a time.  Compile your miner. Install SSH server, set up public/private key authentication, turn off password authentication.  Get into grub and set it up so you boot to the command line.  Shazam!  I love this ****

Linux isn't too too hard.  Once you start setting up your network and SSH you'll see the beauty in it.  Xubuntu 14.04 is a straight up vanilla, lean linux install that works like a charm right out of the box.  It practically installs itself.  Figure out how to use the Debian/Ubuntu repositories.  There are some excellent articles on setting up SSH over on the Ubuntu forums.  After that you'll find the best documentation over on the Arch website, believe it or not.

OpenCl goes in /usr/lib.  Just sayin.  Someday you'll thank me for that.  

There are literally hundreds of coins out there to chose from; take a look at the options on www.whattomine.com to see a good portion of them. Monero is primarily known as a CPU coin, not a GPU coin and as long as you have even halfway modern video cards you will do better mining many other altcoins instead of Monero.

It's what I found searching around the net. SHA, X-11 and Scrypt are being mined in large farms. So, monero is one of the stable coin to mine for profit.

GTX 1080 is best. you can check the stats on net.

What did you read that lead you to believe that Monero was the only profitable option to mine? There are many many altcoins that are more profitable for GPU mining then Monero, even with older hardware.

The 6870 is probably going to be more powerful than the 7750, although it will probably be less efficient.

https://www.google.com/search?q=monero+mining+hardware+comparison
I would recommend looking for recent results (after developers have had time to optimize their mining software), and being skeptical about obvious outliers (knowing that, as always, YMMV). Most cryptocurrencies have people working on mining hardware comparison lists.

Specifically what motherboard are you planning on purchasing? In general, any with several PCIe slots will do, but some motherboards can make it a real pain to get several cards working. When I first got into mining, I used an old ASROCK n68s-UCC board with 1 x16 slot and 1 x1 slot. The x1 slot would only work with my GPU (through a riser) if I used a certain pin shorting hack. I haven't heard of any recent motherboards that require this, however. My first real dedicated mining rig used an MSI 970A-G43, which worked without any such modifications. I eventually retired it after ASROCK released their first H81 Pro BTC mining motherboards.

Running Linux from a USB flash drive may or may not work out. Back when I was mining LTC with my GPUs, I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed on a cheap 8GB USB 2.0 stick and it worked fine. I disabled swap on it to prevent unnecessary writes (cheap USB drives don't last super long). However, now that I'm mining Zcash, I use an old 80GB hard drive with Windows 7 because I need 16GB of virtual memory for Claymore's ZEC miner.

I don't know much about Monero or what you're using for mining software, so you'll have to do research to see if you need a large amount of virtual memory for your purposes. If you do, I would steer away from flash drives, or if you do use them, I'd recommend making a full backup image after you get it running (good idea to have backups, regardless).

GPU's aren't that good for Monero, i suggest you read some more.
Go to Google, typ in: Mining Monero coin, and you should find enough information.

I have used some miners to mine different coins.
And I found that only profitable option for me is to mine monero with Graphics card.

I've been mining monero from two of my regular use desktop and now I want some dedicated hardwares.

I've decided to use cheap/powerful msi motherboards without any casings. (please comment if I'm doing it wrong)
I'll be running Linux from USB Flash drive (or is it a bad idea?)

And I've heard that AMD are better. (Let me know if I'm wrong, I have a wider option for NVIDIA)
But I've smaller AMD list to choose from.

EAH6870_DC2DI2S1GD5

EAH6770_DC2DI1GD5

HD77501GD5

R9290X4GD5

I know the latter ones are most powerful, are they as powerful for monero mining?