Vega mining. Mining on an AMD Radeon Vega video card - performance, technical specifications

At the main Asian computer exhibition Computex 2018, Sapphire presented not only a new flagship video card, but also announced the distribution of gifts to customers. And in order for the cards to reach buyers, miners were “distracted” by two new farms.

Nitro+ RX Vega 64

Sapphire has updated its most powerful video card on an AMD chip, the Nitro+ RX Vega 64. Its main difference from the previous version is that this flagship adapter is powered through only two 8-pin connectors, and not through three, like the original model.

And to demonstrate the capabilities of the powerful video card, Sapphire built a gaming corner right at its stand: Nitro+ RX Vega 64 displayed a panorama from the virtual driver’s cockpit in the game Forza Motorsport 7 on three monitors.

Free games

Thanks to Sapphire's new partnership with Square Enix, buyers of the Pulse RX 550 and RX 560 graphics cards will now receive free games: two with the older model and one with the 550. The video cards themselves have not undergone any changes.

Mining farms

Sapphire now deals not only with consumer graphics cards, but also with products for those who want to participate in the formation of the new cryptocurrency world. At Computex 2018, the company showed two mining rigs. The first model is called MGI-9 and includes 9 RX 470 video cards. The cards, of course, are made in a special mining modification; they cannot be used for games.

CS-14 is a farm for professional miners. It has 7 RX 470 video cards with 8 GB of video memory, but each has two GPUs on board, that is, a total of 14 chips are working on hash search in the farm. In addition, the system has 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, a 128 GB SSD in the M.2 slot, and the device runs Ubuntu OS.

The declared hashrate of the farm when working with the Ethash algorithm (it is, for example, used in Ethereum) is 400 Mh/s. Given the hashrate of the Ethereum network at the time of publication, this performance allows you to mine about 0.03 ETH per day, or, at the current exchange rate, $16. However, you will have to deduct electricity costs - the farm consumes 2000 watts.

You can better view these and some other new items in our video report:

Since the beginning of this year, video cards from the AMD Polaris and GeForce GTX 10 series families have been extremely popular among miners, as they provide a favorable ratio of performance and power consumption when mining cryptocurrencies. This even provoked a shortage and a noticeable increase in prices for graphics accelerators in the second quarter. Therefore, many gamers really hoped that the new Radeon RX Vega generation video cards would not be so efficient in mining, which would give them the opportunity to avoid unnecessary attention from non-target audiences and become more accessible on sale. However, it seems that these hopes are not destined to come true. Recent experiments show that, after proper configuration, AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 video cards are even more efficient at mining Ethereum than the Radeon RX 580 or even the Radeon RX 480.

Reddit user S1L3N7_D3A7H, was able to configure his Radeon RX Vega 64 in such a way that when mining Ethereum they produce a hashrate of 43.5 MH/s with a total power consumption of each video card of 130 W and GPU consumption of 104 W. To achieve this result, the GPU frequency of the video cards was lowered to 1000 MHz, while the HBM2 memory frequency was increased to 1100 MHz (2200 MHz) with a parallel setting of the Power Limit to -24%.

With these settings, the specific mining performance of the Radeon RX Vega 64 per watt spent was even better than that of the Polaris generation cards. Of course, cards of the previous generation are noticeably cheaper, however S1L3N7_D3A7H emphasizes that such mining performance can be achieved not only with the flagship RX Vega 64 accelerators, but also with the cheaper Vega RX 56, since the hashrate depends primarily on memory speed, and not on GPU speed.

It is worth noting that to achieve a record mining result, the experimenter used the regular Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.8.2 driver, and not the special software offered by AMD a couple of weeks ago. As noted, the mining beta driver with the necessary settings is unstable and causes various kinds of problems.

All this, unfortunately, is very sad news for gamers. Since the new video cards of the Radeon RX Vega family are effective in mining, the problem of their shortage and inflated prices will be much more difficult for AMD to solve. At the moment, AMD promises that retail prices for the RX Vega 64 will approach the recommended level of $499 in October, but in light of the revealed high attractiveness of this card in cryptocurrency mining, this may not happen now.

Probably the most important insight is the hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) and other crypto coins based on the Ethash algorithm. Unfortunately, the performance of the Radeon RX VEGA 64 using the latest version of Claymore Dual Eth Miner, which comes with official Vega support, is around 31-32 MHS. We have seen that claims of much higher performance are theoretically possible, but we have yet to confirm whether this is true and whether these claims are actually real or just speculation. It's not great that this hashrate comes at a fairly high power consumption, and the higher the GPU temperature, the lower the performance.

Here is the Zcash (ZEC) mining situation using AMD's new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU, totaling around 475-480 H/s. However, the not so high performance in these two memory intensive algorithms, even with HBM2 memory, is not the most important thing. What we're more interested in about the new AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPUs is the fact that they are cold GPUs and get hot quickly, so keeping them cool 24/7 can be a challenge, at least for air cooling. The amount of power used does not justify the level of performance we are getting for mining at the moment...

When it comes to gaming, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 appears to be closer to the GTX 1080 in terms of performance, but again it still consumes more power than the Nvidia card.

What remains to be seen is what will happen to availability and what the actual price of the new VEGA GPUs will be taking into account the fact that demand from miners may not be that high, although you never know... with market prices of Polaris GPUs at At the level they are currently available, the official RRP of the VEGA 64 looks unreasonably low, so of course expect higher starting prices. On the other hand, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 can also improve its algorithms with more GPUs than memory intensive ones.

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 Graphics cards are out now and hopefully you’ve taken a look at gaming performance in . There have been rumors that the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 is capable of getting hash rates as high as 100 MH/s mining Ethereum, so we also spent come time with Vega 64 and Vega 56 down in the Ether mine to see how they'd perform.

We used Claymore’s Dual Ethereum AMD+NVIDIA GPU Miner v9.8 and tested the two VEGA cards one at a time in the system to see how they did on the current DAG epoch #138. We also tossed in an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 video card from a board partner just for fun as that is one of the most popular mining card that people can buy today with most Radeon RX 570 and 580 cards being out of stock.

So, on the current DAG Epoch (#138), difficulty of around 1,700 TH and a block time of ~21.5 seconds this is what we are looking at in stock form with 1 minute average after running for a period of 15 minutes to let the cards warm up. The AMD Radeon VEGA 64 gets 34.4 MH/s with the system pulling 367 Watts at the wall. The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 gets 32.4 MH/s with 306 Watts at the wall. Not bad results, but not close to the rumored 70-100 MH/s performance these cards were said to have.

No sane miner uses stock settings, so let’s look at what happens when we overclock the cards and use some power saving settings. The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 was able to have the power limit lowered to -30% without drastically impacting the hashrate of the card as it was 34.3 MH/s, but our power dropped down to 283 Watts. We dropped it down to -25% and for 33.9 MH/s at 269 Watts and then finally -40% and got 32.6 MH/s at 256 Watts. Lowering the power target really helped the power consumption as going to -30% saves about 84 Watts and that is a ton if you have a mining farm with dozens of cards that is consuming thousands of Watts of power all day for months on end. Overclocking the memory didn’t change performance on either card. This might be a driver issue, but right now this was the best we could get.

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 we were able to drop down to -25% and we got 247 Watts at the wall, but the hashrate took a dive to 30.1 MH/s. We ended up dialing it in at -23% for a hashrate of 32.40 at 251 Watts.

Lastly, the GeForce GTX 1070 was able to be overclocked with EVGA Precision X up to +800 MHz memory. With the extra memory clock speed and we got that card up to 32.17 MH/s! We also did that with the power target lowered to 60%, so the power draw dropped down 183 Watts despite the memory overclock!

So, what else can we show you? How about hashes per Watt? The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 that has had the power target lowered offers the best hashrate per Watt and that is critical for your electric bill. In stock form the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 gets 0.09 MH/s per Watt of power used and we were able to improve that to 0.13 MH/s per Watt on both the Vega 64 and Vega 56. That is where a GeForce GTX 1070 is stock.

The AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64 was going to be a hit for ethereum mining, but it looks like performance just isn’t where it was rumored to be. AMD has stated that they are working on a block chain driver that improves the DAG performance for all Polaris and Vega cards that should be out sometime really soon. It will be interesting if the optimizations fix the that has been coming for months and improves Vega performance. We will know shortly and coverage will be posted on Legit Reviews the day it drops. When we requested more cryptocurrency performance information our contacts at AMD said they were focused on gamers and had nothing to add. We are sure that the mining community will try these cards out and modify the firmware to extract the most performance from VEGA in the coming weeks. This might not be a mining monster that everyone read about for the past few weeks, but it isn’t a turd either.

When it comes to pricing the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is $399 and the Radeon RX Vega 64 is $499 for the standalone air cooled models. The MSRP on a GeForce GTX 1070 is $379. Chances are you won’t be able to find any of these cards for those prices due to the mining boom, but they are more readily available now than they were a couple months ago. The ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 8GB STRIX will be in stock on August 18th for $449.99 and the Gigabyte AORUS GTX 1070 8GB will be on the same date for $439.99. It will be interesting to see what the AMD Radeon RX Vega cards will be priced on the street later today.

Be sure to take a look at our article from earlier this year if you want to know or to see what hardware we suggest buying to setup a rig!

Update 08/14/17 1:30PM CDT: VEGA 56 Overclocked!

We have been playing around with overclocking a bit more on the VEGA RX 56 and the performance numbers are a little weird. We are able to overclock the memory from 800MHz up to 950MHz with full stability. Running the memory at 1000MHz causes an instant crash and 975MHz causes random crashes at load, so we stuck with 950MHz. The Vega 56 gets 38 MH/s when we start mining, but down to an average 1 minute speed of 34.17 MH/s after just six minutes of mining. This is a nice bump up from the stock number of 32.43, but we wish it would stay up at 38 MH/s. We were doing this run with the power limit at -23% and when we raised that up to -10% the 1 minute average increased up to 34.1 MH/s. The power jumped from ~252 Watts to over 320 Watts by doing that. We are still investigating and let AMD know of the issue as no matter the power limit performance starts out at 38 MH/s and drops down 3-4 MH/s after a few minutes. We also have been having issues with Wattman going transparent during use, so another growing pain that needs to be worked out on Vega!

Despite rumors prophesying the Radeon RX Vega 64 from 70 to 100 Mh/s in Ethereum mining, in practice its power turned out to be much lower. Using the Claymore 9.8 miner, it turned out to be about 31Mh/s on Vega 56 and 34-35 Mh/s on Vega 64.

This is comparable to the typical performance of existing GPUs running the same software, such as:

1. 24 Mh/s - RX 570 4 GB,
2. 27 Mh/s - RX 580 8 GB,
3. 21 Mh/s – GTX 1060 6 GB and
4. 29 Mh/s on GTX 1070.

Let's now take a closer look at whether this video card is the best for Ethereum mining.

Characteristics.

1. Memory: 8 GB, HBM2;
2. Bus: 2048 bits;
3. GPU frequency 1247 MHz / overclocked 1546 MHz;
4. Memory frequency 1900 MHz;
5. Resolution: 7680x4320 pixels;
6. HDMI: 1 pc;
7. DisplayPort: 3 pcs.

Description.

When mining, not only the productivity of raw materials is taken into account, but also power requirements and the cost of equipment. Most farms work with six video cards to maximize profits, because in addition to the video cards, you will have to pay for the remaining parts of the PC and the cost of power supplies. By the way, energy consumption is also an important factor, since it requires the installation of either one larger (more expensive) power supply or at least several smaller power supplies. Running six 6GB 1060 cards in a rig with a good 800-1000W power supply is no problem, and six 1070 or RX 570/580 cards with a 1000-1200W power supply will also work. But to operate a farm with six Vega 64 (power 275 W), you will have to look for a 2000 W power supply or a pair of 1000 W power supplies.

In other words, it is more economical to use less powerful (in terms of power consumption) GPUs to run. Even if the Vega 64 were available right now for $500, that would add up to a total of $3000, plus another $400-$600 for other parts, for a rig that would output 210Mbps and consume 1650W. Performance is better than six 1070s (170 Mh/s), but a farm with 1070 will only consume 900 W. In terms of profit, the first farm with Vega will produce $10 per day, while the second will produce $9.30 per day. Thus, given the current situation, this farm with Radeon RX Vega 64 will pay for itself in at least a year.

They will require a less powerful 750 W power supply. You can earn about $8.20 gross and $6.90 net. As a result, we get that for the amount of purchasing Vega you can buy two farms with 1060 whose hashrate will be 40 Mh/s higher.

Hashrate on other algorithms.

• DaggerHashimoto – 34-35 Mh/s;
• Lbry - 0.322 Mh/s;
• Cryptonight – 900 H/s;
• Equihash – 481.9 H/s;
• x11gost - 13.9 Mh/s;
• Pascal - 1.6 Gh/s;
• Decred - 4.1 Gh/s;
• Sia - 1.3 Gh/s;
• Skunk – 43.5 Mh/s.