Cryptocurrency and the mining industry have had some interesting ups and downs over the last couple of years, with GPU mining with algorithms such as ETHASH / Ethereum picking up hugely in popularity and profitability in the last few years.

One of the most popular ways to generate profit is to use a mining rig with multiple graphics cards to mine cryptocurrency, which is a common way that ‘mining farms’ are setup with hundreds of graphics cards running 24/7 to make huge profits.

With Ethereum looking like its doing well going into 2021 and the latest rounds of GPU releases from AMD and NVIDIA having just passed, let’s take a look at what kind of cards you may want to look into if you want to get into cryptocurrency mining!

The table above shows each graphics card with its respective estimated ‘hash rate’ measured in megahash per second in Ethereum, as well as an average price and power draw so you can have a rough idea of how well the cards perform relative to each other.

As newer graphics card architectures are released with more and more efficient processing it becomes better to stick to the newer cards to maximize profit due to space and power requirements.

NVIDIA GeForce GPUs

From this generation on the NVIDIA side, the GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660 Ti seem to be a good balance between hashrate, cost and power draw, while the 3060 Ti looks to be the best card from NVIDIA overall with a substantial increase in performance over the 16 series cards.

The 1660 Super and 1660 Ti coming in between $440 and $500 aren't much slower than the RTX 2060, 2060 Super and 2070 while maintaining a much lower TDP.

The current generation RTX 3060 Ti nearly triples the performance of the 1660 Super and Ti with just less than half the TDP and about double the price at around $950. With availability of the 3060 Ti getting better over the past few weeks, it looks to be a worthwhile investment for miners and enthusiasts looking to make some profit.

AMD Radeon GPUs

Thanks to massive efficiency upgrades coming to AMD graphics cards in the 5000 series, the previous performance kings (RX 570 and RX 580) look much less appealing compared to the RX 5600 XT and RX 5700 XT.

These 2 cards provide good performance at a reasonable price and TDP, and the 6000 series cards don't seem to bring a whole lot of extra performance to the table at their higher cost and power draw.

At 150W, the 5600 XT looks like it is comparable in value to the 1660 Super and Ti from NVIDIA, with the 5700 XT bumping up the performance by about 40% for a 30% price increase and 50% TDP increase.

When purchasing graphics cards for mining purposes, it is important to choose a card with good quality fans. Many cards used for mining should be 'undervolted', which means that they run as cool as possible for the lowest power consumption. Generally speaking, the cards are run 24/7 as well, so the most common component of the graphics cards failing is actually the fans or memory, not the GPU itself. Also remember that graphics cards are not manufactured with the aim of mining.

When running multiple graphics cards you will also need high wattage efficient power supplies to provide enough juice to the cards, check out our range of quality power supplies here!

If you are interested in some of these graphics cards, check out our huge range here or take a look below for some recommended cards!

DISCLAIMER:

There is risk involved with any type of cryptocurrency mining, Computer Lounge is not a financial adviser and is not responsible for any financial issues related to mining!

Running a graphics card 24/7 under a mining load puts a considerable amount more strain on the graphics card, than they would observe under normal desktop and gaming use. Mining causes higher GPU and memory temperatures which can decrease the life of your graphics card.

Computer Lounge does not provide warranty for graphics cards used for cryptocurrency mining.