No question about it, Ethereum is a hot topic these days, with the burgeoning new cryptocurrency currently on pace to intersect and even outpace Bitcoin's market cap valuation. Though it suffered some wild volatility as of late, the open-source, blockchain-based currency platform is on a tear with hobbyists and enthusiasts looking to download and crunch transaction workloads for the ecosystem, on high end desktop PCs. Originally, these machines may have been targeted for gaming but now their graphics cards can also serve as powerful processing engines for crypto-mining, so much so that there's been a run on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, driving retailing pricing through the roof on basic supply versus intense demand market dynamics and price gouging. That said, the other metric, beyond GPU cost, that can be a barrier to entry for crypto-miners is power efficiency. Crypto-mining workloads can push cards hard and draw lots of power. As such, there are clear performance-per-watt sweet spots emerging among the current round of graphics cards and the results may surprise you.
HotHardware recently tested eight of the top gaming graphics cards on the market currently, both in terms of raw hash rate (MegaHashes per second) versus total system power draw under load, when mining coins based on the Dagger Hashimoto algorithm that Ethereum (or ETH) uses. It may sound counter-intuitive, but of course all GPUs are not created equal and more powerful doesn't always mean "better" when it comes to mining efficiency for the least amount of power draw, while keeping your electric bill in check. And when you consider these GPUs at scale, since many people literally have mining farms of cards all whirring away, every Watt consumed counts, in addition to raw hash rate.
Logically, the current top gaming graphics card, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, also delivers the highest Ethereum hash rate but it also consumes dramatically more power under load when mining, versus more midrange cards like the GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 480. Further, with a bit of memory clock and power target tuning, the GTX 1070 can deliver a lot more performance, while still maintaining a much lower power draw profile.
When you look at all the numbers, and with all things considered including power draw, GeForce GTX 1070 cards look to be the best performance-per-watt GPUs out there currently, with the AMD Radeon RX 480 and RX 580 coming in fairly close behind.
Regardless, if you're looking to jump into the mining game, with a little bit of research and some tweaking, all cards can be made to run more efficiently and deliver better performance per kilowatt-hour. Check out HotHardware's full review for specific metrics on top cards, along with tuning tips. Happy mining.
