I am routinely asked what’s better AMD or NVIDIA cards for mining. Honestly there is no right answer. Each brand and card series has their own benefits. AMDs are great for dual mining and the NVIDIA cards can do great with Lyra2REV based coins. Both do well on ETH.
This guide is not intended to sway you one way or the other, but rather give you a practical comparison of the two brands so you can start to make your own decisions when you start to build your own GPU mining rig.
For this story, I build a new 8 GPU mining rig. It has 5 NVIDIA 1060 SCs and 3 AMD RX580 GamerX cards. Powered by a 1600 watt PSU, with an Asus mother board and a Celeron processor. All running on Windows 10. And, it’s tied together nicely on a Lowes wireframe shelf.
Mixing Cards — Is it okay?
YES! You can mix AMD and NVIDA cards. Afterburner will even group the cards nicely together when you run it (so will Claymore, GoMiner, and Marlin when I tested.) AMD cards first, followed by the NVIDIA cards in order. Oddly, windows will group the NVIDIA cards before the AMD cards when you view your device manager. This doesn’t matter at all, just interesting.
Installation and Drivers
Physical installation of both brands of cards is the same. Mount it on a riser, connect power, and plug in. I’ve moved my cards to all my different PCIe slots to see if there was ever a difference and I could not find one.
Installing drivers is also the same, but here NVIDIA cards shine a little. NVIDIA do not have any special drivers for mining. The current version on their website will do the job. Not so with the AMD cards. For AMD cards you will want to download the Crimson Blockchain drivers from their site. Once you do that, you’ll get a significant boost to hashing power on the AMD cards.
Bios Mods (AMD Only)
AMD cards do require a few extra steps to get to most hashing power out of them. This requires you to mod the bios on each card. Yes, it sounds daunting for someone who hasn’t done it before and there are great online guides but the process is this:
- Use the AMD bios utility to take a backup of the card’s bios, save it somewhere safe.
- Use the Polaris bios tool to edit the straps on the bios. I actually recommend using the auto update feature on the new version of Polaris. It worked great for me on all my cards.
- Using the AMD bios utility again, update the bios on the card.
- Done. Reboot and start hashing.
Note on the AMD 580s my hashing on ETH was this:
- Out of the box — 17 Mh/s
- Crimsion Drivers — 24 Mh/s
- Bios Mod — 31 Mh/s
NVIDIA cards are significantly easier here as you do not modify the bios. They are plug and play.
Overclocking Memory and GPU
Both brands overclock the same way, using a program. You can use Saphire TRIXX to tweak your AMD cards and Afterburner to tweak the NVIDIA cards. Or you can use Afterburner to modify both. I personally prefer to use Afterburner for both. I found when you run both TRIXX and AB together they can cause windows to lockup. But note, you cannot undervolt your AMD cards with Afterburner.
Power Consumption Undervolting
Undervolting your cards is the best way to reduce heat and cut power consumption. There is a pretty significant difference in brands here. The AMD cards are hungry for power and create a lot of heat. While the NVIDIA cards seem less so. Granted for this story I’m comparing 1060s against RX580s.
NVIDIA cards you can achieve a 30–50% heat and power reduction in your cards by undervolting with Afterburner. I find that lowering them to 58–60% works best and will not degrade hashing power and keep your cards cool. This is not as true for the 1070s and 1080s. But overall is true for the brand.
AMD cards do not like to undervolt with Afterburner. But using command lines on Claymore you can undervolt your cards all the same. But, you can not undervolt AMD cards as much. They don’t like it, and will crash if you starve them too much. I found that anything more than at 15% cut will impact performance and stability.
Heat and Memory
This is where a big difference in cards exist. From my experience the AMD cards run hotter than then NVIDIA cards. But they can take it and it memory brand does not seem to impact performance significantly. NVIDIA cards seem to be a little more touchy with heat. Also, the brand of memory makes a big difference with the NVIDIA cards. In my case, I have 3 cards with Samsung and 2 cards with Hynix memory (use zGPU to see what you have.) The Samsung cards can take a lot more heat then the Hynix cards. With mine I can push the memory to +750 in AB on the Samsung cards without an issue. The Hynix cards, anything more than 700 and they will within crash in 5 minutes of hashing.
Stability
Both brands appear to be equal in terms of stability. Once you have tuned your rig with Afterburner, TRIXX, or though the command line on your miner they run fine. I have not seen a significant difference in brand here. Maybe I have been lucky. But there is one difference with these cards when it comes to miner crash recovery, specifically with Claymore. The AMD cards crash more gracefully than then NVIDIA cards. Claymore will detect the issue, and move on or restart with the bad card hashing zero. With the NVIDIA cards the entire run will stop and freeze, resulting in 0 hashing power for the entire rig. Yes, this is with Claymore specifically, other miners behave differently.
I hope this story highlights some of the differences between the brands and helps you in your future purchases.
Fans
Both types of cards have good fans but to keep them running smooth I found that running them both at 80% works best. Your mileage may vary depending on your climate.
Final Thoughts
If you want super easy setup NVIDIA cards are great. If you want to get your hands dirty and have a bit more fun the AMD cards will reward you with a bit more power for the buck (specifically with ETH mining.)
If you like my story and want to drip me a token or two, you can at:
ETH: 0x7BFfAc21516f3f7BdB0FEbdD73aF8B08F59c97b1
SC: 3462d0b00db0ddeb692f6c0d47aea7249cddf656ad4e2e602a9010e70831e51039e34bae4d09
