Although the cryptocurrency is still in a short position, many miners have given up mining and sold a large number of mining card slots. GPU prices continue to fall (no one is buying it yet), but there are still miners interested in the newly launched Intel ARC graphics card series. Is the performance good? Recently, the well-known mining software Nanominer has added support for Intel ARC A380, and foreign YouTube channels have also conducted actual tests. The data shows that this card is not a good mining card.
Intel ARC A380 can also be used to mine Ethereum, but no one will do it
Recently, the Nanominer development team announced the addition of support for Intel ARC graphics card ethash, as well as the function of automatically transferring ETH to ETC when ETH is transferred to the PoS proof-of-stake mechanism:
To this end, the well-known foreign YouTube channel Red Panda Mining also conducted actual testing. First of all, let’s have a general understanding of the hardware specifications of the ARC 380 graphics card. The graphics memory interface of this card is only 96 bits, and the Xe Core only has 8 cores. This is not to say that it is very high:
The Nanominer software shows that the ARC 380 can provide about 10.2MH/s of mining power without any optimization, and the power consumption is around 75W. Overall, this mining power is not very good. It is converted to about 0.136MH/s per watt, which is lower than the 0.38MH/s average of most mainstream GPUs on the market:
He also uses a hardware device to monitor power consumption:
In addition, the video also points out that the ARC A380 may not mine Ethereum (ETH), only Ethereum Classic (ETC). This is because the DAG file size of ETH is 5127MB, and the available VRAM of the A380 is only 4832MB. Although the total VRAM provided by the A380 is 6GB, if this is set as the main GPU graphics card of the operating system, some VRAM resources will be used, which means that if you want to use the A380 to mine Ethereum, you must set another graphics card as the main graphics card:
But strictly speaking, it doesn’t have to be so troublesome, because the Ethereum Foundation has set a date on August 24 to fully transition from the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism to the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism between September 10 and 20.
So overall, Intel ARC A380 is obviously not suitable for mining. Even though it does not have any mining restrictions, its mining computing power is not as good as other graphics cards, even lower than the GTX 1660 series. In addition, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series and AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics cards have dropped in price and no one wants to buy them. For pure mining, it is undoubtedly better to choose other graphics cards.
Red Panda Mining Video:
according to TechSpot According to the latest GPU price tracking data, in the RTX 30 series, high-end graphics cards are already much lower than the MSRP recommended price. For example, the RTX 3090 Ti has dropped by 33%, and can be found for as low as $1,350 on Newegg. The RTX 3080 Ti has also dropped by 28%, and can be purchased for as low as $870:
Among the AMD Radeon 6000 series, the 6900XT has fallen the most, currently down 30%, and is available for as low as $700 on Newegg:
Source: KOCPC Chinese