So, I had some trouble with my Vega 64 and courier took it for RMA. They managed to lose it and the warranty expires in a few days so I’m not optimistic I’m getting it back. What follows is a lengthy legal process and my lawyer is expecting me to get about 600$ for the mess they caused, as it was a used card.
What I need now is to get something in that price range, as capable as the old card for gaming, and bruteforcing a SHA-256 hash or two every now and then.
Pricing is all over the place in Europe so I’m looking into:
Used Vega 64 for arround 400$
New Reference XFX Radeon RX 5700XT for 510$
New MSI Super Ventus RTX 2060 Super for 580$
I’m almost sure that new cards should outpace the old one in gaming, but I’m not sure they can come close to Vega for hash bruteforcing, at least comparing raw TFLOPS.
Vega took anywhere from 4 to 18 hours to crack in my specific workload, and I need it to be not much slower than that, 24 hours is the upper limit.
The monitor is a 1080p 144Hz one, and the rest of the system is a bog standard B450, Ryzen 5 1600X and 16GB of RAM.
Any suggestion guys, what should I do? Is nVidia worth the premium? Does it even hash fast enough?
So if performance has to better, then getting a Vega 64 is out right? (I mean it’s still a decent card really, but showing age for sure)
I know a lot of people have been having issues with drivers and their 5700 XT cards. It’s almost to the point where you shouldn’t get a 5700 XT until AMD fixes the issues with drivers (things like black screen and other buggy graphical things).
Not sure about the hashing rates on Nvidia cards, but I bet they’re not bad. I’m sure you might be able to find someone that has measured hashing rates on 2060 supers. If not you can at least look at the profitability of Bitcoin mining on the different cards since that uses SHA-256 hashing.
If you still want to stay in the AMD camp, maybe look for a used Radeon VII in regards to computation and GPGPU. It is not too far off from a Vega 64.
If you are on MS Windows, you will probably get the best bang for your buck with NVIDIA. I am just a lowly GNU/Linux user so I am AMD biased and am currently eying the 5700XT.
As far as I know the 5700 series is great for games and has newer video encoder/decoder stuff. In pure compute Vega should still be your first choice. Radeon VII was more of a sidestep because it only had 60 instead of 64 CUs. And then there is cooling / noise.
If Vega works for you, there is nothing wrong with it. I got a new Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64 for 350,- Euro. That card is properly cooled and therefor quiet.
yes the 1660S get’s stomped into the ground by a 2060S or a 5700XT obviously…
if you are runnong windows i’m just warning you about the driver situation with AMD. i’m “fine” now but the number of user with critical issues is eye watering to the point that more and more hardware channels and AMD say there is a real issue.
The fact AMD acknowledges the fact their software needs work stands out because every other manufacturere would deny there being any problem to begin with.
It’s 60CU vs 64CU, but higher clocks. IIRC there are workloads where a V64 can out-compute an RVII, depends on if it benefits from the higher clocks or not.
After some more research I fished out Gigabyte 1080Ti for 420$.
The thing is it’s from a miner, so I went to check it out in person, and I can’t see any signs of overheating, no discoloration on the heat-sink, no warping on the board, and the guy swears it was mining for about a year undervolted.
I know it’s a bit of a risky move, but he is willing to give me 30 day return window if something is wrong so I might pull the trigger and hope for the best.
I’ve managed to track down used Radeon VII, but those are super overpriced at 900$ - so that is not gonna happen.