Nvidia Is About To Steal The Cryptocurrency Mining Crown …

Buried on the 17th page of Toms Hardwares GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card review is a simple benchmark result that will dramatically disrupt the landscape of cryptocurrency mining. In fact, its the kind of data that should send AMD back to the drawing board at least if they want to maintain their choke-hold on the mining hardware market.

Historically AMD has been the undisputed crowd favorite of miners looking to stock up on new forms of digital currency like Dogecoin and Litecoin. AMDs Radeon graphics cards possess a secret sauce that allows significantly more powerful compute capabilities, at least the kind required for Scrypt-based mining.

That is, untilNvidiareleased their new Maxwell architecture this week.

PNYs GTX 750 ti | Image Credit: PNY Technologies

As we learned from my introduction to the GTX 750 Ti,first-generation Maxwell cards exhibit a 35% peak performance boost per core and twice the performance per watt. They also blow Kepler hashrates out of the water. Based on what Im seeing with the 750 Ti, Nvidia is poised to embarrass AMD in the performance-per-watt race and thats a substantial factor when youre paying the inflated energy bills caused by mining.

Nvidia didnt breathe a word of Maxwells seriously improved hashing ability in their marketing copy or press briefings, but Toms Hardware discovered it, and Ive been able to replicate their findings with multiple 750 Ti cards from both Nvidia and PNY.

Hashrate using a reference 750 Ti 1GB card from Nvidia (Software: Cudaminer)

What youre looking at in the image above is a hashrate of about 242kh/s using Nvidias reference 750 Ti 1GB graphics card ($139). This is significant for several reasons. First, the 750 Ti is a 60Watt card and doesnt even require a PCI-E power connector. You could plug this card into a cheap box from HP or Dell with a 300W power supply and have power to spare. Second, the temperature never seems to breach 65 degrees Celsius, and it runs considerably quieter and cooler than the AMD 260x ($119), which achieves a peak hashrate of 206kh/s and consumes nearly 130Watts of power.

Hold on a minute! I can hear you saying. AMDs 260x is $20 cheaper than Nvidias entry-level 750 Ti! Thats true, but the nominal price difference quickly evaporates when you consider how the 750 Ti sips power, which matters in the long run. Additionally, Toms Hardware ran the same mining environment test with AMDs upcoming Radeon 265 ($149) and achieved a peak hashrate of 252kh/s and remember that the Radeon 265 is a 150Watt card.

For that same price of $149, heres what I pulled off with PNYs 750 Ti 2GB with a moderate (and stable) overclock:

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Nvidia Is About To Steal The Cryptocurrency Mining Crown ...