RX580’s, 590’s, 5700XT, 6700XT and 3060TI
Mid-range GPU’S: Lower end video cards were working fine at the tail-end of the ETH mining years. We had several cards mining, at least a dozen and were making maybe $3-$5 a day. Then we moved on to the next level 5700XT and 6700XT cards. These cards achieved almost a 80-100% increase in capacity over the RX580’s. AMD was initially a fair card, NVIDIA had long been challenging AMD cards, but we wanted to get some comfort with what we knew and RX580 were doing OK, and we used that as an initial baseline.
AMD: Our first observation on the 5700 and 6700XT cards was that they heat up quickly, and depending on what brand you have, there were large differences between overall size of the card, heat sinks. Thermal paste also made a big difference. Some of the 5700 cards were almost 2x the size, if you had a smaller case some of the cards may not fit.
* One strange observation we had on the 5700XT vs 6700XT was that the 5700XT, the older of the 2 cards was about 10-15% faster (when mining). This really never made much sense to us at all.
NVIDIA: Once we switched over to NVIDIA, we saw a big difference! The 3060TI was very efficient, it managed heat very well, and it seemed to do the same job as the 6700XT but with much less effort. The 3060TI was faster than the 6700XT by about 25%.
Overall, the 3060TI was the best option. Personally I like the Founders Edition card (FE), mainly because this card did not have the mining limiter (LHR) installed on NVIDIA cards, however as of today that has been removed and is no longer an issue. Also, regarding 3rd party manufacturers, the variability is very high between resulting in a wide degree of difference between the cards.
As far as manufacturers goes, for both the AMD and NVIDIA cards, I prefer the manufacturer card. In terms of other models the cards from Sapphire, PowerColor, XFX and ASUS.
Here are some of the models we recommend:
- NVIDIA 3060TI Founders Edition (FE)
- NVIDIA 4060TI Founders Edition (FE)
- AMD – PowerColor 6700XT (affiliate link)
- AMD – XFX MERC 7600 (latest 7000 series GPU budget card) (affiliate link)
- AMD – XFX Speedster MERC319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (affiliate link)
- AMD – XFX Speedster MERC310 AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX (affiliate link)
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