So long Vega!

[Eric3988]

According to a Reddit user and WCCTech, the Vega 64 can hit up to 43.5 MH/s at 130 watts in Ethereum mining. We've been hearing from miners that the Vegas were too expensive and inefficient, but it looks like the efficiency argument is no longer valid. The Polaris cards costing what they do now are not much better proposition versus the optimized Vega. If you're on the bubble considering either Vega, maybe it's time to bite the bullet and buy the bundles out there before it's too late....

Source

 

[xkm1948]

So you are buying Vega for mining or gaming? I am confused. If for gaming 1080 aftermarket would be a better choice given Vega64 current price. If for mining then, have fun i guess.

 

[RejZoR]

Vega 64 prices are somewhat normalized now. Maybe few 10€ higher than one would want on reference designs, but they don't cost 700+ € anymore and quite few stores have them in stock now. Good stocks of aftermarket cooled ones are needed because AiO one price is just too high quite frankly, water or not. I don't think beefy air cooled ones would be reaching those prices. They should be a tiny bit more expensive than GTX 1080 if trend continues the way things stand now. At best, they'll cost roughly the same as aftermarket GTX 1080.

 

[Rehmanpa]

How do you get the mining power consumption lowered so much??

 

[qubit]

How do you get the mining power consumption lowered so much??

Less voltage and lower clocks.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

1000 MHz GPU (versus 1600 MHz), 1100 MHz VRAM (versus 945 MHz)

Vega is clearly constrainted by memory bandwidth so the user cut back on all the wasted power by the GPU (where most of the power consumption is) and pushed the memory as far as it could go.

 

[Eric3988]

So you are buying Vega for mining or gaming? I am confused. If for gaming 1080 aftermarket would be a better choice given Vega64 current price. If for mining then, have fun i guess.

I'm a gamer, so there's your answer. I have the 56 on back order from Amazon even though my order was placed within 5 minutes of launch. Right now I'm very conflicted regarding my best GPU. On one hand, I like the Vega 56 at MSRP for it's performance. I'm also biased seeing as I have a FreeSync monitor and really desire to see it paired with an AMD GPU. Like you said though, an aftermarket 1080 is better for gaming, even though it's more expensive. On top of that news broke that GDDR5 prices are going to drive up costs on all Nvidia cards in the very imminent future. My conundrum is twofold; wait on a backordered Vega that may or may not arrive soon or buy a 1080 now before the price becomes too unpalatable for me.

 

[cdawall]

Issue is still price. $700-800USD for the cards and we still have an ROI issue.

 

[Eric3988]

Issue is still price. $700-800USD for the cards and we still have an ROI issue.

Price is the issue short term, but once the supply level increases and prices come down in a month or two, what's to stop miners from grabbing a $550-600 AIB 64 versus two 580s at around $350-450 each? The thing is once the price swings in favor of the Vegas, I don't think they'll be in stock until the market really takes a dive.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I doubt supply will be fixed any time soon...just like how exorbitantly priced RX 580s are.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

I really like AMD... Been my personal favorite of the the brands until now...
They just aren't competing with Nvidia at the moment.

Get the Nvidia before the price hike... The performance you lose from losing free sync will be gained from a better graphics core and you'll still produce less heat...

 

[terroralpha]

According to a Reddit user and WCCTech, the Vega 64 can hit up to 43.5 MH/s at 130 watts in Ethereum mining. We've been hearing from miners that the Vegas were too expensive and inefficient, but it looks like the efficiency argument is no longer valid.

let me start out by saying i actually own a vega 64 and have been messing around with it for a week now. undervolted it, overclocked it, mined with it, etc. WCCF spreads bullsh*t all the time, they never verify anything. if it looks like it can generate clicks, they post it. they posted like 10+ "articles" claiming that custom RX 480s will be running at 1500 and even 1600Mhz using photoshopped screenshots as proof. this was of course before Polaris came out and all that turned out to be BS. i can't comment on the reddit user though, but i wouldn't hold my breath.

but let's for a moment assume that this is true. what is also true that you can get 32-34MH/s @90W out of an RX 580 with a custom BIOS which is readily available on the net. even at inflated, scalpers prices, you can get RX 580s at $320 any time you feel like it. you can buy two 580s for $650, less than what a vega 64 sells for, and get 64-68MH/s at only 200W. there are mining specific motherboards out there that can support as many as 17 GPUs now. the icing on the cake is that once AMD can actually step up production on Vega cards, second hand Vega 64s will be going for under $350 (after selling fees and shipping) a pop second hand while RX 580 will still be fetching $200+

so, having said all that, Vega still makes zero absolutely worthless for mining.

Price is the issue short term, but once the supply level increases and prices come down in a month or two, what's to stop miners from grabbing a $550-600 AIB 64 versus two 580s at around $350-450 each? The thing is once the price swings in favor of the Vegas, I don't think they'll be in stock until the market really takes a dive.

only the super fancy 580s cost that much. here are some RX 580s that are more than good enough for mining at $320-330:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06ZXRLX3H/?tag=tec06d-20
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XZZ93FQ/?tag=tec06d-20
if you browse ebay you can pick you similar cards in the low $300s all day every day.

additionally, if you are a high volume miner who buys thousands of cards, you can contact Asus, MSI, etc, and they will happily manufacture a batch of cards for you, even cater to your specifications, and you can get them for $300 a pop. the only caveat is that you have to provide your own logistics. like these people who rented space on 747 cargo jambo jets: http://www.businessinsider.com/cryptocurrency-miners-rent-boeing-747s-2017-7

 

[Eric3988]

let me start out by saying i actually own a vega 64 and have been messing around with it for a week now. undervolted it, overclocked it, mined with it, etc. WCCF spreads bullsh*t all the time, they never verify anything. if it looks like it can generate clicks, they post it. they posted like 10+ "articles" claiming that custom RX 480s will be running at 1500 and even 1600Mhz using photoshopped screenshots as proof. this was of course before Polaris came out and all that turned out to be BS. i can't comment on the reddit user though, but i wouldn't hold my breath.

but let's for a moment assume that this is true. what is also true that you can get 32-34MH/s @90W out of an RX 580 with a custom BIOS which is readily available on the net. even at inflated, scalpers prices, you can get RX 580s at $320 any time you feel like it. you can buy two 580s for $650, less than what a vega 64 sells for, and get 64-68MH/s at only 200W. there are mining specific motherboards out there that can support as many as 17 GPUs now. the icing on the cake is that once AMD can actually step up production on Vega cards, second hand Vega 64s will be going for under $350 (after selling fees and shipping) a pop second hand while RX 580 will still be fetching $200+

so, having said all that, Vega still makes zero absolutely worthless for mining.




only the super fancy 580s cost that much. here are some RX 580s that are more than good enough for mining at $320-330:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06ZXRLX3H/?tag=tec06d-20
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XZZ93FQ/?tag=tec06d-20
if you browse ebay you can pick you similar cards in the low $300s all day every day.

additionally, if you are a high volume miner who buys thousands of cards, you can contact Asus, MSI, etc, and they will happily manufacture a batch of cards for you, even cater to your specifications, and you can get them for $300 a pop. the only caveat is that you have to provide your own logistics. like these people who rented space on 747 cargo jambo jets: http://www.businessinsider.com/cryptocurrency-miners-rent-boeing-747s-2017-7

All I can say is, I hope your right about all of your points. Gamers have been getting shafted for too long this year. Both AMD and Nvidia need to step up to meet supply or somebody else needs to enter the market because the demand is there.

 

[cdawall]

Price is the issue short term, but once the supply level increases and prices come down in a month or two, what's to stop miners from grabbing a $550-600 AIB 64 versus two 580s at around $350-450 each? The thing is once the price swings in favor of the Vegas, I don't think they'll be in stock until the market really takes a dive.

62MH/s for the pair of RX580's those are back down to the $300 price point at least at microcenter (although in store and webpage seem somewhat different). The only Vega 64 cards I have seen in person sticker at $699.99. That is 1080Ti territory and while their ethereum performance might be low zcash is similar.

 

[MrGenius]

Read the article carefully. They basically proved it was impossible with the amount of watts reportedly consumed.

1 card + 248W = 43.8 MH/s
2 cards + 248W = 87 MH/s

Do the math. It doesn't add up. First, half of 248 is 124(not ~130). Second, how can 2 cards achieve pretty much exactly double the hash rate of 1 card while only consuming the exact same amount of watts as 1 card? Answer...they can't. It's BS.

 

[Rehmanpa]

So can you undervolt an r9 290 to get similar results? Or is this strictly for polaris and vega?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Vega is a really big chip that's starved for memory. Vega really needed a 4096-bit bus (like Fiji) but they only gave it 2048-bit. This discovery is pretty much exclusive to Vega because Vega is unique in it's construction.

 

[Rehmanpa]

Vega is a really big chip that's starved for memory. Vega really needed a 4096-bit bus (like Fiji) but they only gave it 2048-bit. This discovery is pretty much exclusive to Vega because Vega is unique in it's construction.

Just out of curiosity, had they given it a 4096 bit bus, what kind of performance increases would it have had? Would it have been significant?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Judging by the 25% jump in hash rate by optimizing and overclocking the HBM2, likely yes. AMD went with two stacks to make the package more economical to mass produce.

 

[terroralpha]

Just out of curiosity, had they given it a 4096 bit bus, what kind of performance increases would it have had? Would it have been significant?

only the engineers at AMD can answer that question exactly, but if i had to speculate, i would say the difference would not be meaningful. if a 4096 bit would have brought it close or past 1080 ti performance in gaming, they wouldn't think twice about doing it. they would have just done it and charged $700+ for it ($900 after merchants inflate the price).

they didn't do it because they didn't think it would be worth it. fury x had a 4096 bit bus, so we know they would have done it if they needed to.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

1080 Ti released after Vega was taped out. To change Vega to 4096-bit would require a new architecture. Because Vega had significant compute changes and suffered multiple delays because of it. They couldn't start working on the 4096-bit version until the problems were ironed out with the 2048-bit version. A 4096-bit version could easily be in the works now but we won't see it until next year at the earliest (and probably in very limited supply).

AMD was aiming for Titan X (Pascal) and it hit it (didn't need 4096-bit to get there).