Posted on Monday, March 15 2021 @ 13:39 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Radeon RX 6700 XT is worse at mining than RX 5700 XT
Citing a crypto mining blog, VideoCardz reports the Radeon RX 6700 XT seems to achieve a hash rate of only 43MH/s in Ethereum mining, which means the card is worse at this job than its predecessor. The Radeon RX 5700 XT hits a hash rate of 54.3MH/s so the soon-to-be-out RX 6700 XT model is about 25 percent worse for mining.The site adds that without NVIDIA's anti-crypto mining algorithm on the Radeon RX 3060, both cards would have offered roughly similar performance across all alt-coins. At least for now, it's unclear why the Navi22-based RX 6700 XT is worse for mining than the Navi10-based Radeon RX 5700 XT.
The RX 6800/6900 XT series can offer around 60 MH/s while GeForce RTX 3060 Ti can offer around 50 MH/s. Those are of course stock settings, while most cards see a big improvement after being power limited and overclocked on the memory. The RX 6700 XT optimizations could bring the card closer to 48 MH/s, Cryptomining Blog estimates. However, for now, the card does not look like the best choice for mining.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 anti-mining algorithm circumvented?
Last week there were reports about a mod to circumvent the GeForce RTX 3060's anti-mining algorithm but that news turned out to be inaccurate. Unfortunately, over the weekend, more credible reports have surfaced about a GeForce RTX 3060 hack. VideoCardz writes there are now at least three independent sources claiming the restriction has been broken.Various videos and screenshots are circulating on social media that show GeForce RTX 3060 cards hitting an Ethereum hash rate of over 40MH/s. Japanese tech site PCWatch claims the hack doesn't require driver or BIOS-level modification. It appears to be a simple software hack:
The editorial department was able to confirm the fact that restrictions could be circumvented by interacting with related parties. The specific method is not introduced here, but it does not require modification of the driver or BIOS, and anyone can easily do it with a little effort. -- PC WatchCuriously, there are also unconfirmed reports that the anti-mining restriction is lifted when you use the NVIDIA CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) driver version 470.05 beta. Basically, the gist seems to be that the protection isn't as "unhackable" as NVIDIA was saying a couple of weeks ago.
Crypto miners are now turning to oil-based cooling
One final mining tidbit, WCCF Tech spotted a pretty crazy mining build that uses immersion cooling. Below you can see a tweet of a mining rig with eight ASUS GeForce RTX video cards. All of them are submerged in a basin of mineral oil to keep temperatures in check. Submersion cooling is nothing new, but for practical reasons, it's rarely used of course.Mineral-oil cooling has its own advantages over standard liquid cooling and makes sure that all components are cooled at the same rate rather than variable temperatures across GPU, VRAM, and VRMs. The whole PC is submerged within the cooling liquid and we can also expect lower temperatures when the cards are being run under the cryptocurrency mining operations.
... with oil cooling = the craziest mining ever in the worldhttps://t.co/beYwz9pAux@elchapuzas @hms1193 @harukaze5719 @hardwareluxx_de @nbc_net @VideoCardz https://t.co/QSSaUxOPwG pic.twitter.com/WVW3dNmo7C
— I_Leak_VN (@I_Leak_VN) March 10, 2021
The site also came across a watercooled mining rig with ten GeForce RTX 3090 video cards. The rig is custom-made to accommodate the ten video cards. Each card seems to feature a Bitspower waterblock and is connected to a 280mm radiator. Three Super Flower Leadex Titanium 1600W PSUs are used. The ten cards reportedly run under 50°C while mining coin.
