Clever Geek Handbook

Nvidia and ASUS have developed specialized video cards for mining cryptocurrency





Powerful video cards have now become a scarce commodity in some countries, including Russia. The reason is a jump in the cost of cryptocurrency, which led to a very rapid appreciation of the virtual currency. Accordingly, even those who are quite far from information technology are beginning to mine mining. Previously, modders collected fast and very productive personal computers, and now - crypto farms, which allow mining bitcoins and other types of cryptovalues.



At the same time, the miners do not particularly look at the price of adapters, buying them in large quantities. Store salespeople say that there are buyers who take all the video cards at a time, no matter how many of them are available. As a result, a shortage of video cards began to be felt in stores in many cities of Russia and neighboring countries. The most popular are the newest and most powerful models from AMD, plus the GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080. But miners need more and more powerful cards. And manufacturers, understanding the specificity of demand, decided to develop a “sharpened” card specially for the extraction of cryptocurrency. Recently, Nvidia and ASUS presented specialized cards without video outputs. “Crypto-extractors” do not need them and decided to get rid of them.



The main purpose of the cards is already reflected in the title. ASUS has two trial models. The first, ASUS Mining P106, is designed for maximum performance with minimum operating costs. So, according to the developers, this model is 36% more effective for mining than regular universal maps. Also, the manufacturer says that the new systems are designed to work 24/7. ASUS Mining P106 is a modified model of the GeForce GTX 1060 with an NVIDIA GP106 graphics processor.



In Mining P106, Nvidia's chip works. Characteristics of the map are listed below, more information can be found here .









There is another specimen in the ASUS video cards assortment, already based on the AMD Polaris 10 chip. This is Mining RX 470, more details about this mining engineering miracle can be found here . Interestingly, in this case there is an output for displaying the image, which distinguishes this card from the model described above. The monitor here can only be connected using Dual DVI-D. Accordingly, the image resolution (maximum) will be 2560 * 1600 pixels.







It is noteworthy that the cutouts for the HDMI and DisplayPort ports remained on the metal back plate of the card. But behind the holes there is nothing - an empty space. As for the memory, 4 GB of GDDR5 with a 256-bit interface is installed here. The GPU frequency is 926 MHz; if you use the Boost mode, this indicator can be increased up to 1206 MHz. The memory frequency is 7 GHz. So most features are close to the Radeon RX 470.



There is no sale of these cards yet, both companies only announced work on “cryptocurrency” cards, and also showed the characteristics of such elements. The manufacturer does not report the price either. Both systems are equipped with a dual-slot cooler with two fans. In addition, the need to connect additional power, without this card will not work. For the MINING-RX470-4G, an eight-pole connector is used, the ASUS MINING-P106-6G is a six-pole connector.



In principle, the decision to launch the production of specialized graphics cards for miners is correct. It allows you to meet the growing demand of crypto currency players and at the same time relieve the load on the gaming graphics card market. The problem is that due to the lack of graphics cards in some countries, ordinary gamers cannot buy a video card for an upgrade or a new gaming PC at a reasonable price.



Crypto currency trading can be understood. The fact is that some types of virtual money over the past year have greatly increased against the dollar. For example, Ethereum, cryptocurrency, which not so long ago had problems, rose against the dollar over the last year by 2,700 percent.



Perhaps this is only the first step of the graphics card manufacturers - if sales go well, other models will be released.


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