Ah mining. The revival of an old craze. Who doesn’t want to make their room’s temperature increase to insane levels over the summer in order to cash in on the mining wagon? Who doesn’t want to pull their hardware by the ankles and wrists, stretching it in utilization so as to maintain the PoW (proof of Work) cryptographic security in cryptocurrencies? Apparently, a not insignificant number of users and would-be miners does want that. That has, in turn, placed a whole lot of pressure on the graphics card market from both AMD and NVIDIA, with prices climbing and skyrocketing for graphics cards in the $200-$400 price ranges, as you know. It remains to be seen whether the flow of new miners decreases somewhat now, considering the recent market correction (read: dip) in the cryptocurrency market value (down around 42% from the all-time high of 357€ [~$400] of June 12th.)
After ASUS, it would seem like it’s Sapphire’s time to try and sway miners from their consumer-oriented, gaming graphics cards, through the launch of five different graphics cards models especially geared for mining. These are currently available for pre-order on Overclockers UK, and there are five different products in total, one based of RX 560 silicon, and four different takes on the RX 470 silicon (no, that’s not a typo; it really is the 400 series.)
The RX 560 Pulse Mining Edition differentiates itself through the shroud design and the single DVI output (while usual version of this card feature an additional HDMI and DisplayPort ports.) Its 60W TDP should be good enough to provide around 12-15 MH/s through a 1300 MHz boost core clock and 1750 MHz GDDR5 memory (4 GB in size, though, so may want to look here). The usage of a single 90 mm fan to keep the card cool, however, probably means that temperatures won’t be as low as they could be.
The RX 470 versions, on the other hand, are interesting beasts. Not only are these based on the original Polaris configuration (geared for lower power consumption and lower clocks than the current RX 500 series), but these lack display outputs (which makes sense for mining rigs.) In addition, and this is the most interesting part, Sapphire is differentiating their RX 470 graphics cards not only by memory pool size (4 GB and 8 GB versions), but also by memory IC manufacturer. Namely, mining-geared RX 470 graphics cards manufactured with Samsung ICs are fetching a 10£ premium over their SK Hynix-enabled brethren, on account of possibility of higher overclocks out of the Samsung ICs (and for those who don’t know it, memory speed and overclocking is one of the best ways of increasing hashing power of your graphics card of choice, particularly for Ethereum.) The Samsung versions (260£ and 300£ for the 4 GB and 8 GB versions respectively) are projected to generate 25 to 28 MH/s, while the SK Hynix versions (250£ and 290£ for the 4 GB and 8 GB versions respectively) are expected to generate between 24 to 27 MH/s.
Source: Techpowerup
