Bitcoin Miner rig comparison

What is the fastest way to mine bitcoins? It depends what type of architecture you’re using, but graphics cards are losing the battle to faster devices.Graphical processing units (GPUs) have traditionally been used for mathematically intensive operations. They are designed to handle floating point numbers, which are used in the calculations necessary to display complex graphics. This also made them useful for the heavy mathematical lifting used to break password protection. Russian company Elcomsoft made a whole business from software designed to do that.

Now, these cards have another use: mining bitcoins. Their number-crunching power can be applied to the hashing algorithm used to generate the digital currency. The more hashing calculations that can be made, the more bitcoins can be generated. The creation of bitcoins is therefore related to the time and computing power available, resulting in the measurement of megahashes per second (Mhash/sec).

There are two main vendors of high-end graphics cards: AMD and Nvidia. A study by ExtremeTech in mid-April found that AMD GPUs excel at bitcoin mining, outperforming the Nvidia cards. This is in contrast to the conventional situation in gaming, where NVidia’s GeoForce 600 GPUs have been getting the upper hand, the study noted.

AMD’s cards are better at mining because they do better at manipulating integers, which is more appropriate for the bitcoin mining algorithm.

“Should you mine if you have an Nvidia card?” asked the ExtremeTech article. “You can, but be aware that power costs make this a losing proposition if Bitcoin prices decline to historic values.”

For a graphics card to do anything useful, it needs a software driver. This is a software program that lets it talk to a computer and take instructions from it. Without the software driver, the bitcoin mining software wouldn’t be able to use the GPU as its “brain”.

Most applications rely on software drivers provided by the graphics card manufacturers themselves. However, other software drivers also exist, written by a community of third-party volunteers. These are known as “open-source” drivers.

AMD engineer Tom Stellard has modified the open-source drivers for the Radeon HD5000 and HD6000 graphics cards so that they could work with open-source bitcoin mining software. This lets people mine bitcoins without relying on the manufacturer’s own software.