AMD's New Dual RX580 Mining Card

So you saw my article about the NVidia CMP 30HX card, and I was generally a bit underwhelmed. AMD has entered the mining specific market with an AMD RADEON RX 580 DUAL 8GBX2 MINING COMPUTE ACCELERATOR, 2 RX580 GPUS IN ONE CARD. A mouthful I know. I was pretty excited to check this out and was prepared to be disappointed like I was with NVidia. But this was not the case...

So first of all these come in packs of 6. One big box with six cards bubble wrapped inside. There is no cardboard box around the card, just a cheap clam shell type cover. This is great, I don't have to wreck my cuticles unpacking dozens of individual cards! Simple and easy to get out with no frills. One thing they could have done is install the PCI brackets though. These were just stuffed down the side of the box and I actually thought they didn't include them. My first test with the cards they were just sitting in the motherboard with gravity! The next thing I noted is that they are passively cooled, so no fans on the GPU, just a heat sink. This isn't a problem in our rigs as they are basically a wind tunnel and keep everything nice and cool. I tried to install 8 of these cards, to give 16 GPUs total. Unfortunately the 8 slot motherboard could not handle this and would not boot with all 8 cards installed. One type of board supported only 5 cards, and another type of board supported 6 cards. So 12 GPUs was the most I could operate (6 x 2). I'm now going to investigate if there is an 8 slot motherboard out there that can support 8 cards, giving 16 GPUs.

Testing these cards with HiveOS yielded pleasant results. Each single card was recognised as two individual GPUs. That's right. There are two GPUs and two sets of 8GB RAM on each card. This means that you get twice the mining performance with the single board when compared to a standard RX 580 8GB graphics card. The normal overclocking methods didn't seem to apply. What I did was flash the bioses, all 12 of them, and apply the one click timing patch in polaris bios editor. Then simply set the memory overlock to 2200. This yielded the most stable results after a couple of hours of messing around. There may be better solutions but I was fairly happy with the numbers at this overlock. Mining Ethereum achieves about 30.83 MH/s @ 83w per GPU, which means 61.7 MH/s @ 166w per card. No too shabby.

These cards are definitely a viable option if your motherbaord has support for more PCIe devices than slots. Each card retails for about $1,399, which is cheaper than an NVidia RTX card that ca do 61 MH/s. The power usage is higher, but there are plenty of situations where power is less of a consideration for miners, so I can see these being a good option for certain set ups. (Example Price Here).

Check out the two slightly warmer cards in the image below. HiveOS is madly trying to cool them down by turning the fans up to 100%, lol. What fans?!

The Verdict : These cards a pretty excellent for the price

Next : NVidia's RTX A2000 Review