Quick Look at AMD’s Radeon RX VEGA 64 for Crypto Mining

AMD’s new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU is now officially out in the wild and we have some first impressions from it to share regarding crypto mining. There were various pieces of information and rumors regarding the mining performance of the new AMD VEGA, but since we got out hands on one we are going to share what are the actual out of the box results that we got from it. The new HBM2 memory used in the AMD VEGA GPUs is probably the most interesting part in the new product line, but unfortunately out of the box it does not do great in memory intensive algorithms. Of course we all know from AMD’s Polaris range that with some tweaks and modifications extra performance will most likely be available to miners, but that could take some time.

Probably the most important performance that people what to know about is the hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) and other crypto coins based on the Ethash algorithm. Unfortunately the out of the box performance from Radeon RX VEGA 64 using the latest Claymore Dual Eth miner that comes with official support for Vega is just around 31-32 MHS. We’ve seen claims of much higher performance being theoretically possible, but we are yet to confirm if it is and if these claims are actually real or just speculation. The not so great thing is that this hashrate is achieved with pretty high power consumption and the higher the temperature of the GPU goes, the lower the performance drops and it is really easy for the air cooler VEGA 64 to get hot.

Here is the situation with Zcash (ZEC) mining using the new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU from AMD, just about 475-480 H/s. The not so great performance in these two more memory intensive algorithms, even with HBM2 memory is not what is the most concerning thing however. What we are more concerned with AMD’s new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPUs is the fact that they are power hungry GPUs and quickly get hot, so cooling them properly for 24/7 mining might be a bit of a challenge, at least for the air cooled model. The amount of power used does not justify the level of performance we get for mining out of the box at this point…

You can say that the new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU out of the box at stock settings does manage to perform very similar in terms of performance to what a well overclocked Nvidia GTX 1070 can also deliver for ETH and ZEC mining. The AMD GPU however does it with significantly more power used when compared to what the Nvidia card requires to provide very similar performance for mining (double the power for the VEGA). As far as gaming goes, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 is apparently closer to GTX 1080 in terms of performance, but then again it still consumes more power than the Nvidia card.

What remains to be seen is what the initial availability is going to be and what the actual pricing of the new VEGA GPUs will be considering the fact that the demand from miners might not be that high, though you never know… with market prices of Polaris GPUs at the level they are available now the official recommended price of the VEGA 64 does seem unreasonably low, so expect higher initial prices for sure. On the other hand the Radeon RX VEGA 64 could also do better in more GPU intensive algorithms than it is doing for memory intensive ones. The option for dual mining with one memory-intensive and one GPU-intensive algorithm may also turn out to be pretty attractive alternative, even wiht the not so great performance in memory-intensive mining algorithms alone.