Dear users,

NiceHash was built from miners, for miners. Many years of experiences in the field of cryptocurrencies mining enables us to develop the world's no.1 platform for hashing power marketplace. This platform benefits sellers (miners) as well as buyers. In order to make sure that platform is always up-to date and covers the wide range of cryptocurrencies algorithms, platforms and devices, we're constantly upgrading our testing laboratory. All the hardware, listed in our Profitability calculator is hosted in our lab and tested against various kinds of mining software and utilities. Of course, many other devices, not listed in the Profitability calculator are also compatible with our service and can be profitable for mining. However the hardware, found in our Profitability calculator is on top of the list of the most profitable hardware (now and in the past).

Just recently we added some new hardware, in particular a system with latest generation Intel CPU and some high-performance NVIDIA GPUs. We decided to test latest Intel Z270 chipset and Intel's flagship desktop CPU Intel Core i7 7700K in multi-GPU setup. In particular we were interested how well the new chipset plays with multi-gpu setup (6 GPUs) and how powerful is Intel's flagship desktop CPU on some popular CPU-mineable algorithms.

One aspect of GPU mining that might become important in the near future is also the bandwidth of PCIe interface. GPU mining trends towards memory-hard algorithms which potentially also requires significant PCIe bus bandwidth. PCIe v3.0 interface doubles the bandwidth of previous generation PCIe v2.0 inteface, which can be found on most of current GPU rigs (many of them with the popular ASRock H81 BTC PRO motherboard). All the recent chipsets and motherboard supports PCIe v3.0 therefore we wanted to see how is this working in a 6 GPU rig setup. We used a decent but reasonably priced mothearboard (still too expensive for mass mining rigs setups, though) - the ASRock Z270 Extreme4. Motherboard hosted Intel Core i7 7700K, dual (2x) 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX rot DDR4-3866 RAM and various NVIDIA GPUs (1x GTX 1080, 3x GTX 1070, 2x GTX 1060, all from KFA2).

The results from testing are quite interesting. Intel Core i7 7700K CPU is a very good CPU with some nice overclocking potential. It is running stable @ 4.8 GHz, but we made our benchmarks @ 4.7 GHz while CPU was still below 60 °C at maximum load. By far the most profitable algorithm for this CPU is currently the CryptoNight algorithm with speed as high as 340 H/s.

As far as multi-GPU setup - well, here our experiences are mixed. Motherboards with PCIe 3.0 slots are known to be problematic in multi-GPU setups where > 4 GPUs are used. We had the same experience with our motherboard where only 4 GPUs are properly recognized if TOLUD "Top Of Lower Usable Dram" is configured to "Automatic". In this case memory resources for PCIe devices are not properly reserved and we end up with GPUs detected, but not activated due to lack of system resources.

So what we had to do is to force TOLUD to 3.5 GB - in this case GPUs are recognized and activated properly. However, there are still issues with PCIe bus speed. What we are observing is that some PCIe slots are properly negotiated to PCIe 3.0 while some of them are only negotiated to PCIe 1.1. In general this is not a big issue for most algorithms but some future memory-hard algorithms (similar to Equihash) can suffer in speed due to lack of PCIe bandwidth.

Anyway, all benchmarks for the GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 as well as latest CPU Intel Core i7 7700K are available in our Profitability calculator. As you'll see both GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 are very profitable in terms of price/performance, while GTX 1080 is too expensive for mining-only (but is a great gaming card). Nevertheless mining with GTX 1080 can also be profitable, and since this GPU has a large number of CUDA cores (2560 CUDA cores split up over 20 SMs) it is also very strong on some older algorithms like Lyra2REv2.

Thank you for your using our service and keep on hashing! ;)