There are tens of thousands of GPUs mining right now. Hundreds of the same model, even the same series, and some of them will not mine with the identical speed even if used in the same rig. What is the reason for that?

What is a silicon lottery?

Silicon lottery is mostly used by CPU and GPU overclockers. Each chip can have slightly different performance capabilities compared to the same chip model. Sometimes you can win the lottery by getting a chip that can perform better than the average chip. Other times, you can lose the lottery by getting a chip that will perform below the average chip performance.

By winning the so-called silicon lottery, your chip can achieve higher clock speeds. The chip will be more stable when running higher voltage and clock speed - either core or memory clocks.

For example, a Ryzen 3700x runs at a stock speed of 3.6 GHz. Most of the Ryzen 3700x’s can achieve 4.0 GHz, but not all can achieve 4.3 GHz. If your Ryzen 3700x can run at 4.3 GHz, then you could say that you won the silicon lottery. Congrats!

Does the silicon lottery affect mining?

Yes, it does. All chips are affected by the silicon lottery. Whether this is a processor, graphic card, or RAM.

Before, we established that each processor can achieve higher clock speeds based on the silicon lottery luck. This also applies to the graphic card. If a graphics card can achieve higher clock speeds, it will be able to mine faster. With memory-intensive algorithms, such as DaggerHashimoto, memory speed is more important than core speed. This means that the GPU whose VRAM can achieve higher speeds will achieve a higher hashrate.

How do I know if I won a silicon lottery?

Test the device. First look for recommended overclock settings here. Start with these values and increment the memory or core clock speeds until you find a sweet spot where the rig is still stable. If you can achieve above-average performance or lower voltage with stock clocks compared to the average user, then you most likely won the silicon lottery.

You can compare your overclock settings with other users on our Reddit or Discord server.