First of all, this article is intended for people who already have a professional graphics card in their PCs, due to their high price we do not recommend using them for mining, since we believe that they can be used for much more useful and profitable applications. In any case, everyone is free in their choice and what they do with their hardware.
Profitability of professional graphics cards for mining
Most of the comparisons that you are going to see online, since they do not take into account that the situation in each country is different and offer profitability according to a specific area of the world. Taking into account the current situation in Spain in which electricity has a different cost depending on the time we are using it, it is necessary to extrapolate the information obtained to the different sections and the cost of each one.
As of the day of writing this article, we have sections with a cost of € 0.15 per kW / h, others at 0.17 kW / h and the most expensive at 0.25 kW / h. Which we have taken into account when making the profitability table that you can see below:
| Graphic card | MH / s | Consumption (80%) | KW / day | Cost / day | Profits / Gross | Profits / Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 3090 | 114 | 400 watts | 9.6 | € 1.19 | 12.22 € | € 11.03 |
| GeForce RTX 3080 | 91.5 | 287.5 W | 6.9 | € 0.85 | € 9.76 | € 8.91 |
| GeForce RTX 3070 | 58.1 | 162.2 W | 3.9 | 0..48 € | € 6.30 | € 5.82 |
| GeForce RTX 3060 Ti | 58.1 | 162.5 W | 3.9 | € 0.48 | € 6.30 | € 5.82 |
| GeForce GTX 1080 | 3. 4 | 212.5 W | 5.1 | € 0.63 | 3.68 € | € 3.05 |
| GeForce GTX 1660 Super | 29.3 | 112.5 W | 2.7 | € 0.30 | € 3.18 | 2.88 € |
| GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | 28 | 100 W | 2.4 | € 0.33 | € 3.03 | € 2.70 |
| GeForce GTX 1060 | 22.5 | 112.5 W | 2.7 | € 0.30 | € 2.44 | € 2.08 |
| GeForce GTX 1050 Ti | 12.5 | 100 W | 2.4 | € 0.33 | € 1,356 | € 1.02 |
We know that not all the models of professional graphics cards on the market are on the list, but it has to be said that they are not very popular in their use due to the high price of professional graphics cards, even more than many gaming models. they have seen their market price increase due to the mining bubble. On the other hand, the reason for separating it into sections in the table is because we are talking about a professional graphics card, whose cost has been absorbed by the daily work of its owner.
NVIDIA professional graphics cards are much more expensive than their gaming counterparts, which is why mining with them has a very low or almost zero recovery cost. That is why we propose this comparison for those who want to get extra capital apart from their daily work or have one of these graphics cards without doing anything and want to get something out of it, but we do not recommend its purchase.
That is why if you are thinking of buying any of these graphics cards just to mine we do not recommend them, their high price makes it take time to recover profitability and the mining capacity of the GPUs decreases over time. To this must be added the changes that Ethereum will undergo in the way it works in the coming months, so they are not a good investment to make in the long term.
Outside of cost, are they better than gaming?
Here we have to start from two different premises at a technical level. The first one is that because mining performance depends especially on the VRAM bandwidth and these graphics cards do not have a higher speed than their gaming counterparts, but they do have a greater amount of memory. Its performance when mining does not result in a difference compared to gaming cards. Moreover, they have the disadvantage of having in some cases a greater number of active chips to have more capacity, which slightly increases their energy consumption.
The other part has to do with mining limitations, each graphics card has a different PCI ID regardless of whether there is a gaming or professional counterpart with the exact same configuration. The PCI ID is used by the CPU to communicate with the device through the software controller, which also tells the CPU what it can and cannot do. Well, we cannot forget that NVIDIA has limited Ethereum mining capabilities in the second edition of its NVIDIA RTX 30 that were launched on the market from May 2021.
One thing that is certain is that they are better at mining than some models of the CMP HX range that NVIDIA has taken out for mining.
Multiple professional graphics cards to mine
You may be lucky enough to have multiple professional graphics cards under your control in a data center. From which you have considered using any of the professional graphics card racks to make them serve for mining. Obviously the profitability is multiplied compared to the use of single graphics cards, but it is possible that the business model in which these graphics cards are used is much more profitable or has a higher utility criterion.
That is, if a data center is being used to provide cloud computing services, remote rendering, execution of complex algorithms, analysis of large amounts of data, etc. Since they are much more profitable businesses than cryptocurrency mining and multi-GPU configurations are extremely useful for such applications, this leads to hardly any data from multiple of these cards mining.
Moreover, the advantages offered by professional graphics cards are not useful for mining and do not give any advantage over the use of several gaming graphics cards placed in parallel, so their higher cost is never justified.
What is the best professional graphics card to mine?
Technically the best professional graphics card for mining is also not profitable due to its high price, but it is from a technical point of view. I’m talking about the NVIDIA A100 of the latest generation of your NVIDIA Tesla. The motives?
- Its 2.4 Gbps HBM2E interface is the fastest of a graphics card to date, so when mining Ethereum it has to perform above any other model on the market.
- To the high bandwidth we have to add its calculation capacity, being the most powerful NVIDIA graphics card to date.
In any case, as we have discussed before, mining is not profitable enough to replace the applications in which these graphics cards are used. It is only in the gaming market where GPUs are not a means of production but of consumption and therefore do not generate capital that we have seen a jump in product prices.
