Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Mining Edition card on sale in UK

by Mark Tyson on 26 June 2017, 11:11

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire, MSI

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A few months ago you could snag AMD's top of the range Polaris Radeon RX 480 card, packing 8GB of GDDR5 and get a free copy of DOOM, for £200 or less. Now that card has been superseded by the slightly faster RX 580 but prices are much more expensive, if you can find stock. As regular HEXUS readers will be aware this market price action is all down to the popularity of modern AMD GPUs in cryptocurrency mining.

We mentioned that AMD and Nvidia were preparing port-less graphics cards aimed at the cryptocurrency market, a few weeks ago. A week ago VideoCardz shared images and specs for mining cards from the likes of Asus, MSI and Colorful. The rationale behind these products is that they will be cheaper for miners, stripping away unnecessary ports etc. They will help relieve pressure on the PC graphics card market. Last but not least these cards will not cause gluts in the second hand GPU market when they reach the end of their money-making life.

Over the weekend a Reddit user spotted OC UK had started to list the Radeon RX 470 MINING Edition 4096MB GDDR5 card. In the specs Sapphire claims that card can achieve 23-26MH/s with "low power 122W", and it is "perfect for mining". In the more regular specs we usually consider for graphics cards this RX 470 offers 32 CUs with 2048 Stream Processors, a GPU boost clock of 1236MHz and a memory clock of 1750MHz giving an effective 7000Mbps.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Mining Edition looks identical to the modern graphics cards from Sapphire we have reviewed since last year except for the obvious - there are no monitor connection ports. Remember those were cut to save cost, and warranties are reduced too, this one has just a one year guarantee. The price of the card I have detailed above is £248.99, for pre-order.

Poking around the OCUK site, that's not the only mining card from Sapphire that has been listed over the weekend. You can also see 8GB RX 470 cards, and a Radeon RX 560 Mining Edition with 4GB of GDDR5. The multiple versions of 4GB and 8GB RX 470 cards offer slightly different hash rates. Interestingly, in the search results list, we see the Sapphire PULSE RX 560 mining card at £169.99, with the MSI RX 560 Aero ITX OC listed alongside at just £128.99.



HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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Curious if these ‘mining cards’ would work for things like gpu rendering (ie vray rt and the likes). I'd guess they would but they seriously need to drop the price because it's only a few quid saving over a full fat gpu and I know that I'd rather spend the extra 20 quid or so and get a fully featured card.
It will be interesting to see who buys these and what they ultimately get used for. Based on current prices/difficulty they will be useless for mining BTC (26MH/s would give a loss of £0.30 a day before power is taken into account), but Ethereum is just about profitable (£2.70/day before power)

You'd need a serious amount of luck to recoup your investment..or be very smart with which coins you work with!

If you just want a bit of fun with BTC mining then 2nd hand ASICs can be had for £100ish on ebay that will offer much better power/hashrate ratios - at that price none are profitable but if you just want a bit of fun…ETH is ASIC resistant so I guess it's an option for that, however at circa £1.50 a day profit after overheads, your still taking a huge risk on the price/difficulty of ETH in the future.

Personally i just keep my existing PC mining ETH overnight/when I am at work - no extra investment and it currently covers the power bill (at least the mining portion!)+ a 1% profit (thats using my GTX1080).
Spud1
Personally i just keep my existing PC mining ETH overnight/when I am at work - no extra investment and it currently covers the power bill (at least the mining portion!)+ a 1% profit (thats using my GTX1080).
Been curious about it of late.. How easy is it to set it up, I've got solar panels so I'd cover the running cost during the day… thinking it might be something worth trying during the pc's ‘downtime’
LSG501
Been curious about it of late.. How easy is it to set it up, I've got solar panels so I'd cover the running cost during the day… thinking it might be something worth trying during the pc's ‘downtime’

It depends on how willing you are to learn :) Best place to start is https://bitcointalk.org/ - there is a lot of helpful information on there and its a great resource to get started.

It took a couple of hours to get things going for me - deciding to pool or solo mine (I am pool mining with ethpool), which miner to use, which OS etc…but in principle you:

1) Create a wallet
2) Decide to pool or solo mine
3) If solo mining, download geth and sync the blockchain
4) Download a GPU Miner (i'm currently using Claymores) and start mining

The devil is in the detail - there is a lot to tweak/configure, decisions about which HostOS to run (and depending on your H/W, which VM). Best advice is to start reading :)

Getting your money out is a lot harder and is a topic all on its own…most exchanges are shady enough particularly for alt coins. I convert to BTC and extract my cash that way as I find it much easier (and have benefited from the BTC price boosts as a result!) from a number of exchanges depending on the best exchange rates at the time. Thats a whole other area to dicsuss.
You could also try mining Burstcoin which uses hard drive space instead of mining hashes via a CPU/ GPU. It's easy enough to set up and get running too.