I'll preface this by saying I'm not a miner. Well I guess I'm mining right now, so now I am. Plus I'm a UTEP alumni, and they are the Miners, so I am again. But that's beside the point. I didn't mine before today and I didn't buy this card for mining purposes.
As many of you have noticed I'm sure, the RX 470/570 and RX 480/580 are sold out absolutely everywhere. I've been trying to get my hands on one for a while now, but they've been sold out everywhere for months and marked up. I finally gave up and snagged a 4GB RX 560. Even that was hard to come by. All 4GB cards are usually sold out (Mining Eth is impossible now with a 2GB card.) But I timed it right and grabbed one just before they disappeared again!
Well here it is!
Unboxing is always fun!
And the card!
Very little in the box, just a CD and a short installation guide. No adapters.
And the power, just one 6 pin connector.
I had wanted to do a bit of benchmarking, but since I don't have all the parts yet for the system it will find a home in, I just dropped it in my existing machine with a Phenom X4 9650... and a dead ram channel, so only single channel and 4GB. And a PCIe 2 slot. My Passmark scores were pretty abysmal. Hilariously bad, really, I wish I screenshotted them.I figured any benchmarks for the card I come up with in games are worthless.
But what about mining? Mining doesn't care about CPU performance or RAM. So is mining worth it?
I set up the Claymore miner, took me a bit to figure out the bat file configuration, but I eventually got it.
Sustaining about 12Mh/sec.
Now you could overclock, but I decided to go the other route... undervolt. I've been really amazed how low I could drop the voltages. Not sure if I just did well on the silicon lottery here, but check this out... I took it from the stock 1200ish mV down to 950 and it's been stable for hours. This is keeping the GPU something like 15 degrees cooler, and at a lower fan rate!
Not bad. So is it worth it? Well, it's important to keep in mind here that I work from home and I'm not the only one who uses this computer, so it is on all day anyway. The TDP of the RX 560 is 80 watts, though I would guess it is a fair bit lower undervolted like this. But just to be sure, let's call it 100W over the system without the card running. Profitability looks to be just about $2 a day.
So at this rate, it will pay for itself in about 2 months... if prices and global hashing hold. Suppose I can't complain too much. Maybe I'll grab a second... if I can find one. Is this how people turn into miners?