Over the last week or so, our friends at PC Perspective have been working on determining bitcoin mining performance of various GPUs. If you don’t know what bitcoins are, their article explains it thoroughly. Basically, it is a P2P currency, eliminating the need for banks, credit cards, and online payment agencies. You can buy and sell with this currency, and even exchange it for ‘traditional’ money. Currently each coin is worth about $14.00 USD.
One intriguing thing about bitcoins is that they can be ‘mined’ using the distributed computing method. That’s right, instead of using spare computing cycles to help find a cure for cancer, you can use them for money. PC Perspective’s findings are extensive and fascinating. For one, it is pretty much a waste of your time to use a CPU or NVIDIA GPU to do bitcoin mining. Instead, you should be using cards like 5000-series Radeons, as they can generate anywhere from $1.50 to $6.00 USD worth of Bitcoins per day, depending on model and number of GPUs. Theoretically, you could buy a pair of 6970′s for about $700, and using them to mine Bitcoins 24/7 you will have enough Bitcoin currency to pay for them completely. After a year, you’d have around $1500 of profit.
Thankfully, PCPer did an update, considering the power consumption costs of mining. Based on these findings, it may not even be worth mining at all, depending on what video card you have, and how much you pay for power. In my case, if I was to run both my personal video cards full time – a GTX 460 and an HD 4890, I would be making about $0.01 per day worth of coins…
It’s all very interesting to say the least, so be sure to check it out! Just keep in mind that there are many caveats to consider, most of which can be found in the comments section of each article. And with that, here are today’s hardware reviews:
- ECS HDC-I E350 @ PureOverclock
- OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review @ Techgage
- Corsair Graphite Series 600T Special Edition White Review @ Hardware Canucks
- Thermaltake Frio OCK Overclocking Cooler Review @ Tweaknews and Ninjalane
- SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial @ HotHardware
- Corsair Obsidian 650D @ techPowerUp
- Crysis 2 DX11 VGA graphics and CPU performance benchmarks @ Guru3D
- Lian Li PC-P80N Full Tower Chassis Review @ Tweaktown
- Zalman Z9 Plus Mid Tower Case Review @ ThinkComputers
- Hornettek Slipper U3 Hard Drive Docking Station Review @ DragonSteelMods
- Cooler Master Notepal X-SLIM @ PureOverclock
- HIS HD 6970 IceQ Turbo & HD 6950 IceQ X Turbo X Review @ Hardware Canucks
- ASUS Sabertooth P67 (B3 Revision) LGA1155 Sandy Bridge ATX Motherboard Review @ Futurelooks
- CM Storm Enforcer @ Rbmods
- Crucial Ballistix Sport PC3-12800 CL10 12GB Kit Review @ Real World Labs
- GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 Intel Z68 Motherboard Review @ Legit Reviews
- Antec KÜHLER H2O 920 CPU cooler review @ Hexus
- NZXT H2 Silent Case Review @ Ninjalane
- Sapphire Radeon 6670 Ultimate @ PureOverclock
- GIGABYTE A75-UD4H (AMD A75) Motherboard Review @ tweaktown
- Sapphire Radeon HD 6770 FleX Edition Review @ Techgage
