Another AMD mate is dispatching mining cards grounded on the company’s silicon, this time via Aliexpress. From the table we feel to have an XFX plates card designed for mining workloads. The new XFX BC-160 card makes use of Navi 12, manufactured on 7nm silicon and quilting 2304 Stream Processors across 36 Cipher Units. It employs 8 GB of HBM2 memory running over a 2048- bit machine.
XFX’s BC-160 features a straightforward picking scheme that is unlike any other AMD product. According to spec wastes and marketing accouterments for the cards, decrypting the product law results in a Blockchain Compute (BC) card, in the first generation (1), offering up to69.5 MH/ s typical ETH mining performance (BC-160) in a 150W TGP envelope. This hash rate was achieved under the RedHat release of Linux, which we assume refers to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as Red Hat Linux was discontinued in 2004. The cards also claim comity with the Ubuntu distro.
There are a lot of intriguing rudiments to this card. For one, the Navi 12 silicon was primarily used in one other AMD plates product the Radeon Pro 5600M for laptops, specifically Apple’s MacBook Pro 16- inch model. It was also used in the Radeon Pro V520, though likely in far lower amounts, and that seems to be the base for the BC-160 design. It’s intriguing that there are now supposedly enough fat chips that AMD is allowing mates to repurpose the GPUs for mining cards. Also again, with Apple shifting it’s MacBook Pro line to its own M1 Pro and M1 Max, there is a good chance it has no real desire for fresh AMD GPUs from 2020.
Another intriguing point is that these XFX mining cards are powered by two 8- leg Cut connectors. Considering a single 8- leg connector can supply 150W of power, and the PCIe x16 niche can deliver another 75W, putting two connectors on the cards seems overkill. Again, these were chips firstly used in laptops, where they were tuned to consume far lower than 150W — 50W, to be precise. The AMD Radeon Pro V520 had a 225W TGP, however, and analogous to the BC-160 it used a single cracker- addict cooling design, which should be acceptable for cooling the cards considering the workloads they are meant to handle. Ethereum mining strains VRAM further than anything, and the screenshots indicate power use of around 120W.
The use of HBM2 is part of the Navi 12 design, but at least on the MacBook Pro models it was clocked at a fairly low 1540 MT/s. Indeed with a 2048- bit machine, that is just 394 GBps of bandwidth, while the desktop 5700 XT GDDR6 models had a 256- bit interface and ran at 14 Gbps for 448 GBps of bandwidth. The screenshots show the BC-160 mining at”1275,” which looks slower than the MacBook Pro model, but it’s likely double that speed in MT/ s, meaning652.8 GBps of bandwidth after overclocking.
That would explain how the card manages 70 MH/ s in Ethereum mining, where the RX 5700 XT after tuning covers out at around 55 MH/ s. At stock, the HBM2 likely runs at the same 2000 MT/ s as the AMD Radeon Pro V520, which would put the hashrate at the target 60 MH/s. On other words, the BC-160 delivers further bandwidth than the else analogous Navi 10 GPUs that used GDDR6.
Being a mining card, these are headless designs, so there is no display affair. That means these cards are unfortunately only ever going to fulfil a singular purpose and will noway be among the stylish plates cards for gaming. They are enough much solely designed for miners, potentially keeping said miners down from the gaming-acquainted RX 6000 series. That is too bad, and it shows formerly further than the plates card companies are further than happy to prioritize mining cards if that is where they can make the utmost plutocrat on deals.
XFX’s BC-160 joins Sapphire’s X080 and X060″unofficial”mining cards. Looking at how the cards differ in their design, it seems safe to say that AMD is not furnishing AIB mates with a reference, blockchain- cipher acquainted design. Rather, AMD’s mates are the bones that are designing these cards around AMD silicon. AMD likely makes the same bottom-line earnings whether the GPUs end up in RX 6000-series, RX 5000-series, or cryptocurrency mining products. Unfortunately, that also means lower stock for gaming-acquainted cards, as both XFX’s Navi 12 and Sapphire’s Navi 22 mining cards both consume 7nm chips that could else have gone into the gaming member.
Grounded on the mining performance and power use, the BC-160 would probably rank well in our list of the stylish GPUs for mining. Its HBM2 memory subsystem does increase the price, still. Sapphire’s best-performing X080 has an estimated price of around$ 850, while the new XFX BC-160 is listed on Aliexpress for a cool$. That is further than it costs for an RTX 3080 Ti, using eBay GPU prices, which can do around 80 MH/ s. A videotape of the XFX BC-160 cards in their mining terrain (and the hashrate report, at 338) is also available, which you can see below.