AMD recently said it is doing everything it can to bring more Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics cards to market, but maybe we shouldn't hold our breath. A Reddit forum member posted screenshots of his slightly tweaked Vega 64 card achieving a hash rate of 43.5 MH/s while drawing just 130W of power (104W core power) for his graphics card. If his results end up being par for course, it means Vega 64 will prove an more popular option among miners than previous generation Polaris cards.
To achieve the tantalizing hash rate, Reddit user S1L3N7_D3A7H set his card's core clockspeed to 1,000MHz and the HBM2 memory at 1,100MHz, with a power target of -24 percent.
To put his results into perspective, as TechPowerUp notes, a Radeon RX 580 typically delivers around 30 MH/s at 75W core power, which is 115W per card. S1L3N7_D3A7H was able to achieve a 43 percent higher hast rate with just a 13 percent in power consumption. Interestingly, he did it without the aid of AMD's beta mining driver.
"Pretty sure I can get similar with Vega 56," S1L3N7_D3A7H noted. "Things can only get better from here."
Whether his results are par for course remains to be seen. WCCFTech tried to duplicate his level of hashing power efficiency and fell short. Using identical settings, WCCFTech was "easily able" to hit 43.5 MH/s, but at a higher wattage. Even still, the results were impressive.
"We were able to achieve a power efficiency of 0.20 mHash per watt (40 mHash/s on a power draw of 192 watts), making the RX Vega 64 the most power efficient card on the planet and overtaking the GTX 1070," WCCFTech said. "Since the theoretical limit with the Vega 64 is 72 mHash /s (bandwidth available divided by memory size) we can safely say that with custom mining code you should be able to push this further as well."
If there is a silver lining to be had, it's that Ethereum (like all cryptocurrencies) is volatile. It was trading at over $351 on yesterday, and today is down to $289.
