Mining on AMD video cards: pros and cons

Let’s face it, cryptocurrency has lost its popularity within these last two years. But still, mining cryptocurrency is one of the best additional sources of income. In fact, in some cases mining as an additional source of profit grants you more money than your regular job. But the thing is, you have to invest in mining.
At least first several months you won’t achieve profit, you will be covering your investments. But after a while, you will receive a solid revenue and technically, you won’t have to do anything too difficult. As you might already know, you need mining equipment. One of such details that will help you to mine is an AMD video card. In this review, we will explain what are the advantages and disadvantages of mining coins using graphics processing units (GPU), and what are other peculiarities of the process.

Mining features on the AMD graphics card
As you already know, mining cryptocurrency means solving algorithms. To solve an algorithm, you need specific machines or powerful computers. Any computer can be powerful if you build in powerful and productive details, such as GPU. You can use your computer for mining, but only if you replace your simple video card by a more powerful one.
But of course, most miners build their own mining rigs or farms. Either way, if you are planning to use an AMD graphics card, you need to understand how this is going to work. A while ago, CPUs were used for mining. But the disadvantage of such an approach was that it had a very low processing speed (it was slow while solving algorithms) and the power consumption was too high.
Of course, you receive less profit since you have to spend more money to pay for the electricity, your mining rig might get damaged, and your CPU mines less coins. That’s why video cards are used now. Just imagine, they are 800 times faster than CPUs. Thus, you use a more powerful unit, it consumes less electricity or at least the same amount, but you mine a lot faster.
The core idea is that GPUs are very good at performing repetitive tasks, while CPUs are designed to accomplish diversified tasks. That’s why CPUs are slower – they are better at performing multiple tasks at a time.
If to sum up, the graphics card is able to perform repetitive tasks with at a higher speed. Moreover, they are less consuming. These two features explain why it’s one of the best tools to mine cryptocurrency. They complete more calculations within a time period.

Cons of mining on AMD
The most popular manufacturers are AMD and NVIDIA. Usually, each manufacturer designs its cards in a way that they favor specific coins more than others. And this peculiarity leads to the first disadvantage of AMD products:
    • It will be much difficult to mine such currencies as Ethereum and Monero. It favors Ethash and CryptoNight, NVIDIA are focused on other coins.
    • The second disadvantage is the difficulty in using it. It’s a big disadvantage since you will have to do some research if you want to achieve the best results. You will have to find out about the ways to improve its efficiency. If you compare it with NVIDIA products, you just need to build in an NVIDIA and you don’t have to learn how to improve its efficiency.
At the same time, AMD products are less expensive than those that are produced NVIDIA.

Which video card is better to put for mining?
It depends on several factors. For instance, what coin are you planning to mine, what is your budget, etc. As it was mentioned above, NVIDIA cards are better to mine Ethereum or Monero, AMD cards a great when mining Ethash and CryptoNight.
Even though you don’t have to put too much effort into learning how to get the best efficiency out of NVIDIA cards, they have some disadvantages. First of all, they are too expensive. Second, it has less capacity than AMD. For instance, NVIDIA graphics cards have around 150Kh/s, while AMD has around 1500Kh/s. This means that AMD cards are best for mining.
You can buy a Radeon since it’s affordable and can mine the cryptocurrency of your choice faster. Or you can choose other cards produced by this brand, for instance, AMD RX 570 8GB.

Conclusion
The cryptocurrency market had crashed in the past, but it is still a good idea to mine it. But of course, you need powerful equipment and a high-quality video card.