How to choose a GPU to mine Ether with?
Mining Ethereum can be done in a variety of ways - you can buy a cloud contract and get someone else to do all the hard work for you, or you can do it yourself and get your GPU, or Graphics Card, up and running. However the efficiency of your graphics card can vary a lot and picking one can be quite difficult. What we have done is make the process easier for you by picking a handful of suppliers and showing you how to choose which GPU mines the most and which GPU is the best value for money.
Each Graphics card will mine slightly differently depending on the way it is made. This is all about how each GPU runs the ETHASH algorithm which is key to the proof of work in Ethereum. They also use different amounts of power.
To make it easy we have taken a selection of Ethereum mining GPU's and taken their average stats and metrics from our live ethereum exchange rates and mining network data. This allows us to get key data on how good the graphics card is - like how many days it will take to payoff you buying it and how much ether it should return per year. We also show second hand refurbished graphics cards that are generally cheaper and have a better return because of the cost price.
Once you have selected your GPU depending on your budget or whether you want it to mine efficiently or whether you just want the highest amount of mega hashes - then you can click through to find more return information on it. We show you how much the return per day exceeds the cost of running it with our profit ratio metric, and show you how much you would expect to make in a year given a stable network hash rate and exchange rate.
Its not the graphics card that has the highest number of mega hashes, or the graphics card that is the most power efficient - it's a balance of what works for you.
A word of warning though is that Ethereum will move from proof of work to proof of stake - and nobody knows when this will happen because it depends on the development community. Also bear in mind that the GPU or graphics card that you choose to mine Ethereum with needs to fit in your computer or have a special computer built for it - this will depend on a lot of other factors such as whether your computer has enough power to add an extra graphics card in or whether your computer's motherboard has the correct slot to take the card. so be careful - these figures are only here to give you a basic idea of what the graphics card can do - there is quite a bit of work to do yourself.
If you have a graphics card that you would like us to look into or add to the site - please get in contact, If this is all too much you can always outsource the selection of mining equipment to someone else by buying a cloud mining contract with Hashflare or Genesis Mining.
But if you do decide to buy a graphics card you can follow our guides on how to mine ethereum yourself and how to connect to a mining pool to smooth the volatility of returns.