On January 12, 2021, Nvidia announced the launch at the end of February 2021 of another Amper generation video card called Geforce RTX 3060. Unlike the older RTX 3060ti model, the new product received a different GA106 GPU instead of G104 and a stripped-down memory bus to 192bit. The recommended price for Geforce RTX 3060 was announced at the start of sales at 330 USD, which, of course, is cheaper than the RTX 3060Ti, but how to correlate the capabilities of these two video cards in mining to price and power consumption, we will try to draw a conclusion about the advisability of buying this or that model.
Let's compare the technical characteristics of the three low-end models of Nvidia video cards of the latest generation:
| Specifications | RTX 3070 | RTX 3060Ti | RTX 3060 |
RTX 3060 VS RTX 3070 |
RTX 3060 VS RTX3060Ti |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Release date | 29.09.2020 | 02.10.2020 | 12.01.2021 | ||
| Frequency GPU (BOOST) MHz | 1500 (1730) | 1410(1665) | 1320 (1780) | ||
| Cuda Cores | 5888 | 4864 | 3584 | -64% | -35% |
| GFLOPS FP32 | 20372 | 16197 | 12000 | -64% | -35% |
| Memory | 8Gb GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 12Gb GDDR6 | +50% | +50% |
| Memory bus width | 256bit | 256bit | 192bit | -33% | -33% |
| Total memory bandwidth | 448Gbit/s | 448Gbit/s | 336Gbit/s | -33%% | -33% |
| Power usage | 220W | 200W | 170W | -29% | -17% |
| Announced price, USD | 499 USD | 399 USD | 330 USD | -51% | -21% |
| Ethash Hasharte | 60-65Mh/s | 60-65Mh/s |
45-49Mh/s (forecast) |
-33% | -33% |
| GRIN32 Hasharte | 0,63H/s | 0,53H/s |
0,39H/s (forecast) |
-61% | -35% |
Before buying video cards for mining, first of all, they pay attention to the payback rate or the value of Megahash per Watt and energy efficiency (Watt per Megahash). And in both these parameters, the RTX 3060 video card loses to the older RTX 3060Ti model.
| RTX 3070 | RTX 3060Ti | RTX 3060 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethash W/MH* | 3,66 | 3,33 | 3,77 |
| Ethash USD/MH | 8,3 | 6,65 | 7,33 |
| GRIN32 W/H* | 349 | 377 | 435 |
| GRIN 32 USD/H | 792 | 752 | 846 |
* For energy efficiency calculations, the nominal power consumption without undervolting is taken.
Conclusion: In all technical and economic parameters, the Geforce RTX 3060 video card loses to the RTX 3060Ti, and primarily in terms of price, i.e. the technical characteristics of the video card turned out to be much lower than the company Nvidia established the difference in price between these two models of video cards. And when choosing between these two models, you should give preference to the RTX 3060Ti. But the younger model still has a couple of advantages: more memory, which may come in handy in the future for mining algorithms that require a large amount of memory and only one additional power connector, which simplifies the assembly of mining rigs and the selection of power supplies. The RTX 3060Ti also has models with a single power connector, but these are cheap models with poor cooling, which does not cope well with cooling the RTX 3060Ti graphics card under full load. RTX 3070, in turn, performs better on processor-dependent algorithms: GRIN32, MTP, BeamHash, etc.
