The GTX 1070 is a solid choice for a mining rig. It has decent speed, great power usage, and is widely available.
Slated in NVidia’s graphics card lineup above the GTX 1060 6GB card, the GTX 1070 comes with 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory, and straight from the factory, comes with a 3 year warranty.
As part of NVidia’s new Pascal architecture, the GeForce 10 series cards are up to 3x faster than the GeForce 900 series cards they replace – the 1070 can be up to 3x faster than the 970. It has 1920 CUDA cores, 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and 8 Gbps memory speed. With a boost clock of 1.4x, it has a memory clock speed of 1683 MHz.
Power specs straight from NVidia are listed as 150 watts for the graphics card, with a recommended system power of 500 watts. Maximum GPU temperature is 94 degrees Celsius, although for 24/7 running in a mining rig typical temperature targets are below 70 degrees. The GTX 1070 has a supplementary 8-pin power connector, so keep that in mind when planning a multi-GPU mining rig build.
All of this combined makes the 1070 card a very reliable and solid choice for a cryptocurrency mining rig.
Article Contents
Is this the best 1070 for mining?
Trying to determine which 1070 is the best for mining can be a difficult and laborious task. There are many factors to consider including brand reputation, boost clock, and real world test results.
Cheapest 1070 for mining
If cost is your main concern, then simply go to this page and sort by price – you’ll see all of the current GTX 1070 mining GPUs that are in-stock, and you’ll see which is the cheapest.
However, keep in mind that cost isn’t the only consideration – there are many factors that can affect hashrates and power usage – all of which affect your mining income, which can make spending a little more on the best 1070 for mining well worth your money.
Best 1070 for mining based on brand reputation
If you’re looking for a card you can reliably run 24/7 for years, then you’ll likely want to stay with the top brands like EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus and Zotac. Other brands like PNY, Inno3D, PowerColor, Galax and other offshore brands have less of a reputation that could lead to more downtime. However, a rush on GPUs has caused people to just go with any card whenever they can find a GTX 1070 in stock.
Many gtx 1070 manufacturers also release other ‘versions’ of the same mining card (see below in the “What things should I consider” section). For example, the EVGA 1070 SSC is a higher quality/faster clocked version of the EVGA 1070. With ASUS, their top of the line GPUs are labelled as ROG STRIX. For Gigabyte, it’s the AUROS family of GPUs that top our their brand while MSI uses TWIN FROZR.
Best 1070 for mining based on boost clock
The reference model of the GTX 1070 comes with a 1683 MHz boost clock from the factory. As time has gone on, the third-party GPU manufacturers have tweaked things, including cooling, sorting chips based on quality etc, that has allowed some of their 1070 mining GPUs to have a higher clock and boost rate than the original, reference series. However, when using a 1070 for mining, you’ll want to individually tweak the memory clock, cpu clock, and voltage to perform the best. Since you are doing the overclocking, the factory or ‘spec’ overclock speed does not really matter as much and is not that important when determining the best 1070 for mining.
Best 1070 for mining based on memory brand
During the great RAM shortage of 2018 (that’s my unofficial name for it), GTX 1070 GPU manufacturers started searching far and wide for RAM. As reliable, and easy overclocked Samsung brand of RAM became scarce, they turned to seemingly second grade RAM manufacturers like Hynix and Micron. When overclocking RAM on your GTX 1070 for mining, Samsung allows the fastest overclocking which results in the highest mining hashrates. Micron is decent, usually getting close to the Samsung clock speeds. Hynix, on the other hand, is worse – usually about 20% slower than Samsung memory clock speeds.
The problem is that there is no way to tell what brand of memory the 1070 GPU has until you’ve purchased it, hooked it up, and run a program like GPUz on it.
If you do end up with a 1070 with Hynix memory, you’ll likely want to look at mining on the equihash algorithm rather than ethash.
Best 1070 for mining based on mining algorithm
Mostly, one mining algorithm isn’t better or worse on one GTX 1070 mining GPU versus another (unless it’s because of memory brand – see above).
However, for some reasons that are hard to explain, but could be based on different practices from different manufacturers such as cooling process or chip binning, certain GTX 1070 graphics cards just simply perform better on a specific algorithm. For an in-depth list of real world hashrates when using the GTX 1070 for mining, check out these comparison tables:
What things should I consider when choosing the best 1070 for mining?
When the GTX 1070 graphics card was first designed by NVidia, they designed the new Pascal chip, tested it, and then when it was ready, they mass-produced it at an external facility.
Then, NVidia provided what it calls the ‘reference’ design of the chip to third-party GPU manufacturers. The first products produced by all of these companies will be identical to each other (in theory) as they are all using the exact same chips.
While this is happening, the same companies are also working on their own customized versions of a graphics card using those same chips. Some of the methods they use that can set them apart from the competition is:
- A process called binning – the 1070 chips are tested, selected, and then put into bins based on quality. Then they can use the top ones for their best 1070 mining GPUs
- Component Layout – Specific GPU components are upgraded, changed, tested, reworked to allow better speeds. Things like voltage regulators, higher quality capacitors, resisters, etc are used to proved higher quality cleaner power to the GPU chip to allow more overclocking
- Cooling System – to help with higher overclocking, GPU board manufacturers will try multiple fans, different fan shrouds, and sometimes even liquid cooling – all in the name of being able to tout the highest overclock speeds. Cooling also takes into consideration noise as nobody wants to have a vacuum cleaner noise in their mining rig or gaming computer!
Most of the lowest quality brands will only have a single fan, while there are some GTX 1070 GPUs that have 3 cooling fans, making them the easiest to keep cool even with intense overclocking for the purpose of using the 1070 for mining.
A few months after the reference cards are released, you’ll start to see these customized versions of the card appearing, and when using the customized GTX 1070 in a mining rig, the resulting hash rates can vary a fair amount. Of course, so does the cost of these higher quality/better cooled versions of the 1070.
Resources for selecting the best 1070 for mining
Take a look at some other articles we’ve written about using the GTX 1070 in a mining rig.
Articles without links haven’t been written yet.
Best 1070 for Mining ZCash
Best 1070 for mining ethereum
Best 1070 for mining 2018
Best 1070 brand for mining
Best 1070 card for mining
Best 1070 for mining – was this helpful to you?
I always try to write in an honest, clear, and helpful way, but sometimes it doesn’t quite work out. Did this article on choosing the best 1070 for mining help you out?
Do you still have unanswered questions, or do you think we missed something?Is part of this article now out of date or no longer relevant in the cryptocurrency mining world?
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