By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 15th, 2024
As far as ASUS has not officially confirmed the release of digital currency mining cards, the exact launch is unknown.
Nvidia, the market’s best-performing stock, has announced the launch of graphics cards specifically designed for cryptocurrency mining through its partners. ASUS, a leading maker of graphics cards, has published product listings for Nvidia-based and AMD-based cryptocurrency mining cards. Reportedly, the ASUS product listing for the Nvidia-based card is legitimate.
The ASUS MINING-P106-6G card is based on the GP106 GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 1060 though it takes no official NVIDIA or GeForce branding. There are no display outputs so it is impossible to use it as a primary graphics card down the road.
The specifications on the ASUS page indicate that this product has 1280 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1506 MHz, a Boost clock of 1708 MHz, and 6GB of GDDR5 running at 8.0 GHz. Those are identical specs to the reference GeForce GTX 1060 product.
The ASUS MINING-RX470-4G is rather similar but it uses the older, but very efficient for mining, Radeon RX 470 GPU.
The ASUS RX 470 mining card has 4GB of GDDR5, 2048 stream processors, a base clock of 926 MHz and a boost clock of 1206 MHz, again, the same as the reference RX 470 product. There are openings for a DisplayPort and HDMI connection, but as far as they are both empty, the single DVI connection is left as the only display option.
“ASUS Mining P106 is designed for coin mining with high-efficiency components – delivering maximum hash-rate production at minimum cost,” the product listing said. “ASUS Mining P106 enhances the megahash rate by up to 36% compared cards in the same segment that are not tailored for mining. The new card is also engineered to be seriously durable, enabling 24/7 operation for uninterrupted coin production.”
As far as Nvidia, AMD and ASUS have not officially confirmed the release of digital currency mining cards, the exact launch date of the cards is unknown.
Cryptocurrencies have been incredibly popular this year – Ethereum has risen in value by more than 2,700 percent since the beginning of the year while Bitcoin is up more than 140 percent. This drove the demand for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that are used by cryptocurrency miners to mine new coins for sale or future appreciation. Nvidia is expected to issue the cards so that the surging digital currency demand doesn’t affect its ability to serve the lucrative PC gaming market.
AMD has previously said that the “newly resurgent cryptocurrency mining markets” were driving demand for its graphics cards.
Nvidia shares rallied 236 percent through Monday in the previous 12 months compared with the market’s 22 percent return in that period. That performance ranks No. 1 in the entire S&P 500, according to FactSet.