Best charts for mining 2022

These are the best mining charts of 2021, even the best mining charts don’t look so promising anymore.

What are the best mining graphs and is it worth getting into the cryptocurrency craze?

Bitcoin and Ethereum mining has made headlines again, as the prices and profitability of mining have gone up a lot compared to the last couple of years.

Everyone who didn’t start mining last time is kicking out for their lack of foresight. It’s no wonder that the best graphics cards and chips that top the hierarchy of our GPU benchmarks end up being very good options for mining as well.

How good? That’s what we’re here for, and we have concrete figures on hashing performance, pricing, power, and much more.

We’re not here to encourage people to start mining, and we’re definitely not suggesting that you should mortgage your home or take out a big loan to try and become the next big mining sensation. Mainly, we are looking at hard data based on current market conditions.

Predicting where cryptocurrencies will go is even harder than predicting the weather, politics, or the next big meme.

If you still don’t have the hardware to start mining today (or, actually, about three or four months ago), you’re already late for the party.

As in the old gold rush, those most likely to get rich are those who sell equipment to miners and not the miners themselves.

If you’ve been looking for a new or second-hand graphics card lately, current prices have probably made you raise at least one eyebrow, maybe even three!

Our GPU price index has more details, but the market has had a perfect storm of shortages induced by the pandemic and increased demand, and mining has only made a bad situation worse. We’ve heard people say, in effect, “I imagined that with the releases of Ampere and RDNA2, it was finally time to retire my old GTX 1070/1080 or RX Vega 56/64. Then I looked at the prices and realized that my old card is selling for the same thing I paid for more than three years ago!” They are not wrong.

Pascal and Vega cards from three or four years ago are now sold at prices close to those of their original release, sometimes more. If you have an old graphics card out there, you might even consider selling it yourself (though finding a replacement might prove difficult).

The good news for those not interested in mining is that profitability has fallen substantially over the past two months, thanks in part to China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency miners.

Now more than ever, we advise against people trying to get rich from cryptocurrency mining. Even with reduced GPU prices, it could take more than a year to reach equilibrium, in addition to the environmental cost and other factors to consider.

Ultimately, we know that many PC gamers and enthusiasts are upset by the unavailability of graphics cards, but we cover all aspects of PC hardware, not just gaming.

We have analyzed GPU mining many times over the years, including in 2011, 2014 and 2017. All of them are times when the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed, driving interest and demand.

The year 2021 is just the latest in the cryptocurrency mining cycle. The only prediction we are willing to make is a lovely tautology: Bitcoin and Ethereum prices will change in the coming months and years, sometimes up and sometimes down.

And as we’ve seen so many times before, the impact on the price and availability of graphics cards will continue to exist.

You should also keep in mind that, based on the personal experience of some of us using consumer graphics cards 24 hours a day, it is absolutely possible for fans, VMRs or other items on your card to burn. Proceed at your own risk.

The best mining charts 2021 evaluated, tested and classified

With this preamble out of the way, let’s go to the main point: What are the best graphs to mine 2021? This is somewhat theoretical, as most cards cannot be purchased at retail, but we also have a solution for that. We will use eBay prices – in the sales listings – taken from our GPU price index.

How much can be gained by mining Ethereum with a graphics card, and how long does it take to recoup the cost of the card using eBay’s current inflated prices? Let’s take a look.

For this chart, we have used the current difficulty combined with the average price of Ethereum over the past week – because nothing else comes close to the Ethereum GPU for mining profitability at the moment.

We’ve tested all of these GPUs on our standard test PC, which uses a Core i9-9900K, an MSI MEG Z390 ACE motherboard, 2x16GB of Corsair DDR4-3600 RAM, a 2TB XPG M.2 SSD, and an 80 Plus Platinum certified SeaSonic 850W power supply.

We have optimized the performance of Ethereum mining, with an eye on minimizing energy consumption and maximizing hash rates.

Also note that we are using real-world online power measurements for GPUs, collected using our Powenetics hardware and software solution, so our power figures are not based on software data, which can be out of place from a few watts to over 50W, depending on the GPU.

Finally, we have used $0.10 per kWh for energy costs, which are much lower than in some areas of the world, but also higher than in others.

Taking the hash rate and the current difficulty, we subtract the cost of energy to get the daily benefits.

Below the best charts to mine 2021, we use the approximate price of eBay divided by the current daily profits to get the payback time of the graphics card. The following table is sorted by the time to reach the break-even point (assuming the price and difficulty do not change, which is certain).