Inno3D releases card with GTX 1080 GPU for mining cryptocurrencies

Inno3D has announced an accelerator for mining cryptocurrency. The P104-100 is, as the name implies, based on Nvidia’s P104, a variant of the GPU that is also used by the manufacturer for the GeForce GTX 1080 models.

Inno3D has equipped the P104-100 Crypto-Mining Accelerator with its Twin X2 cooler with two fans. The core clock speed of the P104-100 is set to 1607MHz, just like the GP104 GPU of the reference GTX 1080. The accelerator has gddr5x memory and the bandwidth is 320GB/s. The card does not have any outputs, which is not necessary, given the focus on mining cryptocoins.

The size of the memory is 8GB, but Inno3D reports that a frame buffer of only 4GB is shown ‘due to optimizing for mining hashrates’. The manufacturer does not clarify what this means. More than 4GB doesn’t make much sense for mining Ethereum, as the directed acyclic graph is currently between 2 and 3GB in size. The 4GB limit is not expected to be reached until around September 2019, after which 6GB and 8GB cards will be required for mining.

Either way, processing Ethereum’s hashing algorithms benefits from more memory bandwidth. That reliance on memory is built in purposely to make it difficult to develop asics optimized for mining, thereby flooding the platform’s economy.

According to the manufacturer, the performance is about 34MH/s for Ethereum, 470Sol/s for Zcash and 660H/s for Monero. The tdp of the Inno3D P104-100 Crypto-Mining Accelerator is 180W, which raises the question of how profitable it is to deploy the card. Inno3D will announce the price of the card at the end of December.