Sapphire RX470 & RX580 Crypto Mining – A Beginners Guide

Making Money

OK, I picked a freaking rough time to speak about profits in the crypto world. However, it’s not as simple as it may seem. I ran each card for 24 hours, and they were only pulling around £1 to $1.40 a day. It’s likely to be less than this with any downtime while you’re working or gaming though. The estimate on NiceHash is very rough and changes continuously based on the current script and market value of the coins.

Market Value

Well, that’s a roller coaster right there. Just like a stock/investment, it could make you rich, it could be worthless before you finish your breakfast. I won’t say mining will make you rich, it likely won’t. However, before the price drop of BTC (Bitcoin), a few GPUs could easily mine $10+ a day, which is what caused the boom and subsequent shortage of GPUs. Now it’s about 1/5th of that. Then it gets more interesting. If you were to mine $10 of Bitcoin today, and in six months the value for 5x the current value (if only!), anything you mined previously would also increase up to that value. Of course, if the value drops, the complete opposite happens and your coins are worthless.

Electricity Doesn’t Grow On Trees

Learn how much you pay per kWh for your electricity. The Sapphire AMD RX470 Mining Edition and Sapphire AMD RX580 Pulse are pretty modest regarding power use, drawing about 150/200w each. Right now, that’s barely profitable, but again that can change as the value of Bitcoin goes up or down.

What Cards Should I Buy?

Ideally, I don’t think you should buy any GPU right now. The prices of cards are just too high to justify buying a card just for mining. However, if you get lucky with a nice deal, and they are out there, buying a card for gaming makes far more sense.

Can I Use My Current GPU?

Yup, pretty much any GPU will get the job done. Obviously, the faster the card, the more it’ll be able to mine each day.