XFX R9 280 Double Dissipation Black Edition OC 3GB Review

CryptoCurrency Mining Performance (Scrypt)

In response to growing enthusiasm to the world of cryptocurrencies we have started to benchmark graphics card for their mining power. While Bitcoin mining is pointless and unprofitable on consumer hardware, Scrypt mining can still be profitable due to the current absence of Scrypt ASIC miners. We use CGMiner for AMD cards and CUDA miner for Nvidia cards to benchmark their Scrypt Hashing performance. You can see configurations for Scrypt-hashing and more Scrypt hashing results here. Our results are by no means the absolute best that is possible for each of the graphics cards we test, these results are based on the factory clock speeds of the graphics cards and we do not spend that much time tweaking to find the optimal settings. You WILL be able to achieve better performance through better optimised settings and by overclocking. Though we hope these results should give you a rough idea of what to aim for if you choose one of the graphics cards we have tested. Please note we are using the recent major update for CUDA miner that dramatically increases Nvidia mining performance.

Since XFX’s R9 280 DD Black Edition graphics card is going to be mostly snapped up by miners we thought we’d explore its mining capability a bit deeper. As you can see below at stock it happily churned away at 575~ Kh/s which is a solid result for an out of the box R9 280.

We did manage to push things a lot further with some overclocking taking the hash rate to an amazing 725 Kh/s! That is better than a stock R9 280X which we’d expect to see produce about 700 Kh/s.

Let’s look at how we achieved those numbers in more detail. Below you can see our settings for our overclocks and what hash rates they gave.

In terms of power consumption our overclock increased that by 50W~ and increased the temperature by about 7 degrees although there was some small fluctuation. We used 100% fan speed simply because this non-reference cooling solution is reasonably quiet, but we mainly used 100% fan speed because the cooler the card runs, the more efficient it is (as the VRM is in a more optimal temperature range) and thus the more profitable mining is because power consumption is lowest.

Anyone interested in the settings we used can find them below. We used these with CGMiner 3.1.0. These are by no means the absolute best settings out there, but they should give you a solid start. Tweakers with more time and patience than me will probably be able to eek out another 25-50 Kh/s or cut some excess power usage down. Whatever way you look at it though the XFX R9 280 DD BE OC is a cracking graphics card for mining.

“setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://pool.domain:port -u username.worker -p password –thread-concurrency=24000 –intensity=20 -g 1 -w 256 –gpu-powertune 20 –no-submit-stale”