Let’s check th ZCash mining GPUs currently available, in this guide covering the main aspects of choosing a video card for crypto mining purposes
Are you consdering getting into cryptocurrency mining? Check below the best ZCash mining GPUs currently available below, as well as other factors you should consider when mining GPUs.
Why Mining ZCash?
If you considering mining crypto currencies and you are new to that, mining ZCash may be a good way to start it. Unlike mining Bitcoin, where the difficult involved in mining already rendered the currency little profitable for small miners, other currencies still have rather decent margins. One of these currencies is ZCash, also known as ZEC. ZCash had a huge growth, together with the other main crypto currencies in 2017, and is still holding a high postion in 2018 on coinmarketcap.
ZCash project itself used a lot of the tech from bitcoin to create its blockchain, however it has some differences. The main difference of ZCash is the fact that it offers high anonymity compared to bitcoin or some other main alt coins.
You can mine ZCash with both CPUs and GPUs. However, as the level of difficulty improved, just like with most main coins, it is now only profitable to mine using GPUs. There are some other factors you should consider when choosing the Best ZCash mining GPUs, and we will analyze them below.
Nevertheless, you can use your GPUs to mine any other crypto currency than ZCash, as long as they use the same concept (proof of work).
What to Consider when Buying a ZCash GPU and Building a ZCash Mining RIG
If you want to get into mining, the first thing you should consider is that a more expensive GPU will not necessarily be the best.
Hashing Power: The hashing power (measured in Sols/s or H/s for ZCash) is the first thing you should consider when buying a GPU. Theoretically, the most expensive the GPU is, the higher will be its hash rate. However, this is not absolute, as there are many other factors playing a key role here, such as brand, mining pool, overclocking, temperature etc.
Electricity Costs: Electricity costs are also another main factor when considering building a mining rig. Depending on the country where you live in, it may not be profitable at all to mine. In other cases, even if you have a poor setup you can get a good profitability if electricity is cheap. You have also bear in mining that different GPUs have different power consumption.
Return on Investment: the ROI or return on investment of your mining operation will depend on a few things. How much you paid for your GPU, how much you are paying or electricity, and what is your hash rate. In my opinion, the return on investment should be of 100% in at most 12 months. That is, the profit from mining should pay the cost of your GPU in at most 12 months. If you have a good setup and low costs, you can get back the amount invested in as low as 3 months. But anything below 6 months I would consider pretty good.
Finally you can use this mining profitability calculator to estimate the cost of your investments and how fast you get your investment back.
Best ZCash Mining GPUs
Considering the factors above, we can go to our list of the best mining GPUs. However, before we get to that, there is still one thing to consider. What we have below is an estimate of Sol/s for each video card, nevertheless this changes daily, as the difficult for mining is not always the same. So one has to work with rough estimates when dealing with mining.
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This ZOTAC GTX 1080 is curently one of the most powerful GPUs available if you want to mine ZCash or other crypto currencies. Obviously this comes with a price tag that will also influence your return on investment. It comes with 8 GB 256-bit GDDR5X memory so you can expect to be pretty fast not only for mining, but for anything you put it to work on.
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This graphics card manufactured by ASUS is one of the most popular GPUs currently used on mining rigs around the world. It has a pretty good Sols/s and you can expect around 300 Sols/h (beginning of 2018 estimation). The main advantage of this GTX 1060 is that it is also pretty affordable, so you can have a pretty fast return on investment if you choose this video card.
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This Radeon RX 580 is a good alternative if you want to mine ZCash or other crypto currencies and you do want to go for NVIDIA graphics card. This specific GPU has 8 GB memory and has a pretty high benchmark. You can expect to reach around 350 Sol/s with this card, and considering its price, you can expect to have a decent return on investment.
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The NVIDIA Titan X is one of the GPUs with the highest benchmark, and highest hash rate for mining crypto currencies. If you tune it well, you can expect to reach around 800 Sol/s with this GPU. However, it is pretty expensive, therefore you may not have a very good return on investment while using it.4
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This ASUS ROG STRIX GPU is one of the best bets if you want to mine ZCash on 2018. It has an extremely high benchmark, and a price tag that is relatively attractive. It has a good return on investment, but it is not the on the top of the list of ROI. You can expect more than 500 Sol/s when using it.
Finding a GPU card
You may actually notice that it is much harder to find used GPUs in 2018 rather than new ones. The GPU mining market is still exploding, and it is not uncommon to have new GPU models being sold out and out of stock most of the time. This is just an indicator, of how good it is mining these days.
If you want to check more GPUs for mining ZCash, you can check their mining benchmarks on this website.
Are you mining ZCash? Leave your thoughts on the comment box below.