Mining in general is a serious ecological problem for me. For Proof of Work coins it makes the network reliable and safe - and thats some kind of necessary. But the problem is, the more the coin is used, the more the coin gains value and the more the network grows. The first couple of years that was not a problem for cryptocurrencies, the overall consumption was reasonable. With the actual exponentially growing hashrate of cryptocurrencies we are facing a serious ecological problem by 2020, if not even before (thats the point were the power consumption of the BTC network equals world power consumption). With this in mind you could ask me "well, then why do you mine". I believe in cryptocurrencies as the future in one or another way and i believe in the technology behind it. Since the network needs the hashpower for security reasons and i really like the idea to get rewarded for providing hashpower just by turning on some scripts i nevertheless searched for some ways to make this as less power consumptive as possible. For me, efficiency has a much more value than pure hash power. In this post i will start with Ethereum and compare the most common consumer cards right now on the market. (stock settings and without bios mods)

Since Nvidia GPUs can not be Bios modded, you can only tweak them a little bit via standard OC tools like MSI Afterburner. But you can do the same to AMD GPUs - so the comparison remains the same. The real difference starts with Bios modding, wich you only can do with AMD GPUs. A RX 470 is capable of 29 MH/s while only consuming 90W of power (wich leads to an efficiency of 0,322 - 78%+!!). So, if you do not want to BIOS mod and just want to keep everything on stock settings, GTX 1060 is your card. But if you want to get the best possible efficiency available, you have to BIOS mod the RX470.