AMD's new Radeon RX 460 based video cards are now available on the market and crypto currency miners are wondering are they any good for mining and especially for mining Ethereum (ETH). AMD's GPUs are known to perform better in the memory demanding Ethash algorithm used by Ethereum, so no wonder that there is interest, even though the RX 460 is the slowest model of the new RX series of video cards. While it may not be the best choice for multi-GPU mining rig when power/performance ratio is important as well as when you want to get the highest possible hashrate from the whole rig, it still might be interesting choice for smaller mining rigs. With 6x Radeon RX 460 you should be able to fit in a total power consumption for the whole mining rig of about 400 Watt and a 500W PSU should be more than enough for the whole system providing some extra headroom.

Specifications of the AMD Radeon RX 460

What you should take a note of in the specifications is the number of stream processors that are less than half of the ones found in RX 470 - 896 for the RX 460 vs 2048 for the RX 470. Also the width of the memory interface here is cut in half compared to RX 470 and RX 480 - 128-bit versus 256-bit, so especially for Ethereum mining what you should expect is about half the hashrate judging from the specifications alone. The video memory is clocked at 7 GHz (1750 MHz), but with 128-bit memory bus it should have half of the RX 470 with 4GB clocked with the same clock of the video memory.

So what is the Ethereum mining Hashrate for the RX 460

The exact number you can expect to get when using the Claymore Dual Miner along with the AMD Radeon RX 470 mining Ethereum (ETH) is 10.7 MHS at stock settings. As already explained even based on the specifications we knew that it should be somewhere around the half of what the RX 470 4GB with 7 GHz video memory makes or with other words a little shy of 22 MHS and when you divide that in half you pretty much get what the RX 460 actually manages to deliver. So no surprises here regarding the hashrate that the AMD Radeon RX 460 manages to provide for mining Ethereum.

Extra tip for the 2GB model of Radeon RX 460

If you are getting an AMD Radeon RX 460 with just 2GB of video memory (there is a version with 4GB as well) with the idea to mine Ethereum with it you may end up seeing this error message:

Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can’t allocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)

This is a problem that is know to show on some video cards with just 2GB video memory when trying to mine Ethereum, the good thing is that you should still be able to make it work. What you have to do is add a few extra lines in the BAT file you are using to start your Ethereum mining software and the error message should disappear and the miner should start working just fine.

Here is what you need to add at the start before the line running your Ethereum miner:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Alternatively you can just run these commands in a separate BAT file and then start the miner.

Do note that the setx command sets the environment variables permanently, so there should be no need to run them each time when you start your miner in order for them to take effect!