Ethereum hashrate may drop very fast!
The hashrate of ethereum mining may drop very fast because of the expanding DAG filesize (every 30000 blocks the epoch increase by 1, for an increase of 10 it will take around 45 days). Benchmarking some hardware, and increasing the epoch value, we can predict the hashrate drop in the future. Here are some examples:
| Cards | DAG (epoch) | Hashrate (Mh/s) |
|---|---|---|
| RX 470 4gb | 130 | 21.7 |
| RX 470 4gb | 140 | 20.9 |
| RX 470 4gb | 150 | 20 |
| RX 470 4gb | 160 | 18.1 |
| RX 470 4gb | 180 | 14.9 |
| --------------- | --------------- | --------------- |
| RX 570 4gb | 130 | 26.9 |
| RX 570 4gb | 140 | 25.1 |
| RX 570 4gb | 150 | 23 |
| RX 570 4gb | 160 | 20.9 |
| RX 570 4gb | 180 | 17.7 |
| --------------- | --------------- | --------------- |
| Fury OC | 130 | 32.3 |
| Fury OC | 140 | 30.3 |
| Fury OC | 160 | 29.8 |
| Fury OC | 180 | 26.2 |
| --------------- | --------------- | --------------- |
| GTX 970 | 130 | 17.5 |
| GTX 970 | 140 | 6 |
| --------------- | --------------- | --------------- |
| GTX 1070 | 130 | 29.5 |
| GTX 1070 | 140 | 29.2 |
| GTX 1070 | 160 | 28.8 |
| GTX 1070 | 180 | 29.5 |
| --------------- | --------------- | --------------- |
| GTX 1060 3gb | 130 | 22 |
| GTX 1060 3gb | 160 | 22 |
| GTX 1060 3gb | 170 | 22 |
| GTX 1060 3gb | 180 | error due to DAG size |
currently (23/06/2017) we are at epoch 130.
So , as you can see the hashrate of the RX series cards will be reduced considerably, the 970 after only 45 days it will become unusable, but the nvidia 10xx series (except for the 3gb ram limit of this 1060) won't be penalized. So I recommend to buy nVidia cards of the 10xx series.