Can I use a mining card for all around performance?

[ICrann]

Hello,

 

I was thinking of getting mining card on ebay because of the huge price difference. I am not planning on playing high graphic games more farming simulator 15 and Sims 2 which both work on my €150 laptop. But I mainly use my computer as a workstation for programming and developing software. I was wondering if a mining card would boost the speed of my system without having to install any dodgy third party drivers for gaming.

 

One of the listings I was looking at was this one They say in the description that they can provide drivers if your gamming on it but I don't want to have to do that.

 

Thank you in advance for help.

[Kaelon]

In short, no.

 

Mining Cards are a very specific application of a GPU to be used for, as you can surmise, mining cryptocurrency (or, more specifically, performing a series of complex mathematical computations to advance publicly held ledger data).  This is an extremely narrow use case, and in order to gain processor benefits for the rest of your system, you would need to have applications (and corresponding drivers) that specifically take advantage of GPUs for computational purposes.  By default, games and pretty much every other application on your system won't benefit from the power of a mining GPU.

 

There are certainly some nuances to this answer, including possible workarounds (many, but not all, convoluted).  While Mining GPUs are inexpensive, by and large it's also because they have a very specific workload associated with their capacities.

[Nayr438]

I don't know much about it, but what I do know is

 

You need a iGPU

You need a modified Driver

I don't believe it has nvenc or cuda support.

If something changes in Windows, where you need a new driver, it may not be possible in the future to upgrade your driver if NVIDIA blocks the workaround rendering your card useless for anything but mining.

[ICrann]

3 minutes ago, BlueScope819 said:

Nah, see the thing with a mining card is their drivers are locked down by Nvidia to only do mining, which means that you basically will have to be installing dodgy drivers regardless of what you plan to do with it, unless you want to lose money mining with it. LTT has a great video on the subject, if you wish.

I already checked it out but that was more aimed towards gaming

[ICrann]

2 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

I don't know much about it, but what I do know is

 

You need a iGPU

You need a modified Driver

I don't believe it has nvenc or cuda support.

If something changes in Windows, where you need a new driver, it may not be possible in the future to upgrade your driver if NVIDIA blocks the workaround.

The CPU I am planning on has integrated graphics

[Haro]

12 minutes ago, ICrann said:

was wondering if a mining card would boost the speed of my system without having to install any dodgy third party drivers for gaming

Mining cards are not even used to display an image 

Some mining specific models don't even come with a display output, and it has a mining firmware. If you  can't find the non mining equivalent card for around the same price 

Go for it as a fun project if you want, but you will need some time and effort.

[Jurrunio]

Depends on the exact GPU you're talking about. Nvidia mining cards can be used for stuff like machine learning (i.e. secondary processor) only. It supports CUDA like the standard card, but there's no video output making them unsuitable as the main graphics card.

 

As for AMD, their "mining cards" are just normal cards with 1 or none display outputs. If there is a display out, you can use it just like a normal gaming card.

[Grabhanem]

What application are you looking to improve performance in? If it's not a gaming-like load and also not CUDA, it's unlikely your graphics card will matter at all.

[Kilrah]

He said gaming.

 

There are solutions to make it work but you do have to do "dodgy driver hacls".