ASUS Cryptocurrency Mining Cards Are Real And Not Coming To North America

The rumors that NVIDIA and AMD would be coming out with dedicated mining cards that have been optimized for 24/7 use appear to have been real. ASUS has officially launched both an AMD Radeon RX 470 (Polaris) based and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Pascal GP106) based solutions for mining.

The ASUS MINING-P106-6G uses the same GP106 GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 1060, but ASUS isn’t using any NVIDIA or GeForce branding on this model. It also doesn’t have any display outputs, so the resale value for mining will be low as no gamer is going to want it since it can’t be a primary graphics card down or run in SLI. The ASUS specifications page lists this card as having 1280 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1506 MHz, a Boost clock of 1708 MHz, and 6GB of GDDR5 running at 8.0 GHz. The card also still has the usual one 6-pin PCIe power connector.

“The new card is also engineered to be seriously durable, enabling 24/7 operation for uninterrupted coin production. With GPU Tweak II also included for easy clock-speed and voltage tuning, ASUS Mining P106 provides the vital hardware and software tools cryptocurrency miners need to succeed in their quest to make a profit making the new cards a great choice for building mining systems with the best possible cost-performance ratio.” – ASUS

Many were hoping for a mining card that had a power optimized BIOS for mining and higher memory clock speeds, but that didn’t happen. These are the same clock speeds as the standard ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 video card, so you’ll still need to overclock and lower the power it appears. When it comes to mining Ethereum you are looking around 22 MH/s on an overclocked GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, so we’d expect this card to have about the same hashate.

Next up we have the ASUS MINING-RX470-4G and like the name implies this is basically an AMD Radeon RX 470 that has been optimized for mining use with the Polaris GPU. This model has 2048 STREAM processors, a base clock of 926 MHz, a Boost clock of 1206 MHz, and 4GB of GDDR5 running at 7.0 GHz effective (1750 MHz). The ASUS MINING-RX470-4G is again not factory overclocked or undervolted, so you’ll need to use a program like

One interesting thing about the ASUS MINING-RX470-4G is that they left the DVI video outputs on the board. The HDMI and DisplayPort openings are on the mounting bracket, but the connectors are not on the PCB. This means you might be able to use this card for more than just mining when the time to end mining comes, so something to think about. The AMD Radeon Rx 470 4GB graphics card gets around 22 MH/s as well.

The bad news is that this model will not be carried in the United States for the time being and is heavily focused on the APAC market. Right now these mining cards don’t look that special as they are basically the same as the regular gaming card and will have a lower resale value with the missing video outputs. We’ve also heard that these cards only come with a 6-month warranty versus the standard 3-year warranty and are priced the same as a gaming card.

We like the idea of a dedicated mining card, but they need to cost less and have a mining optimized BIOS for them to really take off! ASUS should overclock and undervolt the card from the factory so you don’t have to spend the time to flash and dial in each mining card in your farm. Reduce the warranty to 90-days or something and cut the price back more and they’d win the hearts of miners all across the world!