AMD RX 5600 and 5500 models

What is up with these models of GPU? Why does no one ever talk about the 5500 or the 5600? All you ever hear about is the 5700 and the 580, 480, 470 aren’t the 5600 above the 580 and below the 5700? Why aren’t they shown on the what to mine GPU page? I looked around online and it looks like these mine better than the 580 but slower than the 5700 just seems weird to me that this model never comes up.

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I have 6 5500XTs running smooth as silk. Haven’t really tried to play with the settings yet. They are all a consistent 25.5Mhash and are at 90Watts per card. I have also been looking at the 5600, but they are only 6GB cards. All three are pretty damn good cards and the prices are proportionate to their profitability.

Here is why I prefer any of those three vs the 580. The 580 runs at a 49% profit-to-electricity cost. In other words, you spend more in power than you get in profit. What this means is, if the coin you are mining drops by 50% you are actually losing money as your power stays the same.

The 5500, 5600, 5700 all run at 63%+ which is really REALLY good. Only card I have found that is better than them is my Radeon VIIs which are at 68%. That means that even if Eth drops by 50%, I will still pull in 10%+ profits. You really can’t argue with those numbers.

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thank you for sharing this I was hoping to hear from someone who is actually mining with them!

Right, so here’s what I’ve learned in looking at just the issue that you raised!!!

As we are all learning in tweaking our rigs, it’s the memory that gets you the hash rate on most of the currently profitable algos. So I’ve been trying to compare the probable memory performance across a range of cards.

The RX570 8GB cards are all GDDR5 at a memory bus of 256bits. This gives a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s.

The 5500XT has 8 GB of GDDR6 with a memory bus of only 128bits but that gives you the same memory bandwidth - 224GB/s. This seems to indicate that the benefits of GDDR6 are lost through the narrower memory bus in this instance.

The 5600XT has 6GB of GDDR6 memory and a memory bus of 192 bits. It gives a memory bandwidth of 288GB/s - about 30% increase over the 570 and 5500.

The 5700 (non XT) has 8 GB of GDDR6 with a memory bus of 256bits giving a memory bandwidth of 448GB/s - twice that of the 570 and 5500 cards. But as we know you don’t really get twice the hash rate so there is more to it than just memory bandwidth.

What also needs to be considered is the improved power efficiency of the new model cards. The Navi10 based cards are much more efficient in that you can get them operating at pretty high hash rates for pretty low power usage. I have RX5700s delivering 53MH/s at 73W. That gives me a hash/watt figure of 0.726MH per Watt. My RX 570s deliver 31MH/s at 90W which is equal to .344MH per Watt - or about half as efficient.

What I then do is I look at the price of the card, assess it’s efficiency and then decide what is going to give me the best value. For example using my numbers above, if I can buy an RX5700 for $450 (AUD for me) then I would need to be able to buy an RX570 for less than $213 to make it better value ($450 / 0.726 x 0.344).

Based on PTCrusader’s figures above (and yes I know they are the stock settings and could probably be improved with some tweaking) the 5500XT is getting a hash/watt of 0.283MH/W which is less than the 570s with some overclocking/undervolting. Given that the 5500XTs are generally priced higher than the 570s, I’d be interested to see what sort of increase in hash rate and reduction in power might be achieved on these Navi10 cards???

can you share your overclock settings? I am getting the same hashrate but I am using 120 watts per card.

I’m fascinated by that 570. There is a 4GB, 8GB, and a 16GB model but NH calculator shows them all as mining about the same. WTH?

Just to clarify my post earlier. Taking the NH calculator which I know isn’t deadeye accurate…

@ .11 power rate

570 8GB Mines .67 a day with .34 in power leaving a profit of .33 a day.
5500xt Mines .57 a day with .16 in power leaving a profit of .31 a day.

However if ETH dropped by 50% then

570 mines .335 a day with .34 in power leaves a loss of .01 a day
5500xt Mines .275 a day with .16 in power leaving a profit of .105 a day.

One is the safer bet short term as we have no idea what prices will do before end of year. Also, notice 570 uses 2x the amount of power to make same profit.

that is what I was basing my comments on.

MeatyMouse - I’ve settled on using the Adrenalin software to tweak my RX570s. At the moment, I set the Core Clock frequency (in the State 6 and State 7 columns) at 1200mHz and 875mV. The memory is set at 2050mHz and 875mV on State 2.

This image shows it hashing on Claymore’s while it uses the same power but gets slightly less hash rate on Phoenixminer (my RX5700s get better hashrate on Phoenix so I usually run the 570s on Phoenix as well because I feel like it’s more stable).

Oh…I forgot to mention that I flashed the BIOS for each of these 570s to an RX580 which took me all of about 20 minutes to do 12 of them.

I was looking for the clocks on the 5700’s to get them down to 70 watts

These are the Adrenalin settings for my RX5700s


I’ve brought the core clocks down to about 1200mHz and 800mV (just drag the white flag across to about 1200 and then put your voltage in the box below). I’ve boosted the memory to 1824 and on my board you can’t alter the mem voltage (set at 850mV) unless you mod the board, which I might get to eventually. Not every card is the same so on one of my cards I have a slightly lower mem clock which gives me a tiny drop in hash but also a drop in power usage.

This is giving me 75w and producing 52.5Mh/s but I just restarted the rig and I find the hash rate will slowly rise to about 53Mh/s and the voltage will settle somewhere around 72-73w.

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that is effing amazing bro can’t wait to get my rig working again moving one GPU to the other PSU didn’t solve my problem but I feel like I have some ideas to try instead of just feeling stuck like I did before

Thanks - it’s taken a bit of tweaking and many rig restarts when I go a little too low on the voltage but I’m happy to have the 9 GPU rig running pretty stable with total power draw here:

GPUs 1, 3 and 7 are the RX570s which are sitting down at 87 watts now and the other 6 are the RX5700s staying around the 75 watts. Getting a pretty consistent hash rate at just over 400mH/s with no incorrect or stale shares. I can crank the hash rate up to get over 415, but I have to up the power and I start getting a meaningful number of rejects making my “at pool” hashrate fall back below what I get at the 400mH/s - so just wasting power doing that.

With your setup, I’d try 4 x RX5700s on the main GPU powering the mobo etc, then put the fifth RX5700 and the 4 RX470s on the B Slots with the other PSU.

One thing to look out for if you have had the rig fail to start after you added more GPUs is to check all your power cables to make sure you haven’t shorted out any wires. With my setup, because the 5700s need an 8pin and a 6pin to the card, I didn’t have enough PCIE power cables on my 1200w PSU to power the risers, so I had to use the SATA connectors. I was running 2 SATA cables to power 3 risers each but found out you shouldn’t power more than 2 risers with each SATA cable. I have now thrown out 4 SATA cables after I looked at them and found that I had melted the plastic and probably shorted the cable at a point very close to the PSU itself.