Why does the hash rate drop in mining?

Representatives of the crypto community use various terms that newcomers have not heard of. Among such words is hashrate, or hashrate. In mining, this is the performance of the equipment, namely the amount of calculations per second. Owners of farms for mining digital coins may face a decrease in this indicator. To begin with, it is necessary to find out why the hash rate in mining falls over time. Such a situation negatively affects the income from coin mining.

Factors affecting the hash rate

Computing power does not only depend on the performance of the equipment used by miners. To keep the income from cryptocurrency mining at a high level, it is necessary to check the performance of the system.

The number and performance of the equipment

First of all, you need to check the computing system for mining. The most popular hardware for cryptocurrency mining is video cards, or GPUs.

Miners connect them into farms, which usually consist of 4-8 devices. Sometimes even 12 cards are used.

Manufacturers create equipment for different algorithms. For example, NVIDIA cards work better with Ethash (Ethereum), and AMD devices win when mining on Equihash (Zcash).

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The performance of a video card when mining cryptocurrencies depends on other parameters:

• Frequency of operation. The basis of each board is chips (aka crystals or cores), which function at a given frequency. The higher it is, the faster each copes with the execution of commands.
• The number of cores. Their number also affects the power of the GPU.
• Timings. From them depends on the time of execution of each command by the card. Basic settings sometimes reduce the power of the card in mining. In the network you can find timings for a specific cryptocurrency. Their use removes the pauses between the execution and reception of a new command.

The power of the system is also affected by software settings, power stability, farm quality and internet speed.

More advanced hardware entering the market

Right now, miners are buying GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. With the release of each new generation of video cards, manufacturers modernize the chips. Modern models produce higher performance and require less power compared to previous systems.

Against the background of new NVIDIA and AMD cards, the performance of outdated devices does not change. For the latter to decrease hash rate, objective reasons are needed.

Back in 2021, NVIDIA decided to programmatically block cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3060 graphics cards. According to the developers’ plan, the power should have been halved. It turned out that mining was limited only for the Efirium network, but this restriction was removed after the system was hacked.

Network complexity

One of the main parameters in cryptocurrency mining. From it depends on the amount of work that needs to be done by the equipment to find one block.

With the growing popularity of cryptocurrency and its value, the hash rate of the network increases, as more powerful mining equipment is connected. Along with this, the block discovery time decreases. When it becomes noticeably lower than the average values, the complexity of the network is raised by the algorithm. There is also an inverse dependence. If the hash rate of the entire network on Efirium has fallen significantly, it will take more time to find a block. As a consequence, the complexity will decrease to return to previous values.

External factors

A decrease in computing power occurs for a variety of reasons. For example, if a large farm is disconnected from the network, the hash rate will decrease. The higher it was, the more noticeable the effect will become.

In 2019, the largest farms in China were audited. Some mining companies shut down, which caused a decrease in the power of some cryptocurrency networks.

Power problems also lead to a decrease in the number of miners and a drop in computing performance.

Causes of hashrate drop in mining

The main reasons are listed above. They work for the Ethereum network and other cryptocurrencies. You can only add some indirect reasons.

Cause	Consequences
Falling ETH value	If the value of the coin drops drastically, it will cause the hardware to disconnect from the network.
Farm overheating	All graphics cards get very warm under load. When the temperature jumps (above 80 °C on average), the power of the chips decreases. If a user’s hash rate drops on one graphics card, it is a sign of overheating.
Lack of power supply	In this situation, too, the performance of farms for cryptocurrency mining decreases.

If it is still possible to eliminate the causes of overheating and lack of power, then nothing can be done with the Ethereum rate. In this case, the miner becomes a “hostage” of the market.

Why the hash rate on the video card drops and ways to solve the problem

Among the most frequent methods of eliminating the causes of the drop in efficiency are the following:

• If one or more cards started to get warm, it is necessary to clean radiators, replace thermal pads, install a new cooling system.
• In the case of changing timings (or if they remained standard), it is necessary to find in the network values for a specific cryptocurrency.
• When the reason is the collapse of the token rate, it remains only to wait for the market to grow.
• Program failure. This happens rarely, but it cannot be ruled out. It is necessary to look for a problem in the software settings or simply reset them to the standard ones, and then make new parameters.

Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Why does the hash rate on my video card drop when idle?

The card may be going into power saving mode. You need to switch the card to maximum performance. You can do this through the NVIDIA or AMD control panel.

❗ What is processing power measured in?

The units of this parameter are hashes per second, or H/s. For convenience, such values as kH/s (kilohesh), MH/s (megahesh), GH/s (gigahesh), TH/s (terahash) are used.

💻 Does a video card’s performance drop a lot when mining if it overheats?

The power drop of the card when overheating depends on the architecture of the device, the frequency vips used and the number of cores. Some devices lose 50% of performance at temperatures over 80°C, while others lose only 10-15%.

📟 Is it possible to calculate the power of a specific video card?

Yes. There are special services online to calculate the yield from mining. The user only needs to find in the table his board and the mined coin. This will allow you to see the average figure.

💲 How to raise the performance of a video card?

To increase the power use programs for overclocking the GPU. AMD graphics cards are best suited for this purpose.

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Author: Saifedean Ammous, an expert in cryptocurrency economics.