XFX RX 550 4GB Monero Mining with xmr-stak-amd

Written by CC Freak on September 13, 2017
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I recently found the XFX RX 550 4GB model for sale for just $109 shipped via Amazon and couldn’t resist the price tag. I was reading people getting around 300 h/s with the cards and that works out to around 2.75 hashrate per dollar spent. Not bad at all, so I ordered two (and just ordered two more that will be here tomorrow) and started playing with xmr-stak-amd to see what I could get out of them. Needless to say, I am pleased. Disclaimer: Below I have linked to Amazon using my affiliate links. It helps fund my hobby and keeps my writing these kind of articles.

Note: At the bottom is a follow up with 6 RX 550s on SimpleMining OS.

A quick rundown of the mining rig:

Here are the settings I am using for xmr-stak-amd for 2 XFX RX 550 4GB. Note: See update at bottom of post for 4 card configuration.

/* 
 * Number of GPUs that you have in your system. Each GPU will get its own CPU thread.
 */
"gpu_thread_num" : 4,
/*
 * GPU configuration. You should play around with intensity and worksize as the fastest settings will vary.
 *      index    - GPU index number usually starts from 0
 *  intensity    - Number of parallel GPU threads (nothing to do with CPU threads)
 *   worksize    - Number of local GPU threads (nothing to do with CPU threads)
 * affine_to_cpu - This will affine the thread to a CPU. This can make a GPU miner play along nicer with a CPU miner.
 */
"gpu_threads_conf" : [ 
	{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
	{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
	{ "index" : 1, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
	{ "index" : 1, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
],
/*
 * Platform index. This will be 0 unless you have different OpenCL platform - eg. AMD and Intel.
 */
"platform_index" : 2,

To break it down a bit, I am starting 4 GPU threads and assigning 2 threads per card, each with an intensity of 512 and worksize of 8. One video card is set to processor core 1 and the other to processor core 2. The Pentium G4400 is a dual core processor with no hyperthreading.

Platform_index is on a case by case basis depending on your hardware, but 2 is what worked for the above configuration.

The results can be seen below:

Averaging 655 h/s over 15 minutes. That works out to exactly 3 h/s per dollar spent on the video cards at a very low power output.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Keep in mind that this is all at stock speeds! I plan to switch to Linux once I reach 8 video cards and have 12 XFX RX 550 running for just under 4 kh/s at a cost of just $1,308 dollars. The cards should retain a decent resell value due to the ram.

Update:  Here is my current results with now 4 RX 550’s at stock speeds:

Combined, all 4 RX 550s are producing 333.75 h/s over 15 minute window. Not bad, for stock speeds.

/* 
 * Number of GPUs that you have in your system. Each GPU will get its own CPU thread.
 */
"gpu_thread_num" : 8,
/*
 * GPU configuration. You should play around with intensity and worksize as the fastest settings will vary.
 *      index    - GPU index number usually starts from 0
 *  intensity    - Number of parallel GPU threads (nothing to do with CPU threads)
 *   worksize    - Number of local GPU threads (nothing to do with CPU threads)
 * affine_to_cpu - This will affine the thread to a CPU. This can make a GPU miner play along nicer with a CPU miner.
 */
"gpu_threads_conf" : [ 
	{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 1, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 2, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 3, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 1, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 2, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
	{ "index" : 3, "intensity" : 512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
],
/*
 * Platform index. This will be 0 unless you have different OpenCL platform - eg. AMD and Intel.
 */
"platform_index" : 1,

Follow Up: I have now reach 6 RX 550s and have made the move to SimpleMining OS so that I can eventually fill the entire Motherboard up with 12 of them. I am using sgminer-gm-5.5.5 with the following settings:

--no-submit-stale --kernel cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://x.227.x.134:3333 -u 46dpA9N1KDE9yERcSGASXPUyA4ga1GrPq5sDXqwwjQL2dAmf5kvgpNQUWdvyT1r55pfwfvuBn2h7YQPhZFYdWtjWUVUTobh -p x --rawintensity 504 -w 8 -g 2

I’ve found it the most stable. Results:

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