AMD Navi 12 BC-160 Mining Cards on Sale in China

Another AMD partner is shipping mining cards based on the company's silicon, this time via Aliexpress. From the listing we seem to have an XFX graphics card designed for mining workloads. The new XFX BC-160 card makes use of Navi 12, manufactured on 7nm silicon and packing 2304 Stream Processors across 36 Compute Units. It employs 8GB of HBM2 memory running over a 2048-bit bus.

XFX's BC-160 features a straightforward naming scheme that's unlike any other AMD product. According to spec sheets and marketing materials for the cards, decoding the product code results in a Blockchain Compute (BC) card, in the first generation (1), offering up to 69.5 MH/s typical ETH mining performance (BC-160) in a 150W TGP envelope. This hash rate was achieved under the RedHat release of Linux, which we assume refers to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as Red Hat Linux was discontinued in 2004. The cards also claim compatibility with the Ubuntu distro.

XFX's BC-160 joins Sapphire's X080 and X060 "unofficial" mining cards. Looking at how the cards differ in their design, it seems safe to say that AMD isn't providing AIB partners with a reference, blockchain-compute oriented design. Instead, AMD's partners are the ones that are designing these cards around AMD silicon. AMD likely makes the same bottom-line earnings whether the GPUs end up in RX 6000-series, RX 5000-series, or cryptocurrency mining products. Unfortunately, that also means less stock for gaming-oriented cards, as both XFX's Navi 12 and Sapphire's Navi 22 mining cards both consume 7nm chips that could otherwise have gone into the gaming segment.

Based on the mining performance and power use, the BC-160 would likely rank well in our list of the best GPUs for mining. Its HBM2 memory subsystem does increase the price, however. Sapphire's best-performing X080 has an estimated price of around $850, while the new XFX BC-160 is listed on Aliexpress for a cool $2,000. That's more than it costs for an RTX 3080 Ti, using eBay GPU prices, which can do around 80 MH/s. A video of the XFX BC-160 cards in their mining environment (and the hashrate report, at 3:38) is also available, which you can see below.

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Francisco Pires
Freelance News Writer

Francisco Pires is a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware with a soft side for quantum computing.

  • ezst036
    Could someone please get confirmation as to if defective GPUs are being re-purposed into a mining-only scenario? Earlier reports made this claim.
    Reply
  • gargoylenest
    ok, so marketing strategy...sell mining cards in one of the only country where its illegal to mine?
    Reply
  • daeros
    Not just the one use case - these could also work very nicely as desktop accelerators for a VDI server setup - those don't need to have local display outputs.

    I also like the jab at companies building products for the customers who will pay the most for them - that's their job. Where do you think they get the billions of capital? It comes from investors, and they expect a return on their money. Companies that intentionally make income-decreasing business decisions generally do not last long.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    gargoylenest said:
    ok, so marketing strategy...sell mining cards in one of the only country where its illegal to mine?
    Yes was just think that too.
    Reply