In the second half of 2021, AMD’s board partners repurposed their old Navi 12 GPU inventory for the crypto mining market in the form of the BC-160, and so the 8GB HBM2 BC-160 hit the market.
The AMD BC-160 crypto mining card from XFX features a 7nm Navi 12 GPU that packs 2,304 cores in 36 compute units. The card has 8GB of HBM2 memory at 1.6 Gbps pin speed and runs over a 2048-bit bus interface, so there are two HBM2 stacks on the package, each with a 2 GB stack and 512 GB/s of bandwidth.
The card is equipped with 150W TGP and has an ETH output of 69.5 MH/s for a PPW of 0.46. This is a lower PPW than the entry-level RDNA 2 (Navi 23) product, as shown below.
AMD BC-160 (default) – 69.5 MH/s @ 150W (0.46 PPW)
AMD BC-160 (default) – 72.3 MH/s @123W (0.58 PPW)
AMD RX 6600 XT (Tuned) – ~33 MH/s @ 55W (0.59 PPW)
AMD RX 6600 Non-XT (tuned) – ~30 MH/s @ 50W (0.61 PPW)
With optimized settings, the card can deliver up to 72.30 MH/s at 123W, resulting in a slightly better PPW rating.
The AMD BC-160 mining card is optimized to run in the Linux Ubuntu/RedHeat operating system and can be used in a 12x GPU farm. The card itself features a dual slot design with a custom PCB and offers both active cooling (blower) and a standard passive cooling design. Power is provided through a dual 8-pin connector on the back and, like every mining card, it features a headless design.