Now that Ethereum (ETH) is no longer mineable crypto coin you don’t have to worry about its DAG size and the amount of memory you have on any Ethash mining hardware, or maybe this is not entirely true. Before switching from PoW (mining) to PoS (staking) Ethereum’s DAG size has already passed the 5GB size making it impossible for miners using video cards and ASIC miners with less memory to mine it. But since ETHW and ETHF are forks from Ethereum their DAG sizes are also over 5GB already, so mining these with older hardware is not possible anymore and it would take about a year and a half before these reach the 6GB DAG size…
So, GPUs and ASIC miners with 6GB or less memory will stop being usable for mining these Ethereum forks, but there are a lot of other “younger” crypto coins that have much smaller DAG size that are still mineable with older 4GB GPUs or ASIC miners and will be mineable for quite a long time in the future. EtherGem (EGEM) is a crypto coin that has recently passed the 4GB DAG size, and QuarkChain (QKC) is expected to reach it very soon later this month. Then there are also the latest additions to the Ethash crypto coins such as Proof of Memes (POM or ETH2.0) and PinkChain (PINK) that were just recently launched and still have just 1GB DAG size.
MinerStat has an interesting and useful Ethash DAG Size Calendar service available that gives you a list of most coins, though not all, that are Ethash and similar algorithms that are DAG-based and when they will reach certain sizes for their DAGs. There is also an easy DAG size calculator that will allow you to do some math on your own for the supported coins, such as for example to check when Ravencoin (RVN) will have a 6G DAG size (March 2027). This tool can be quite useful for anyone with older Ethash ASIC miners such as first generation iPollos with 4GB memory, Jasminer X4 with 5GB memory etc. as well as for GPUs with 3GB, 4GB, 6GB video memory etc.
– To check out the MinerStat DAG Size Calculator and Calendar…
