Cryptocurrencies

What cryptocurrencies do you use/own?

  • Bitcoin (XBT)

    Votes: 30 27.8%

  • Ether (ETH)

    Votes: 16 14.8%

  • Litecoin (LTC)

    Votes: 15 13.9%

  • Peercoin (PPC)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Dash (DASH)

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Dogecoin (XDG)

    Votes: 4 3.7%

  • Blackcoin (BLK)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Zcash (ZEC)

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Other

    Votes: 14 13.0%

  • None

    Votes: 69 63.9%
  • Total voters
    108
Moltuae said:
NiceHash's profitability can fluctuate a lot. As I understand it, because they sell your hashing power, what they pay is largely dependant on what people are bidding for it: https://new.nicehash.com/marketplace
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Down to $4.97 at the moment.

With the recent drops that makes my payback for the card purchase closer to 5 months instead of 3. Still not bad, but I'm starting to wonder if I should mine coin directly or through a pool.


Moltuae said:
If you want a good (and very technically in-depth) read, I'd recommend getting a copy of Andreas Antonopoulos' book 'Mastering Bitcoin'. I have it in good old fashioned paper-back format for a bit of light night-time reading. For a less technical read, I believe his book 'The Internet of Money' is also very good, though I haven't read it myself yet.
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I've read 'The Internet of Money' on audiobook and found it very good. 'Mastering Bitcoin' might be too technical, but I may need to give it a shot. I think I just barely, almost, understand public key / private key encryption, hashing, and other technologies.
 
I'm doing NiceHash as well and noticed a drop as well. My new board with 4X P-51 slots will be coming in soon, so I plan to be as efficient as possible running GPU's all in one pool. Otherwise you end up losing profit to system idle/runtime.

With 2 R280 I was making roughly (estimated by them) 240 CAD per month. But one of the cards is having issues and I'm trying to identify if it's a card issue or it just doesn't play well in multi gpu.

I'm hoping to get enough rigs to make this my full time job. :)
 
Struggling with part of the system I didn't think would be a big deal: building a frame / case.

I've looked at a lot of info and videos around the web. You can build a simple cheap frame from wood, but that just seems wrong. There are a lot of frames made with angled aluminum and was thinking that would be best. Then I've noticed a few that use square tube aluminum. Those look sturdy and maybe more configurable and stackable than the other styles.

What have you all decided on?
 
A few years back I purchased a huge assortment of OpenBeam extruded Aluminium beams and connectors. http://www.openbeamusa.com/about/

I'm using those to build a rig. You can use M3 screws to secure a mainboard standoff in reverse, which is how I will mount my boards. The rig will be capable of powering 8 cards, 4 per system. Each board will be mounted open air, with PCI-E risers going to another level to secure the cards.

I have a HP XW4600 board on the way which will be system #1, and I have an old ASUS board that has 4 PCI-E ports that will be system #2.

I have 2X Saphire R9 Fury Nitro, 2 X R9 280X (Sadly one may be defective), 2X R9 360, MSI R9 290 TwinFrozer and a GTX 460.

The GTX doesn't produce much but if it's used in tandem with the other cards, it may break even, or make a profit if things go up in value.

I'm gonna need a very big PSU (or two) to power these rigs, which will take a bit to break even, but so far everything is working out. I also have some older Sempron 210U thin clients that have PCI-E 4X slots that are 64 Bit Capable, so I will use those for cards that run OK but don't play nice with the other kids. I have a Gigabyte 280X that is having issues. It was mining fine till a second card was added. So it could be a power issues as I don't have powered risers and the ASUS Server board I am using may not have the circuits to power two hungry cards, hence the need for powered risers. I assume even if a VGA card has external connectors, it will still pull a certian amount of power from the PCI-E slot.
 
timeshifter said:
Struggling with part of the system I didn't think would be a big deal: building a frame / case.

I've looked at a lot of info and videos around the web. You can build a simple cheap frame from wood, but that just seems wrong. There are a lot of frames made with angled aluminum and was thinking that would be best. Then I've noticed a few that use square tube aluminum. Those look sturdy and maybe more configurable and stackable than the other styles.

What have you all decided on?
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That's something we've struggled with all along.

Most of our multi-card rigs use a purpose-built aluminium frame sourced on Ebay, sold by a small manufacturing company in eastern Europe but those seem to be no longer available now. I'm struggling to even find an image of one but they are similar to this: https://i.imgur.com/2nVOx40.jpg

For my customer's mining farm, ultimately I think we'll be custom-building a large rack from angled aluminium, in the meantime I'm still experimenting with different options. I took delivery of one of these frames yesterday. It's ok but very basic and provides no easy way to secure the graphics cards. There are better frames available like this one but they're usually quite a bit more expensive -- I guess you get what you pay for. I was experimenting initially with using a large tower case, hoping to mount 2 or 3 graphics cards in the 5.25" bays, but I haven't been able to find a suitable case or a simple way of mounting the cards. One problem with graphics cards is that there's no universal size or suitable fixing points.

I agree that wood just seems wrong. Fire risks aside, it looks very unprofessional, almost like the computer equivalent of this: https://i.imgur.com/ta7hphf.jpg
 
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Alright, this was too interesting to pass up. I purchased a 1080 Ti and cobbled together a system using spare parts otherwise. This is an older i3 with 4GB RAM and a 7200RPM drive. The other components don't seem to make much of a difference. It's running at 34.4MH/s mining ethereum. I'll power down and hookup my Killawatt when I get a chance.
 
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Blues said:
~1:20 in that video you could see the typical heat wave visual distortion and I don't know that it was an effect.

Right now I think the best entry card for people might be the 1050Ti their calculator doesn't say what memory size but I can only find it in 4GB so assuming that is what they use it is ~$150 for the card and has a profitability with their calculator of about $55/month
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I/we discussed not long ago what a bang-for-the-buck the 1050Ti is right now.

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/gaming-on-a-budget.73656/
 
TAPtech said:
Alright, this was too interesting to pass up. I purchased a 1080 Ti and cobbled together a system using spare parts otherwise. This is an older i3 with 4GB RAM and a 7200RPM drive. The other components don't seem to make much of a difference. It's running at 34.4MH/s mining ethereum. I'll power down and hookup my Killawatt when I get a chance.
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Which 1080 Ti card did you buy? Wonder how much power that 7200 RPM drive pulls? What software you running for Ethereum? I'm still stuck on Nicehash. Ethereum has really dropped in value over the last two weeks.
 
It's a gigabyte 1080Ti something or other. Might be worth simply booting from a USB3.0 drive to save the 7200rpm power. I'm running claymore and mining Ethereum and Pascal at the same time. I'm using nanopool and am using an Exchange which is probably a bit of a risk. Kind of neat, it can hash both at the same time with "no performance impact". That seems to be true in my limited testing. Maybe it can fit both calcs in the same clock cycle.
 
TAPtech said:
It's a gigabyte 1080Ti something or other. Might be worth simply booting from a USB3.0 drive to save the 7200rpm power. I'm running claymore and mining Ethereum and Pascal at the same time. I'm using nanopool and am using an Exchange which is probably a bit of a risk. Kind of neat, it can hash both at the same time with "no performance impact". That seems to be true in my limited testing. Maybe it can fit both calcs in the same clock cycle.
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It would be interesting to know how that compares with NiceHash for profitability. Do you have any figures?

Probably better to setup a wallet rather than use an exchange. Not just because of the risk factor but I believe a lot of exchanges explicitly forbid mining directly into their wallets.
 
Moltuae said:
It would be interesting to know how that compares with NiceHash for profitability. Do you have any figures?

Probably better to setup a wallet rather than use an exchange. Not just because of the risk factor but I believe a lot of exchanges explicitly forbid mining directly into their wallets.
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Yeah, I'm not sure if Gemini would let me, so I used nanopool. I'm just getting started here so I certainly appreciate the input. I'll do some math and post it here. I got a bit ahead of myself and wanted to get the thing cooking!

The rig idles at 55W and goes up to 220W under load, after tweaking some settings... getting 30.5Mh/s on Eth and 302mh/s on Pascal concurrently. Out of the box the card was doing 32+Mh/s. I'll have to fiddle some more and see where the best efficiency is.
 
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Interested if anyone else is mining zcash? Everyone seems to go straight for eth when mining.

I've got a 1050ti running at ~180 sol/s and a 1070 running at ~460 sols which is currently bringing in just under $6 per day, even with the recent price crash.

Not done any power calculations as I already owned the cards... figured why not put them to use.
 
Moltuae said:
Yeah it would be good to see some direct comparisons. NiceHash profitability is low a the moment so it may be better to mine directly to a pool right now.

@SAFCasper What setup/algorithm are you using to mine Zcash?
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Using EWBF's CUDA Zcash Miner and flypool.

Cards are overclocked but I think they were ~150 and ~420 at stock speeds, can't remember for certain.

I'll see if I can run a test on Nicehash.


EDIT:
The 1070 is showing $3.50 per day on Nicehash. I don't have access to the 1050ti right now.
 
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I would say that the $/day isn't great as value of the currencies fluctuate and the for Nicehash the rate people are paying also fluctuates so the most consistent is the actual hash rates. We all like to look at what we actually get for our efforts so the $/day is kinda what we all gravitate toward.

I have a SFF desktop I am debating selling off or holding and when I can buy and drop in something like a low profile 1050Ti to make it a starter mining rig.
 
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