AMD destroys Nvidia at Bitcoin mining, can the gap ever be bridged?

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UaVaj

Golden Member
Nov 16, 2012
1,546
0
76
hokies83 said:
It holds a Stock exchange value.

Anywho this is my Auction.. 1/10th for 37$

http://www.ebay.com/itm/190822765375?ssPageName=STRK:MESOX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1561.l2649

My Point is even if you do not want to look into it with Amd Gpus there are Asic machines.. and investing into it could pay off in the long run.

Im about 6000$ invested into BTC mining i have 2 50 GH/S Asic miners ordered.

At the market price now if i had my 2 50 GH/S asic machines running this is what it would look like a month.

Coins per 24h at these conditions 5.6039
BTC Power cost per 24h 0.53 USD
Revenue per day 690.46 USD
Less power costs 689.93 USD
System efficiency 500.00 MH/s/W Mining Factor 100 at the end of the time frame 0.66 USD/24h@100MHash/s Average Mining Factor 100 0.68 USD/24h@100MHash/s Power cost per time frame 16.07 USD
Revenue per time frame 20588.97 USD
Less power costs 20572.90 USD

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
Click to expand...

not to bust your bubbles. at that rate of return. why buy just 2. when you can buy a warehouse full.



back to amd.
if you aleady own the hardware (for other purprose - like entertainment gaming). bitcoin mining is a nice bonus.
if you need the hardware to mine. just buy bitcoin coins.
 
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2is

Diamond Member
Apr 8, 2012
4,281
131
106
nVidia doesn't care about bit coins and I'm glad. I'd rather have them focus on things that matter.
 
Will Robinson

Will Robinson

Golden Member
Dec 19, 2009
1,408
0
0
2is said:
nVidia doesn't care about bit coins and I'm glad. I'd rather have them focus on things that matter.
Click to expand...

NVDA owners probably think....
f4kbpt.jpg

:eek:
 
birthdaymonkey

birthdaymonkey

Golden Member
Oct 4, 2010
1,176
3
81
Mining is fun too. You get to buy/tweak computer parts, look at graphs, play the market, and make a small profit if you're smart. If it wasn't fun, I don't think most of the people on here would be doing it.
 
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peteyo

Member
Apr 15, 2013
34
0
0
I very interested in the future of bitcoins, whether good or bad interesting none the less. Everyone talks about tons of electricity. What does it cost in electricity to run a decent miner?
 
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Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
110
106
Cloudfire777 said:
Because I use calculators. They don`t follow sheep mentality and post their subjective lies to spread around the BS on how wonderful the GPU mining is.

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

And go read about Bitcoins before coming in here. Basically everyone knows that GPU mining is dead and everyone who buys a AMD GPU just to mine is clueless. Go visit Reddit. Or even look at the history. There is an unanimous voice that ASIC/FPGA is the future. Batch #2 from Avalon was just shipped. Batch #3 was outsold the minute it was out. 65Gh/s @ 800W compared to 1.3Gh/s @ 600W from the 3x7950s.

Its not even fair. It started with CPU mining, then the GPU miners took over, now the ASICs is the king.
Click to expand...

It's not as simple as that. Those cute little Avalon ASIC devices, batch 2- those were sold in January. The BFL ASIC have pre-orders nearly a year old. AFAIK the only ASIC that have actually delivered so far was the batch 1 of Avalon.

On paper, ASIC are amazing, way better than GPU, and will change the face of bitcoin mining.

In reality, that has been the story for the past year, and the difficulty of actually mass producing viable ASIC mining devices has proven elusive. Difficulty has doubled since Jan, which makes mining harder, but cash value has increased 7-fold.

The net result, right now, is that GPU mining is much more profitable today than it has been for almost a year prior.

Of course ASIC will eventually arrive, and difficulty will eventually get pushed much higher. But nobody knows for sure when this will be. You might order 10 BFL 50GH SC ASIC machines today and not actually get anything for your money for a year, who knows how long the delay actually is.

On the other hand, if you want an ASIC right now soon, there are options: ASICminer 10GH devices were sold at auction last week. The lowest bid? 75 bitcoin. That is $9500 in today's values. You could actually buy 20 or more 7970 video cards for that, total hash rate: 12GH. Sure, the ASIC is more power efficient, and a lot more manageable than running 5 4X 7970 rigs, but the video cards hold better resale value in the event of a bitcoin total crash.

ASIC will eventually come out in quantity, and this may be as soon as month or two from now, but currently it's not there yet, and GPU mining is viable for the time being. Personally I wouldn't go out and invest $10,000 in video card mining machines, but I also wouldn't invest $9000 in a 10GH ASIC device, as I think that is a huge over payment.

Cloudfire777 said:
For those who want to mine with GPUs you are almost 1 year late.
Click to expand...

Not at all true. A year ago, GPU mining was less profitable than it is right now today. Difficulty increases, but value is also a very important part of the equation. The current USD value of bitcoin is so much higher than the value from a year ago that the difficulty increase is insignificant.
 
Will Robinson

Will Robinson

Golden Member
Dec 19, 2009
1,408
0
0
With such a faddy thing as BitCoin who knows if it will crash and if/or it is imminent.
Forking out big bucks on a dedicated Mining machine costing thousands is inherently risky but having it as a free feature with an AMD card is totally cool.:cool:
Like most users here I tend to throw away,give to friends or just put into storage a $300 odd video card every few years.:|
At least with BitCoin it's a bit of added value(recently a lot of value)and helps justify the somewhat disposable nature of our expensive electronic toys.
My Galaxy S2 was a lot more expensive than a video card but it too will end up the same way but without BTC's redeeming nature.:\
 
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Cloudfire777

Golden Member
Mar 24, 2013
1,787
95
91
Chiropteran said:
It's not as simple as that. Those cute little Avalon ASIC devices, batch 2- those were sold in January. The BFL ASIC have pre-orders nearly a year old. AFAIK the only ASIC that have actually delivered so far was the batch 1 of Avalon.

On paper, ASIC are amazing, way better than GPU, and will change the face of bitcoin mining.

In reality, that has been the story for the past year, and the difficulty of actually mass producing viable ASIC mining devices has proven elusive. Difficulty has doubled since Jan, which makes mining harder, but cash value has increased 7-fold.

The net result, right now, is that GPU mining is much more profitable today than it has been for almost a year prior.

Of course ASIC will eventually arrive, and difficulty will eventually get pushed much higher. But nobody knows for sure when this will be. You might order 10 BFL 50GH SC ASIC machines today and not actually get anything for your money for a year, who knows how long the delay actually is.

On the other hand, if you want an ASIC right now soon, there are options: ASICminer 10GH devices were sold at auction last week. The lowest bid? 75 bitcoin. That is $9500 in today's values. You could actually buy 20 or more 7970 video cards for that, total hash rate: 12GH. Sure, the ASIC is more power efficient, and a lot more manageable than running 5 4X 7970 rigs, but the video cards hold better resale value in the event of a bitcoin total crash.

ASIC will eventually come out in quantity, and this may be as soon as month or two from now, but currently it's not there yet, and GPU mining is viable for the time being. Personally I wouldn't go out and invest $10,000 in video card mining machines, but I also wouldn't invest $9000 in a 10GH ASIC device, as I think that is a huge over payment.



Not at all true. A year ago, GPU mining was less profitable than it is right now today. Difficulty increases, but value is also a very important part of the equation. The current USD value of bitcoin is so much higher than the value from a year ago that the difficulty increase is insignificant.
Click to expand...

Did you suddenly forget about FPGAs? They are available everywhere. You can even build your own. The con about the ones that come pre programmed is that they cost a big slump of money but you make a lot once you break even since the Hashrate is so high. But if you know how to bridge them, how to make a bridge program, you can build a board with many FPGAs with really high Gh/s.

GPU mining today is DEAD. Forget about it. Its not profitable. Atleast not make you rich. The Bitcoin value however is higher today than 8-9 months ago, but it was way easier to mine for coins back then since the difficulty was much lower. So you mined much more Bitcoins per month than today. The people who really made money on Bitcoins was the people who was part of it since the beginning, saved them, and waited til the Bitcoin price was +$200.

Today with the increasing difficulty however its a different game.

Batch #2 have already began to ship from Avalon btw. God knows how high the difficulty will rise to once they begin. It won`t be pretty.
http://mineforeman.com/2013/04/16/a...51-of-the-network-hashrate-soon-to-be-avalon/
 
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Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
110
106
Cloudfire777 said:
Did you suddenly forget about FPGAs? They are available everywhere. You can even build your own. The con about the ones that come pre programmed is that they cost a big slump of money but you make a lot once you break even since the Hashrate is so high. But if you know how to bridge them, how to make a bridge program, you can build a board with many FPGAs with really high Gh/s.

GPU mining today is DEAD. Forget about it. Its not profitable. Atleast not make you rich. The Bitcoin value however is higher today than 8-9 months ago, but it was way easier to mine for coins back then since the difficulty was much lower. So you mined much more Bitcoins per month than today. The people who really made money on Bitcoins was the people who was part of it since the beginning, saved them, and waited til the Bitcoin price was +$200.

Today with the increasing difficulty however its a different game.
Click to expand...


FPGA were interesting, but even before ASIC came out they just weren't good enough for serious use. They traded initial investment cost for reduced electricity consumption. It's not a very smart trade though.

For example, taking one of the more price efficient FPGA, ZTEX USB-FPGA Module 1.15y offers 860MH/sec, but costs $1304 dollars. You can build a dual 7950 mining rig for less than that, and that rig will put out 1GH/sec.

The ztex fpga might be more efficient, but currently for usual electrical costs ( $.11/kwh) profit is about 10X cost of energy for a GPU. Even with cost of elctricity factored in, the 1GH/sec rig will make more money for less initial investment than the ztex FPGA.

TL;DR: efficiency is only one side of the coin. Performance per dollar is so low for FPGA that they really don't make sense (nor have they ever made sense) for anyone with access to cheap power.

The BFL FPGA were the only ones that were even close to being good, but that was because BFL got some chips very cheap from someone selling them at a loss and there was a very limited number of them. This is also why they aren't for sale anymore.

Cloudfire777 said:
Batch #2 have already began to ship from Avalon btw. God knows how high the difficulty will rise to once they begin. It won`t be pretty.
http://mineforeman.com/2013/04/16/a...51-of-the-network-hashrate-soon-to-be-avalon/
Click to expand...

"According to their most recent mail"

According to some email and posts from awhile back, BFL should have shipped ASIC 6 months ago. Sometimes "recent mail" isn't a reliable measure of anything. I'll believe it when the difficulty increases 10-fold.

Though, actually even with all of batch 2 mining, difficulty won't even double. You should check your numbers before making bold statements that aren't true. We are still a long way off from the death of GPU mining.

Oh wait, I see you are a big fan of nvidia. Now it starts to make sense. Everything you said about GPU mining being dead is true, if you talking about GPU mining with an nvidia card. My bad. You should look into the competition, AMD cards are about 6X as efficient at bitcoin mining and are still far from "dead" at mining.
 
Will Robinson

Will Robinson

Golden Member
Dec 19, 2009
1,408
0
0
Originally Posted by Cloudfire777
Bah I`m out. I feel like repeating myself over and over again. Mine your hearts out for all I care.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cloudfire777
GPU mining today is DEAD. Forget about it.
Click to expand...
AnandThenMan said:
I thought you didn't care? I continue to make money mining, the only thing dead is your butthurt argument.
Click to expand...

This^

Is there a single thread about AMD GPU's that he doesn't thread crap :confused:

Hey Cloudy...good chance there will be an article on HD7990 shortly...get yourself all armed and ready to go just in case it turns out to be pretty good.
 
crashtech

crashtech

Lifer
Jan 4, 2013
10,695
2,293
146
I bought a 7970 for gaming and fun, turns out it has also made me about $150 since I received it about a month ago, so I'm pretty happy with this dead idea.
 
C

Cloudfire777

Golden Member
Mar 24, 2013
1,787
95
91
Chiropteran said:
FPGA were interesting, but even before ASIC came out they just weren't good enough for serious use. They traded initial investment cost for reduced electricity consumption. It's not a very smart trade though.

For example, taking one of the more price efficient FPGA, ZTEX USB-FPGA Module 1.15y offers 860MH/sec, but costs $1304 dollars. You can build a dual 7950 mining rig for less than that, and that rig will put out 1GH/sec.

The ztex fpga might be more efficient, but currently for usual electrical costs ( $.11/kwh) profit is about 10X cost of energy for a GPU. Even with cost of elctricity factored in, the 1GH/sec rig will make more money for less initial investment than the ztex FPGA.

TL;DR: efficiency is only one side of the coin. Performance per dollar is so low for FPGA that they really don't make sense (nor have they ever made sense) for anyone with access to cheap power.

The BFL FPGA were the only ones that were even close to being good, but that was because BFL got some chips very cheap from someone selling them at a loss and there was a very limited number of them. This is also why they aren't for sale anymore.



"According to their most recent mail"

According to some email and posts from awhile back, BFL should have shipped ASIC 6 months ago. Sometimes "recent mail" isn't a reliable measure of anything. I'll believe it when the difficulty increases 10-fold.

Though, actually even with all of batch 2 mining, difficulty won't even double. You should check your numbers before making bold statements that aren't true. We are still a long way off from the death of GPU mining.

Oh wait, I see you are a big fan of nvidia. Now it starts to make sense. Everything you said about GPU mining being dead is true, if you talking about GPU mining with an nvidia card. My bad. You should look into the competition, AMD cards are about 6X as efficient at bitcoin mining and are still far from "dead" at mining.
Click to expand...

Do you even know what a FPGA board is? You can get boards like that for almost 1/10 of the price directly from China. All you need is your own program for the mining which is easy to create on your own if you have a little skills, or even get a hold of. I`ve seen big stacks of FPGA boards connected to each other, running with over 20GH/s, for just over $2000. Power consumption very low. Compare that to GPUs. You need over 30 x 7970s to even reach that hash rate, then you have to deal with the heat and the electricity bill from the very unefficient GPUs.
That german company you mention is just milking the whole spectacle about Bitcoin.

Oh please spare me with your nonsense. You can`t compare Butterfly Labs and Avalon. Butterfly is known to be scammers and have yet shipped out any of their ASICs, Avalon have shipped devices out to customers already. People have sold Avalon on Ebay several times already. They exist.

I`m also saying that GPU mining on AMD GPUs is dead or bad at best. When you make almost $500 a month on 4 * 7970s running 24/7 for an entire month, but have to deduct over $100 for electricity because they are so unefficient and draw so much power, its pathetic. (Here comes the ASICs...)
Under $400/month on them running 24/7, having to deal with heat and noise, can`t use them for anything else than mining, is an epic fail. Unless you live in your parents house in your little room. Then I guess the $100/week is a nice addition to the weekly allowance from your parents.

The rest of us just shakes our heads whenever the sheeps start talking that their AMD GPUs make them so much money. Time to come out of your little bubble. You ain`t getting rich on mining.

AnandThenMan said:
I thought you didn't care? I continue to make money mining, the only thing dead is your butthurt argument.
Click to expand...

Oh yes, now you can buy even more candy and soda for the weekend. Your mother must be proud of you.
 
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