Ethereum GPU mining?

Crono · Mar 11, 2016

Yeah, I think there is going to be 2-3 months of profitable mining left. Diminishing returns, of course, but that's expected.

Ethereum requires a decent chunk of VRAM and by the time ASICS or FPGAs could be designed, manufactured, and hit the market, Serenity/Casper will be here. There might be some GPU shortages and price hikes, especially as the transition to Pascal and Polaris will start shortly before summer.

MrTeal · Mar 11, 2016

Crono said:
Yeah, I think there is going to be 2-3 months of profitable mining left. Diminishing returns, of course, but that's expected.

Ethereum requires a decent chunk of VRAM and by the time ASICS or FPGAs could be designed, manufactured, and hit the market, Serenity/Casper will be here. There might be some GPU shortages and price hikes, especially as the transition to Pascal and Polaris will start shortly before summer.

Be interesting to see what happens there. I'm in a pretty good position since I have all the wiring, infrastructure, PSU, etc. All I need are some GPUs. I'm heating the garage with some slightly below break even BTC miners now, it wouldn't be much to change them.

hawtdawg · Mar 12, 2016

Man, I wish I had kept mining when I first found out about ethereum. Could have easily made a few thousand by now. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Bitcoin (still made a ton anyway, but could have made millions).

Madpacket · Mar 12, 2016

hawtdawg said:
Man, I wish I had kept mining when I first found out about ethereum. Could have easily made a few thousand by now. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Bitcoin (still made a ton anyway, but could have made millions).

I hear ya. I could have paid my mortgage off lol. The price of Eth is still climbing. I think we're going to see a mad bubble in the next few weeks. Time to trade some BTC... ;D

MrTeal · Mar 12, 2016

hawtdawg said:
Man, I wish I had kept mining when I first found out about ethereum. Could have easily made a few thousand by now. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Bitcoin (still made a ton anyway, but could have made millions).

Madpacket said:
I hear ya. I could have paid my mortgage off lol. The price of Eth is still climbing. I think we're going to see a mad bubble in the next few weeks. Time to trade some BTC... ;D

LOL... Says everyone who cashed out a kBTC or two for $7 when they got out of GPU mining back in 2012 before the ASICs were about to come online and the halving happened. My wife still points out I should have sold them for $1200 instead.

Erithan13 · Mar 13, 2016

I'm thinking about getting a second gpu for mining, looking at pcie-only powered cards for now like the R7 250 (2GB), to estimate the hashrate is it as simple as:

290 hashrate = 29MH/s with 2560 stream processors @ 1ghz

270 hashrate (384 SP @1ghz) = (384/2560)*29 = 4.35MH/s

Would pay for itself after about 2 months at the current price and difficulty. Pretty low risk since I can always sell it if/when I'm done with mining.

Madpacket · Mar 13, 2016

Erithan13 said:
I'm thinking about getting a second gpu for mining, looking at pcie-only powered cards for now like the R7 250 (2GB), to estimate the hashrate is it as simple as:

290 hashrate = 29MH/s with 2560 stream processors @ 1ghz

270 hashrate (384 SP @1ghz) = (384/2560)*29 = 4.35MH/s

Would pay for itself after about 2 months at the current price and difficulty. Pretty low risk since I can always sell it if/when I'm done with mining.

I could be wrong but r9-380 4GB cards are the best value per Mh but you'll need more slots or more gear to power them. Like with 2*390's you'll be at the same speed as 3*380's.. Around 60Mh.

I've been buying 390's for this reason. Performance per watt is pretty equal between them 380 and 390's after tweaking.

Also 390's currently come with Hitman which you can sell off to recoup some cost (sold one code for $45 CAD yesterday).

But it looks like this ETH craze is starting to jack up all prices like back in the Bitcoin days.

Madpacket · Mar 13, 2016

MrTeal said:
LOL... Says everyone who cashed out a kBTC or two for $7 when they got out of GPU mining back in 2012 before the ASICs were about to come online and the halving happened. My wife still points out I should have sold them for $1200 instead.

Yup.. The smart folks early on bought coins in addition to mining and kept them. No one really thought they would hit 1200...

Erithan13 · Mar 13, 2016

Madpacket said:
I could be wrong but r9-380 4GB cards are the best value per Mh but you'll need more slots or more gear to power them. Like with 2*390's you'll be at the same speed as 3*380's.. Around 60Mh.

Interesting. I've got a slot free but I'm going to be limited by my PSU (EVGA 550W) since I never thought I'd end up with two gpus in the system. I don't want the hassle/expense of upgrading the PSU especially since it's not clear where the future of mining lies at this point. I've got a single 6/8 pin pcie power connector spare so a 380 would be an option if it doesn't stress the PSU too much. I'll need to grab a power meter and see exactly what I'm drawing with my OCed 290, I might be able to accommodate both cards if they're undervolted.

The 380 is priced pretty steeply here though. I've got a bit of cash to spare so I'm going to ponder buying the 380 or another card vs just buying some ether. Decisions, decisions....

Madpacket · Mar 13, 2016

It would be risky adding a 380 to a PC that already has a 290X on a 550W power supply.

For reference I have one 380 + one 390 on a FX 8350 platform with half cores disabled and underclocked etc powered by a Seasonic 750W. With this combo I undervolted / power tuned both cards pretty severely and it's still pulling 440W from the wall. You could probably get away with it with careful tuning but not at stock voltages.

MrTeal · Mar 13, 2016

It sounds like a good time to upgrade your PSU to a nice 1kW platinum unit, under the pretext of helping with mining.

EightySix Four · Mar 13, 2016

I've been testing some overclocking on longer runs and I'm not noticing much a difference. Is the 380 constrained by memory clocks or core clock?

Hitman928 · Mar 13, 2016

Probably mem clocks

MrTeal · Mar 13, 2016

Well, I just picked up another two NOS 7950s, bringing my dedicated Eth hardware to a pair of 7950s and a 7990. That's good for around 80MH/s at 800W or so. Right now it's $15/Eth and 1.4TH/s, so ~$125/week net of power. At 2TH/s and $12/Eth they're bring in ~$76/week after power. The GPUs cost $500, so they might pay themselves off after a month and a half or so. We'll see how this goes.

hawtdawg · Mar 13, 2016

MrTeal said:
LOL... Says everyone who cashed out a kBTC or two for $7 when they got out of GPU mining back in 2012 before the ASICs were about to come online and the halving happened. My wife still points out I should have sold them for $1200 instead.

I didn't sell them too early, I just lost several hundred to the Bitcoinica scam.

Madpacket · Mar 13, 2016

I think anyone in the game since 2012 will admit they've lost or been scammed out of BTC at some point. Happened to me as well.

Madpacket · Mar 14, 2016

EightySix Four said:
I've been testing some overclocking on longer runs and I'm not noticing much a difference. Is the 380 constrained by memory clocks or core clock?

It may depend on the type of memory (Hynix vs Elpedia) but I noticed with my Sapphire 380 with Elpedia would only do around 19Mh out of the box and approx 21 after overclocking both the memory and core. They don't have a ton of wiggle room but are pretty power efficiency.

wege12 · Mar 15, 2016

For some reason when I start up my ethereum wallet and it attempts to sync the node, it gets stuck processing the blocks. No progress is ever made in the "progress bar" and I open it daily to sync so it shouldn't take long at all.

Any ideas on how to remedy this?

metalliax · Mar 15, 2016

wege12 said:
For some reason when I start up my ethereum wallet and it attempts to sync the node, it gets stuck processing the blocks. No progress is ever made in the "progress bar" and I open it daily to sync so it shouldn't take long at all.

Any ideas on how to remedy this?

Did you upgrade to the latest version? 0.5.2? Also, it could take 5-10 minutes to process all the blocks.

repoman0 · Mar 15, 2016

Giving this a try, why not. I'm running a single MSI 290 and getting around 26.5-29 MH/s (not sure exactly, my 6 hour average in nanopool seems to jump around). At the very least, it gives me a reason to see what my card clocks to. So far I'm running -0.025V and 1050 MHz, from 977 .. it was fine overnight. The pool has been projecting around $220-240 USD per month for me ...

EightySix Four · Mar 15, 2016

It has been awhile since I really spent a lot of time overclocking and I feel like I must be missing something. I'm using the OverDrive settings and getting some results that I don't 100% understand.

At default (990 GPU, 1425 mem, 60*C under load) I get 19.5 MH/s.
With the memory at 1495 I get 20.49 MH/s.
With the memory at 1500 I get 20.49 MH/s on the first run, 19.5 MH/s on the second).
With the memory at 1505 I get 18.16 MH/s.

No matter how much I OC the core, I get no changes from 20.49 MH/s. I can run -15% on the "power limit" and still get the 20.49 MH/s. Is the 380 that VRAM limited? When I go over 1500 is the VRAM throttling?

Shmee · Mar 16, 2016

Looks like cloak and Dash are up a bit too, I had some still so I am happy

Madpacket · Mar 16, 2016

EightySix Four said:
It has been awhile since I really spent a lot of time overclocking and I feel like I must be missing something. I'm using the OverDrive settings and getting some results that I don't 100% understand.

At default (990 GPU, 1425 mem, 60*C under load) I get 19.5 MH/s.
With the memory at 1495 I get 20.49 MH/s.
With the memory at 1500 I get 20.49 MH/s on the first run, 19.5 MH/s on the second).
With the memory at 1505 I get 18.16 MH/s.

No matter how much I OC the core, I get no changes from 20.49 MH/s. I can run -15% on the "power limit" and still get the 20.49 MH/s. Is the 380 that VRAM limited? When I go over 1500 is the VRAM throttling?

Yes try 1600 or 1650 mem and GPU core at 1100. That should get you to 21Mh...

Madpacket · Mar 16, 2016

wege12 said:
For some reason when I start up my ethereum wallet and it attempts to sync the node, it gets stuck processing the blocks. No progress is ever made in the "progress bar" and I open it daily to sync so it shouldn't take long at all.

Any ideas on how to remedy this?

I did upgrade to 0.52 and I can't ever finish connecting to all nodes. So similar problem. Is there some temp Mist files I can delete?

wege12 · Mar 16, 2016

Madpacket said:
I did upgrade to 0.52 and I can't ever finish connecting to all nodes. So similar problem. Is there some temp Mist files I can delete?

I fixed my issue by fixing my PC's time. Apparently it was off by 30 seconds or so.

Ethereum GPU mining?

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