Ethereum GPU mining?

[MrTeal]

At today's price ($10 per ETH) and difficulty a 380 will earn around $90 a month, after power costs. But the difficulty level has doubled in the last month and seems set to keep rising rapidly, so I'm not sure you'd ever recoup the cost of the card.

I bought my last mining card about three weeks ago, and won't be getting any more. I can't see a scenario, short of a massive jump in the price of eth (not impossible, of course), where it would pay off to buy new cards now.

You would come extremely close IMO. Unlike BTC ASICs in which increased hashrate correlates with decreasing hardware costs, the cost/hashrate of Eth has very little impact on the price of new mining hardware. This is what 11c/kWh and 20MH/s looks like assuming you start mining now and continue for 3 months if the hashrate doubles monthly.

You end up making $96 after power costs, which wouldn't pay off the card but would subsidize more than half its cost.

Baring an Eth ASIC coming out though, this is an extremely unlikely scenario. If you go back to the GPU mining days with BTC, you would find that with a stable price the network stabilized at the point where reasonably low power areas had a reasonable payoff period. My gut is saying that it was about 8c/kWh and 180 day payoff, but it's obviously been many years now and I don't feel like looking it up.
It's relatively reasonable to look at the graph there, and say look at the day 50 point. There you're making about $1.1 gross per day. Let's say your all in cost to add a ~20MH/s 380 is $220, which is the card and a portion of the PSU, MB, etc. That's a low ball, since without MIR the cost of a 380 is about $190, but whatever. At that point, even for someone with free power you're looking at a 200 day payback, and the possibility that earlier than that the network might switch to PoS.

I would imagine (at the current 10-11 price) that we might see the network double again over the next two months, and then maybe gain another 50% over the following 2 months. Even if you go with doubling in 2 months and doubling again in the following 2 months, you'll end up with at around the $180 mark at the start of August. Depending on when you think Polaris will launch (back to school season?) that's about right to fulfill your requirement.

Again, all IMO. YMMV, etc, etc.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

[ethminer around 30mhs is 1 KB/s up and 1KB/s down.]

Quote:
Hmm okay, that's 172.8 Mb / day in aggregate. That's actually less than what I'm pushing in aggregate assuming linear scaling of bandwidth requirements per MH/s, so . . . huh. Interesting.

after just about 24 hrs Im still about 1 KB/s each up and down for my single 390 ~ 31 mhs. says 160 MB total so youre right on target.

Ill set up a stratum proxy and post the numbers. ideally Id want to run the stratum proxy on a raspberry pi that also I use to run some BTC hardware (lotto mining for lulz) but to use netbalancer Ill set the proxy up on this box for a time.

hopefully this weekend Ill have some numbers.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Thanks!

Glad to be of assistance.

hopefully this weekend Ill have some numbers.

Let us know how it works out. I'm already intrigued by the apparent difference in bandwidth usage between us. There may be something non-linear going on here.

 

[Denithor]

I wonder how the new FirePro S9300x2 would work for mining E?

Does it require single or double precision muscle?

 

[beginner99]

If Ethereum tanks in price your investment in simply buying Ethereum may lose you more money compared to buying a few mining machines which costs can be recouped from reselling hardware. On the flip side all efforts towards mining will seem silly compared to buying (at today's price) if the price of Ethereum shoots up to 50 USD a coin.

Yes, but it is not how it works. I have $4000 in a pocket, If I knew ETH would go from $1 to $11 I would totally buy $4000 worth of ETH.

Alternatively, will eth go to $100 in next month? If so I'm all in.

No one knows really, that is why mining is a safe bet. You can only loose on the hardware value degradation and electricity if it drops.

True. Mining has less risk. But it's also difficult to mine a substantial amount unless you have a spare room you can fill with rigs. Also with new GPU Generation on the horizon, buying hardware now will quickly reduce the hardwares value.

Of course standard investing rules apply here. Only invest as much as you are willing to loose. Don't bet your house on it. If you buy ether for $10k now at roughly $10 (easier to calculate, 1k ether) and it goes up to $1000 in say 3 years, you are a millionaire.

To mine 1k ether will take very long. You will need to invest in hardware. AT roughly 30mh/s you make about 20 Ether per month. But that will slow down over time. For 1k that would be 4 years. Still about 1 year at 100 mh/s not including rise of difficulty.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I would imagine (at the current 10-11 price) that we might see the network double again over the next two months, and then maybe gain another 50% over the following 2 months. Even if you go with doubling in 2 months and doubling again in the following 2 months, you'll end up with at around the $180 mark at the start of August. Depending on when you think Polaris will launch (back to school season?) that's about right to fulfill your requirement.

Again, all IMO. YMMV, etc, etc.

So basically what I got from that is that the window is shutting. I went ahead and bought a cheap 390x to try and mine as much in the first month that I can.

 

[wege12]

Whenever I try to mine with my 270x 2GB it says

Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can’t allocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)

Any ideas how to remedy this? It mined fine before.

 

[metalliax]

Whenever I try to mine with my 270x 2GB it says

Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can’t allocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)

Any ideas how to remedy this? It mined fine before.

Did you try this?

open a command prompt and run the following:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

 

[wege12]

Did you try this?

open a command prompt and run the following:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Yes, I have tried that but still same receiving same error.

 

[metalliax]

Yes, I have tried that but still same receiving same error.

What about the following:

setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

 

[DrMrLordX]

I use

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

to make my 270 run.

 

[wege12]

I use

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

to make my 270 run.

For some odd reason when I try to run those commands, I receive the "error invalid syntax. type setx / for usage".

However, if I run the following commands:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

They work but do not fix the issue of my 270x not being able to mine. FYI I am running 16.2.1 AMD drivers on Windows 10 64 bit

 

[Hitman928]

Did you restart after setting them?

 

[wege12]

Did you restart after setting them?

Yeah, still no luck

 

[Hitman928]

What happens when you try to mine?

 

[wege12]

What happens when you try to mine?

If my 270x is the only gpu, the following message is displayed and nothing else happens:

"Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can’t allocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)"

If I have a second gpu installed, like my Fury X, after the above message is displayed it will just start mining with my Fury X only.

 

[DrBombcrater]

I can mine successfully with a 2GB 270, it just needs:

SET GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

 

[wege12]

I ended upgetting my 270x to work again by rolling back to AMD's 14.XX drivers.

Thank you to everyone who helped me!

 

[DrMrLordX]

For some odd reason when I try to run those commands, I receive the "error invalid syntax. type setx / for usage".

Weird. I can't explain that. But it looks like you got things working so good for you. Let us know if you have any further problems.

 

[Bigtruck]

Is it possible to get the the opencl miner to recognise the A10 GPU using RAM instead of VRAM?

 

[DrMrLordX]

You mean the iGPU on something like my 7700k? If you're asking what I think you're asking . . . no, it is restricted to the frame buffer assigned to the iGPU. On my motherboard, that's maxed out at 2 Gb. I was able to get it mining by assigning 2 Gb of frame buffer and using the same fix that people have been posting for 2 Gb video cards like the 270/270X. But the hashrate is so low that it is not worth the trouble.

 

[Bigtruck]

You mean the iGPU on something like my 7700k? If you're asking what I think you're asking . . . no, it is restricted to the frame buffer assigned to the iGPU. On my motherboard, that's maxed out at 2 Gb. I was able to get it mining by assigning 2 Gb of frame buffer and using the same fix that people have been posting for 2 Gb video cards like the 270/270X. But the hashrate is so low that it is not worth the trouble.
__________________

A10 is a hybrid CPU/GPU on a chip from AMD. But in essence you've answered my question.
Thanks

 

[beginner99]

I ended upgetting my 270x to work again by rolling back to AMD's 14.XX drivers.

Thank you to everyone who helped me!

Yeah mining seems to be broken on newest drivers...

 

[DrMrLordX]

A10 is a hybrid CPU/GPU on a chip from AMD.

Yeah, I own one. An A10-7700k.

 

[RussianSensation]

Are you guys seeing this? Newegg.com US has almost no R9 390 cards left.

GIGABYTE Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 GV-R939WF2-8GD = Sold out
GIGABYTE Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 GV-R939G1 GAMING-8GD = Sold out
PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 AXR9 390 8GBD5-PPDHE 8GB = Sold out
MSI Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 R9 390 GAMING 8G 8GB = Sold out
XFX Radeon R9 390 Graphic Card - 1.05 GHz Core - 8 GB = Sold out
XFX BLACK Edition Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 R9-390P-8286 = Sold out
ASUS Radeon R9 390 DirectX 12 STRIX-R9390-DC3OC-8GD5-GAMING = Sold out

The only good R9 390 left is this XFX one. After that card sells out, there will be no more decent R9 390s to buy on Newegg without a restock.

I would be inclined to believe that AMD is discontinuing R9 380X/390/390X ahead of Polaris 10/11 launch but yet there is plenty of stock of R9 380X and 390X.

NCIX US = *** indicates the card has sold out/no longer in stock and requires a special order. R9 390/390X search shows extremely low availability:

http://search.ncix.com/search/?qcatid=0&q=r9+390

If AMD is not discontinuing R9 390 production then looks like once again they underestimated the demand from mining. I mean there are still a solid 2 months or so to go before Computex so it seems highly unlikely they discontinued R9 390/390X this early.