Ethereum GPU mining?

[IntelUser2000]

Hopefully the 470's will be available in mass quantities unlike the 480's.

Rumors are quoting Mid-July. Probably for United States. Probably August for Canada. Considering the difficulty increase I changed my mind, I'll probably get the 480 instead. I'll save money on card but lose Ether.

For your riser issues I noticed you mentioned Canada Post and eBay. I don't recommend eBay for buying risers unless you know the exact ones to get and guaranteed shipping times. Too many times risers are sent from China never to show up. Not worth waiting to save $5.00 when you could be mining instead.

I had positive experience from eBay. One time the order I had(not a riser) never arrived, sent a message and they refunded the cost. They are very slow at arriving, though I've found a seller that claims 2-3 day shipping time.

http://bitcoinware.net/collections/...-card-with-extended-length-usb-3-0-flex-cable

Thanks, I'll consider it next time.

I am worried about Ethereum prices as well. As of right now Profitability even with 4GB version is extending to over 6 months. I've calculated that I NEED Decred dual mining to make the power costs negligible otherwise profitability drops like a rock(due to low Ether prices)

It would be nice if someone with 4GB can take a picture of their memory chip.

Oh well, I still have no choice whether I have a riser now or not. At cart Newegg says it won't start delivery until Monday anyways. NCIX isn't available until July 8th!

 

[PhonakV30]

In my country , I can only buy XFX 7970, Price is almost $196.but I'm worried about DAG file.i will be safe for 1 year ? atm I heard DAG file is now 2GB.

 

[SK10H]

$12 / Ether isn't really that low. My 24/7 average per hour electricity rate is ~12.6 cents, add in the electricity delivery cost (Fat pension - $5 for every $1 pension investment :thumbsdown: ) the average rate may be about 17 cents, excluding 13% HST tax.

With all my near term rx480 purchase, I am prepared for Ether to drop to $4 - 7.5 in the worst case, basically the scenario where I can't even break even on the electricity cost alone excluding the card purchase price.

 

[IntelUser2000]

$12 / Ether isn't really that low. My 24/7 average per hour electricity rate is ~12.6 cents, add in the electricity delivery cost (Fat pension - $5 for every $1 pension investment :thumbsdown: ) the average rate may be about 17 cents, excluding 13% HST tax.

With all my near term rx480 purchase, I am prepared for Ether to drop to $4 - 7.5 in the worst case, basically the scenario where I can't even break even on the electricity cost alone excluding the card purchase price.

I agree with you now, but the problem is that difficulty is increasing at a rate of 25% per month. If it wasn't that high, I'd be ok with even lower prices.

Using this calculator: http://cryptowizzard.github.io/eth-mining-calculator/

24.7MHz/s @ 170W system power
$0.1 power cost
4150 network hash
14.3s blocktime
25% hashrate increment

turn out to be:
1 month: $56.78 - $12.24 power
2 month: $45.42 - $12.24 power
3 month: $36.34 - $12.24 power

And on and on. You reach a breakeven point at somewhere between 6th and the 7th month. At $7.5, the breakeven point would be at 4-5 month, and you'd get grand total of $61.15 out of $239 spent for 8GB RX 480.

At current rate of $11.7 per ether its: $138.67

 

[SK10H]

I agree with you now, but the problem is that difficulty is increasing at a rate of 25% per month. If it wasn't that high, I'd be ok with even lower prices.

Using this calculator: http://cryptowizzard.github.io/eth-mining-calculator/

24.7MHz/s @ 170W system power
$0.1 power cost
4150 network hash
14.3s blocktime
25% hashrate increment

turn out to be:
1 month: $56.78 - $12.24 power
2 month: $45.42 - $12.24 power
3 month: $36.34 - $12.24 power

And on and on. You reach a breakeven point at somewhere between 6th and the 7th month. At $7.5, the breakeven point would be at 4-5 month, and you'd get grand total of $61.15 out of $239 spent for 8GB RX 480.

At current rate of $11.7 per ether its: $138.67

Using
$0.18 CDN
4150 network hash
14.3s blocktime
25% hashrate increment

Hashrate: 125MH/s
Consumption: 800W (150 x 5 + 50W MB CPU)

Year: Rev: 1400.62 USD Cost: 1261.44 CDN

2nd board
Hashrate: 100MH/s
Consumption: 720W (150 x 4 + 120W MB CPU)

Year: Rev: 1120.5USD Cost: 1135.3 CDN

Those are my expected hashrate by next month when non-ref is here.

Still have some 7970, 7950, 390 cost that shouldn't be included. The only way this is worth is if Ether is substantially higher than $12 going forward. $4-8 will mean I am mining at a lost with these increase, at least temporarily, or forever.

 

[IEC]

I'm up and running with my 2x Sapphire RX 480 4GB cards. The memory on these overclocks to just shy of 2.2GHz (i.e. <8.8GHz) stable. They are Samsung chips, for what that is worth. Getting slightly less than the reported 25MH/s, but I'll check again after 24 hours to see where it stabilized. Running 950MHz core, 900mV on both cards.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'm up and running with my 2x Sapphire RX 480 4GB cards. The memory on these overclocks to just shy of 2.2GHz (i.e. <8.8GHz) stable. They are Samsung chips, for what that is worth. Getting slightly less than the reported 25MH/s, but I'll check again after 24 hours to see where it stabilized. Running 950MHz core, 900mV on both cards.

That is great news on the memory. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Madpacket]

I'm up and running with my 2x Sapphire RX 480 4GB cards. The memory on these overclocks to just shy of 2.2GHz (i.e. <8.8GHz) stable. They are Samsung chips, for what that is worth. Getting slightly less than the reported 25MH/s, but I'll check again after 24 hours to see where it stabilized. Running 950MHz core, 900mV on both cards.

Thanks for sharing your results. Any idea what your power consumption looks like?

 

[IEC]

Thanks for sharing your results. Any idea what your power consumption looks like?

GPU-Z reports ~104W per card but as we now know that is supposed to be the chip only. The voltage reported in GPU-Z is also higher than what I set in Wattman so I can only surmise that either Wattman is buggy, or my voltage settings are being overridden at a BIOS/hardware level.

I haven't yet tried hooking up the miner to my sinewave UPS which has a handy power usage readout. I should be able to get an estimate of overall contribution per card by comparing idle vs 100% mining power usage via the UPS.

 

[IntelUser2000]

IEC: At your voltages and clocks 104W per card is believable. You are way under stock clock/voltage. 104W just the chip would be way too high.

Here it costs 0.1243c/KWh cdn for Tier 2 and 0.11 or so for Tier 1. I'm pretty sure I'll reach Tier 2 running a miner so taking the worst case estimate.

I think I've got a pretty decent 280X. It undervolts to 1.069V @ 1050MHz. With 1.088V I can clock it to 1100MHz but the scaling isn't linear. With 1.069V and stock 1050MHz power use Eth+Decred 52 is at 223W. Eth only I believe 189W. Meaning at wall power use for the 280X is only 140W all for a price of $160 cdn. The amount of Decred I am getting reduces "effective" system power use to 96W. I wouldn't run Decred if Eth was high but no choice at the present.

 

[Madpacket]

Mining's always a temporary endeavour and eventually becomes a fools errand for those of us who pay for electricity. It's just a matter of time before the bulk hashing power moves to areas where electricity is free or nearly free. This happened with Bitcoin and Ether will be no different.

My last Hydro bill was almost $600 CAD and I expect this months to be even higher due to the need for extended air conditioning. 80% of that is due to mining. However even at these rates and current prices a week or so of mining usually pays for a months worth of hydro. It's still extremely profitable especially after the sunk costs are paid off.

Yes if you start from scratch today you'll likely have a rough time getting a quick ROI unless the price triples in that time frame. However if you started mining back in February (as I did) or earlier most of your equipment would be paid for by now so any added equipment is quickly paid off by existing hashing power.

The interesting thing about Ethereum and the DAG algorithm is that there's no real cost effective way to build an ASIC. So like most things surrounding Ethereum we're again in a unique position - one where we can keep mining until Proof of Stake happens. Proof of Work is still the only viable Blockchain technology although I fully expect this to eventually change with the core developers involved.

However given the current but fixable events with the DAO and Ethereum I suspect Proof of Stake will take a lot longer to safely implement. This means GPU's really are "it" for the foreseeable future. This is unlike Bitcoin or Litecoin which saw ASICS flood the market halting GPU sales almost overnight.

The most important variable for most of us who pay over 10 cents per KW is the price of ether. This of course is highly volatile but expected to go up over time as utility and adoption increase.

When making big purchases for investments where you expect a ROI you have to make an educated guess as to where you see the market heading, and not where it is today.

If you really expect Ether to stay between 12 - 15 USD you know the party's over very soon for us as the difficulty will shift the mining (this is capitalism at play) to more profitable areas such as China.

I don't expect Ether to stay at the current prices hence my largish investment in mining (as well as straight up buying the dips). The mining is really just a more risk averse way of investing into ether vs. buying.

We all know if ether crashes to zero due to some unfixable flaw we can still sell off our gear and recoup a ~50% of our investment, so that's really why we mine.

Just a bit of a rant but wanted to get out my thoughts as the discussion around profitability isn't so straight forward.

 

[Madpacket]

GPU-Z reports ~104W per card but as we now know that is supposed to be the chip only. The voltage reported in GPU-Z is also higher than what I set in Wattman so I can only surmise that either Wattman is buggy, or my voltage settings are being overridden at a BIOS/hardware level.

I haven't yet tried hooking up the miner to my sinewave UPS which has a handy power usage readout. I should be able to get an estimate of overall contribution per card by comparing idle vs 100% mining power usage via the UPS.

Thanks. That does seem about 10W too high but even if correct with board you should still be around 130W in total. Better than Hawaii, but Fury Nano still wins in efficiency so far. For now anyway

 

[IntelUser2000]

Madpacket- We all know if ether crashes to zero due to some unfixable flaw we can still sell off our gear and recoup a ~50% of our investment, so that's really why we mine.

Yea, I was a investor in stock markets before. Even with the biggest companies there's always the fear of a complete crash rendering everything you have useless. At least with mining you'll get significant portion back even with the worst case scenario.

 

[suklee]

Just slapped a AIO water cooler on my 290x and am mining @ 29Mh/s @60C (VRM1/2 at 80/66C). I've got some VRM heatsinks coming in which should help lower the VRM temps.

In Afterburner I've set core voltage -50 (1.117v) and power limit -35. What other settings for the GPU / Win10 can I play with to optimise temperatures/power usage?

 

[DrMrLordX]

You can lower RAM speed to 1175-1250 MHz to save some power.

 

[Accord99]

Lower the Aux Voltage to -100 and keep on trying lower and lower core voltages until you run into instability.

 

[suklee]

Thanks guys, will try the above suggestions. besides memory clock, it recommended to lower the core clock speed from 1030?

Is anyone still dual mining Eth/DCR with Claymore's miner?

 

[IntelUser2000]

Is anyone still dual mining Eth/DCR with Claymore's miner?

I do, and will continue to do so as long as the card doesn't lose Eth hashrates from dual mining.

For my case, 192W Eth only rises to 235W dual mining. The amount of DCR I get makes effective power use 80W or lower. DCR has almost no impact on Eth hash rates on my 280X. 500MH/s DCR for 0.1 Eth reduction, if at all.

It won't work with RX 480 if you are messing up with the setup to get max hashrates.* Only if you keep the core clocks and memory clocks at default you do. But then for the RX 480 its better to underclock the core to save power and overclock memory to get your Eth hash rates up.

*Because of that, I am thinking of getting some 290s and mixing them with some RX 480s, or wait until how custom versions and/or RX 470s do. I can get a 290X for $200 cdn and 280X for $100 cdn. Even at current Eth prices I'll ROI on the cards and then some by end of year or so. Hopefully no one snatches it up before I do.

Just slapped a AIO water cooler on my 290x and am mining @ 29Mh/s @60C (VRM1/2 at 80/66C). I've got some VRM heatsinks coming in which should help lower the VRM temps.

AIOs are ok if you have them already I guess. Otherwise I think I'll experiment on bunch of CPU coolers + RAM heatsinks from eBay.

Heat affects your power usage fair bit, especially when the temperatures are high. Just by switching to a good cooler to bring down temperatures from 80C to 60C, RX 480 should get 20W or so power reduction. At lower temperatures it isn't worth it to lower it further. For my 280X when hashing starts and temps are in the 40s range it uses 223W, and it rises to 235W when it reaches 64C.

 

[suklee]

I do, and will continue to do so as long as the card doesn't lose Eth hashrates from dual mining.

For my case, 192W Eth only rises to 235W dual mining. The amount of DCR I get makes effective power use 80W or lower. DCR has almost no impact on Eth hash rates on my 280X. 500MH/s DCR for 0.1 Eth reduction, if at all.

I've read that DCR shouldn't affect Eth hash rates but that hasn't been the case for me, I wonder why? Maybe I have the wrong command line settings. Will try playing around with -dcri Decred intensity

My Eth dropped from 29 Mh/s -> 25ish when I started mining DCR which is going at ~ 400 Mh/s

Are you using Catalyst 15.12 or 16.xx?

 

[MrTeal]

Interesting, thanks for the info. So next week is looking good still, phew!

I'm also a Premiere member (aren't we all? ) but my order still shows as in "packaging". My order went in at around 12:30 eastern, so roughly 3 hours after you. I'll update the thread if it ships before Monday.

Did yours ever ship? I got a tracking number for mine Friday around lunch time, but it's still not showing as active in Purolator's system.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I've read that DCR shouldn't affect Eth hash rates but that hasn't been the case for me, I wonder why? Maybe I have the wrong command line settings. Will try playing around with -dcri Decred intensity

Yea, it depends on your card, and DCR settings. I thought 290s didn't get affected by hash rates, but apparently it can be more sensitive than 280x. I set it at DCR 50. Above that it starts dropping Eth perf.

Since dual mining takes advantage of unfilled execution resources, it won't work similarly for every card. You may need to drop it.

Are you using Catalyst 15.12 or 16.xx?

I am using the latest beta drivers. It makes no difference for me. It seems the later ones are more stable when I undervolt.

 

[codyray10]

Ether currently valued at $9.93, seems to be dropping slowly the last couple of days

 

[thilanliyan]

Anyone know if there is any limitation these days in running a nVidia and an AMD car in the same system, assuming the nVidia card would be the main one?

I am thinking of selling one of my 290s and getting a 1070 as a mining/gaming card. I'd keep one of the 290s as a mining card only, but I want to make sure the drivers play nice.

 

[n0x1ous]

Anyone know if there is any limitation these days in running a nVidia and an AMD car in the same system, assuming the nVidia card would be the main one?

I am thinking of selling one of my 290s and getting a 1070 as a mining/gaming card. I'd keep one of the 290s as a mining card only, but I want to make sure the drivers play nice.

Haven't done it personally, but with Windows 8 forward, its supposed to play nice with multiple video drivers from different vendors....

 

[poofyhairguy]

I've read that DCR shouldn't affect Eth hash rates but that hasn't been the case for me, I wonder why?

It depends on the cards. I notice out of mine the Tahitis do best with dual mining especially with my new zip tie coolers. No ETH penalty which is great because they aged the worst hashrate wise. My ref 290 can't dual mine with an overclock which means I don't do in on there. The 390x does fine though.

Need to make that little extra with ETH values going in the tank.