Ethereum GPU mining?

[Torn Mind]

I have some old AMD hardware from the previous mining bubble that has been rotting away. How much would AMD 7XXXX GPUS go for? I know 7750 prices are insane at my local Microcenter. I will probably skip this train because I'm too late again. Sigh.

 

[n0x1ous]

I have some old AMD hardware from the previous mining bubble that has been rotting away. How much would AMD 7XXXX GPUS go for? I know 7750 prices are insane at my local Microcenter. I will probably skip this train because I'm too late again. Sigh.

not as much as Hawaii and Polaris. 7000 series is no longer good at ethereum, but still good for Zcash and others

 

[deanx0r]

Great job on the 10 card rig. I like how you used wood as your base platform and the 200MM fans are a nice a way to direct the hot air away. I bought a metal rack a while ago but it's 5 shelves and I ended up adding only one 6 card rig. This gives me some ideas to expand on it. Do you mind sharing what Motherboard and CPU you're using?

The motherboards are Gigabyte Z170 Designare. G1 Gaming or Asrock Z170 K6 Gaming. I know everyone and their mother recommends the BTC motherboards or the ASUS Prime Z270-A, but those boards cost quite a bit and running 6+ GPU per rig requires some really beefy PSU when you can get away with a 80 Gold 850 to 1000W and still stay above 91-92% efficiency if you stay between 70-90% load. The 100 series motherboards are heavily discounted, and I think I picked all my motherboard for $60-$90 each.

CPUs are Celeron G3930 or Pentium G4400. $40-$50 each.

Last week, I ran into a guy picking up 4 x 7700K along side ROG class motherboards, and four full tower cases at Microcenter. We talked a bit and I thought he was building some gaming rigs. But no, he was getting on the Ethereum train and had no idea what to do. I think he walked out with a $3,000 charge on his credits for four systems, but with ZERO cards to run.

 

[deanx0r]

Can someone who is mining with 1080tis give me some tips. What to mine, what miner/pool, what settings, etc. I have the 1070,1060 and 480 ETH mining stuff down but I'd like to branch out so I picked up a couple 1080ti cards to play with.|

Feel free to shoot me a PM. Thanks!

I would just recommend nicehash if you want to play with other algorithms. I know they take a 3% cut, but it saves you the hassle to look for mining software specific to a currency, a mining pool or time spent trying to trade odd coins on an exchange. Nicehash does all the leg work and pay you out in bitcoins.

 

[Charlie22911]

Took a look at my EVGA 1070 SC and all five were Micron GDDR5.

 

[MrTeal]

The motherboards are Gigabyte Z170 Designare. G1 Gaming or Asrock Z170 K6 Gaming. I know everyone and their mother recommends the BTC motherboards or the ASUS Prime Z270-A, but those boards cost quite a bit and running 6+ GPU per rig requires some really beefy PSU when you can get away with a 80 Gold 850 to 1000W and still stay above 91-92% efficiency if you stay between 70-90% load. The 100 series motherboards are heavily discounted, and I think I picked all my motherboard for $60-$90 each.

CPUs are Celeron G3930 or Pentium G4400. $40-$50 each.

Last week, I ran into a guy picking up 4 x 7700K along side ROG class motherboards, and four full tower cases at Microcenter. We talked a bit and I thought he was building some gaming rigs. But no, he was getting on the Ethereum train and had no idea what to do. I think he walked out with a $3,000 charge on his credits for four systems, but with ZERO cards to run.

He's going to have fun with temps with four cards double spaced in a tower chassis. Poor guy.

 

[Charlie22911]

I would just recommend nicehash if you want to play with other algorithms. I know they take a 3% cut, but it saves you the hassle to look for mining software specific to a currency, a mining pool or time spent trying to trade odd coins on an exchange. Nicehash does all the leg work and pay you out in bitcoins.

I heavily second this. It also keeps me from having to download block chains for each wallet. Worth the 3% in my opinion.

Edit - Grammar

 

[daxzy]

How do you even fit more than 2 high powered mining systems in a single room? At least most rooms in the US are using 15A breakers. So 15A * 120V = 1800W.

 

[Elfear]

How do you even fit more than 2 high powered mining systems in a single room? At least most rooms in the US are using 15A breakers. So 15A * 120V = 1800W.

In homes built somewhat recently, most rooms have more than one breaker. I have three mining rigs. Two in my main basement room and another in the spare basement bedroom. No issues over the past week. Never counted the # of breakers but I know it's at least 2x20A.

 

[MrTeal]

Heh, bunch of 30A 240V PDUs.

 

[IEC]

How do you even fit more than 2 high powered mining systems in a single room? At least most rooms in the US are using 15A breakers. So 15A * 120V = 1800W.

Newer homes use 20A+ breakers, sometimes up to 2 in a room. Managing the heat load is more of an issue for me than anything else. With my "summer" electricity rate increase and the hot summers (as high as 42°C high temps outside) I have idled my distributed computing rigs and am only running Ethereum miners at the moment. I'll scale things back up in October when rates and temps drop. I never dreamed Ethereum mining would still be a thing one year later, but here we are.

 

[Madpacket]

So I picked up three Gigabyte Mini ITX 3GB 1060's to try out. They were only $229 CAD and I'll use them to fill out the few slots left in a couple rigs. I'll report back my experience with them in a few days. Adding another 60Mh at this point seems silly but if these cards can still ROI in a few months then it's all good.

 

[Madpacket]

I never dreamed Ethereum mining would still be a thing one year later, but here we are.

Yeah me either. We're pretty fortunate getting in the mining game early. I see so many people buying mining rigs now it's insane. The price of Ether changed everything.

Funny story, I went to an Ethereum MeetUp this week and a nice guy there (serial entrepreneur) asked me to build him a mining farm. He wanted to spend 100K on mining gear "to start" but really knew nothing about mining. He was dead serious about getting started ASAP. I kindly refused his offer but it gives you an idea of what's going on. Also attendance at the MeetUp was up about 10x since January (last time I went).

I've also had a bunch of requests from F&F on "How to buy Ethereum". These are just regular people (a nurse, a factory worker, a grade school teacher) who aren't really technical at all but want in. I've been helping them get on exchanges, add Fiat, then buy Ether, and get the Ether off the exchange for safe storage, but it's a lot of work for someone new to this space. Also with Ledger Nano S wallets being almost impossible to get, it makes the safe storage part a lot harder.

Anyone else been in this game a while have people coming out of the woodwork asking you about Ethereum?

 

[deanx0r]

I think I started to mine over a year ago with a 7990 to finance my next video card purchase. At the time, I didnt think it was worth keeping the lights on for such low returns, and I was more than happy to be able to sell my old 7990 for 500+. What a mistake, and here we are....

 

[thilanliyan]

anyone else been in this game a while have people coming out of the woodwork asking you about Ethereum?

I've had some family members and friends asking me to help them buy lol...but I'm very hesitant to do it cause the dream could pop any moment haha.

 

[Madpacket]

I think I started to mine over a year ago with a 7990 to finance my next video card purchase. At the time, I didnt think it was worth keeping the lights on for such low returns, and I was more than happy to be able to sell my old 7990 for 500+. What a mistake, and here we are....

It's all good man. I made the same mistake in the early Bitcoin days. This technology is still new you'll likely get another chance for some other coin down the road.

 

[Madpacket]

I've had some family members and friends asking me to help them buy lol...but I'm very hesitant to do it cause the dream could pop any moment haha.

I refuse to sell them any coins but if they have enough interest to put Fiat on an exchange to buy them, I'm not going to stop them. I always warn them it's a high risk investment.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Anyone else been in this game a while have people coming out of the woodwork asking you about Ethereum?

Nobody that I talked to about it seems to remember or care. Not sure how many of them know the value of ETH right now, though.

Lots of others seem to have clued in on it. Just based on the way my earnings mining ZEC have changed over the last 48-72 hours, I'd say an enormous amount of hashing power has come online recently. According to nanopool, back when ZEC was running around $430, I was getting something like $.60 per Sol/S per month. Now I'm at $.25. Ouch.

edit: ZEC is trading at $378 right now so it's not like the price has dropped by nearly 42%!

 

[thilanliyan]

I refuse to sell them any coins but if they have enough interest to put Fiat on an exchange to buy them, I'm not going to stop them. I always warn them it's a high risk investment.

Yeah I wouldn't sell then my own coins but I have put fiat in for them, bought, and warned them it could pop lol.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

How do you even fit more than 2 high powered mining systems in a single room? At least most rooms in the US are using 15A breakers. So 15A * 120V = 1800W.

make sure to derate by 20% that 1800 watts for full time mining. so ~1400 watts should be safe

 

[dighn]

I had someone offering me $10k to buy that stack which had me seriously thinking. Over a year. this stack has a potential earning of $21k+ profits. $10k now or $21k over a year... tough choice.

$10k is actually not a bad offer considering how quickly difficulty is rising. 300 MH/s will get you $21k at current difficulty, but if the difficulty keeps rising at this rate and the value doesn't keep up with it, you are looking at less than $10k (see this http://www.mycryptobuddy.com/EthereumMiningCalculator). Will the price keep rising with difficulty? Probably not at the same rate IMO. I do think as long as it's still somewhat profitable, people will keep jumping in. It's a race to the bottom.

 

[SimianR]

I've got my 1080 overclocked and it seems to cap out at 5500mhz memory clock while mining. I've got the memory slider completely maxed and while gaming it will run at 6000mhz (which is unstable) but during mining it drops back down to 5500 and stays there, any idea how I can bump it up a bit? I've tried MSI Afterburner and Gigabyte's overclocking utility. I get about 25MH's mining ethereum (haven't checked out Zcash yet).

 

[IEC]

I've got my 1080 overclocked and it seems to cap out at 5500mhz memory clock while mining. I've got the memory slider completely maxed and while gaming it will run at 6000mhz (which is unstable) but during mining it drops back down to 5500 and stays there, any idea how I can bump it up a bit? I've tried MSI Afterburner and Gigabyte's overclocking utility. I get about 25MH's mining ethereum (haven't checked out Zcash yet).

Maybe try +800 or +900 with eVGA precision. I know the 1080 Ti is a different card, but I can do +905 and 63% TDP and get 38MH/s on Ethereum.

 

[SimianR]

Maybe try +800 or +900 with eVGA precision. I know the 1080 Ti is a different card, but I can do +905 and 63% TDP and get 38MH/s on Ethereum.

Yeah I just tried eVGA precision and I'm still getting the same weird behavior, if I don't have Claymore running, the clock speed of the memory jumps to 6000mhz (or whatever I set it to) if I apply the overclock in the software, but as soon as I fire up Claymore and start mining, the clockspeed drops to 5500mhz or so @ +1000mhz. If I set it to +900 then its 5400mhz and so on. I feel like I should be able to get more performance out of the card though, 25MH's feels low.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I do think as long as it's still somewhat profitable, people will keep jumping in. It's a race to the bottom.

Not necessarily. We had another run on difficulty over the past year leading up to the DAO hack (it has fluctuaed somewhat since then) but you can see that there is an equilibrium point beyond which many miners can not longer profit vs electricity costs. That's when they scale back and difficulty plateaus.

With ETH, I believe the plateau the last time was when 1 MH/s per month was worth about $1.15. Beyond that I don't think people will bring much hashing capacity online or even keep all their rigs running. It's interesting to see how it shakes out.

With ZEC the plateau was something like $.15 per Sol/S (different scale mind you; a 390 for example can do 350 Sol/S exchange-side while doing maybe 30 MH/s exchange side).

Anyway if you know the hashrate of your rig, I can't promise you you'll always get at least $1 per month per MH/s but odds are good that you'll get that or better.