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Ethereum GPU mining?

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MrTeal said:
TBH, I wouldn't build a mining rig / server. Mining rigs can be a little bit finnicky, especially at the start. A server you want something with sufficient power for your needs, and then rock solid reliability and 100% uptime. Depends what you mean by server of course, but you may want to think about just building a proper machine for each.
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That's a really great point. Mining rigs can crash / freeze or need to be rebooted... often.
 
So basically, I need to decide if I want to build a open-frame all purpose mining rig with mobos that are hard to find, but would be the cheapest option, or build a hyrbid gaming rig that can actually be used for other things AND mining. And then I would for some reason need 32GB and more gaming/higher end parts but would have a box that can be used for multiple things.

I have my own gaming rig, so this second rig wouldnt necessarily be used for "gaming" but I am thinking of things like, being a file server for streaming in house, mining, and anything else I might want. I suppose that is a moot point as being used for mining has the same GPU requirements as being used for gaming.
 
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ultimatebob said:
Ya know, my house is a bit chilly right now. If I'm going to spend money on heating, I might as well earn a little crypto on the side 🙂
Click to expand...

I looked at that.

It seems my heat pump is far more efficient in terms of heating and energy use. Specifically, to make 1 unit of heat, the heat pump uses 1/6th the energy of my graphics card.

That is what I get for getting an environmentally friendly high efficient unit.

What was I thinking?

----------------------------------------

I also discovered that even with the stock gpu bios, if I took the power slider on my vega 56 and set it to -50%, it only used 80 watts while retaining most of its hash rate.

So with Eth and 28 MH/s,
80 watts,
and my California electric rate of 13 cents kw/h
it would supposedly make $3.04 per day

or $91 per month. Which I find to be shockingly high for an ancient Vega 56.
or $1,109.64 per year.

Which is why we have a GPU shortage. If even my old stuff can return its original purchase price in less then 4 months, the demand for the new stuff is easy to justify.
 
ultimatebob said:
...and it's jerks like these two that now require us to have per person purchase limits for video cards.
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Maybe you misunderstood... they didn't actually build a 100-GPU mining rig, they were just laying out the numbers.

Edit: Here's another clip where they discuss buying one RTX 3090 each at MC for $2200.
 
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Leeea said:
I looked at that.

It seems my heat pump is far more efficient in terms of heating and energy use. Specifically, to make 1 unit of heat, the heat pump uses 1/6th the energy of my graphics card.

That is what I get for getting an environmentally friendly high efficient unit.

What was I thinking?

----------------------------------------

I also discovered that even with the stock gpu bios, if I took the power slider on my vega 56 and set it to -50%, it only used 80 watts while retaining most of its hash rate.

So with Eth and 28 MH/s,
80 watts,
and my California electric rate of 13 cents kw/h
it would supposedly make $3.04 per day

or $91 per month. Which I find to be shockingly high for an ancient Vega 56.
or $1,109.64 per year.

Which is why we have a GPU shortage. If even my old stuff can return its original purchase price in less then 4 months, the demand for the new stuff is easy to justify.
Click to expand...

I have an older drafty house with electric space heaters to supplement the oil powered furnace in each room.

The electric space heaters use about 500W each while running on the "medium" setting... about the same amount of power as a gaming PC running full tilt while mining. Hmm... 🙂
 
ultimatebob said:
I have an older drafty house with electric space heaters to supplement the oil powered furnace in each room.

The electric space heaters use about 500W each while running on the "medium" setting... about the same amount of power as a gaming PC running full tilt while mining. Hmm... 🙂
Click to expand...
you know what you need to do!

...

ps: the heat pump for my home was around a $10000* upgrade. As long as it is above 20 F outside, it does very well. Windchill seems to help it. I left the porch doors open one night, and did not realize it until the next morning when I noticed the curtains were billowing in the wind. My electric bill (which is just for two people now days) runs around $130 a month, but it rarely drops below freezing here.

*I was able to recycle parts from my air conditioner, so for me it ended up be around $5000 after part reuse.
 
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VirtualLarry said:
Maybe you misunderstood... they didn't actually build a 100-GPU mining rig, they were just laying out the numbers.

Edit: Here's another clip where they discuss buying one RTX 3090 each at MC for $2200.
Click to expand...

Sure, but they're putting the idea in people's heads. Most miners can't afford 100 cards, but they can afford a dozen of them. That's another 12 cards that aren't going to gamers.

The profitability equation they're talking about in that video also requires mining profits to be stable for about a year in order to make money on this venture. If we learned anything from 2018, that's not likely to happen.
 
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At optimimal settings, which whattomine.com gives an idea of, your Vega 56 will make about 45MH/s. You shouldn't need to touch powerlimit, but adjust memory and core clocks, and undervolt.
 
Shmee said:
You shouldn't need to touch powerlimit, but adjust memory and core clocks, and undervolt.
Click to expand...

I already adjusted the memory, I do not have a card that clocks its memory well.

There is no way I am going to undervolt. Yes, reducing the voltage does reduce the noise in the line and allow more consistent power delivery. But it also pushes the amperage up and out of spec, and it is the amps that kill electronics.

If I keep this card in spec it will last well nigh forever. When I am done with this card I will pass it on to someone else, and it needs to be undamaged.
 
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Leeea said:
I already adjusted the memory, I do not have a card that clocks its memory well.

There is no way I am going to undervolt. Yes, reducing the voltage does reduce the noise in the line and allow more consistent power delivery. But it also pushes the amperage up and out of spec, and it is the amps that kill electronics.

If I keep this card in spec it will last well nigh forever. When I am done with this card I will pass it on to someone else, and it needs to be undamaged.
Click to expand...
Huh, that does not sound right to me at all. I always heard it was access heat and voltage on the chips. Keep in mind that you will not be running core at stock with an undervolt, but rather at a much lower frequency, which also reduces power, everything is more in line with the frequency-voltage curve.
 
Leeea said:
I also discovered that even with the stock gpu bios, if I took the power slider on my vega 56 and set it to -50%, it only used 80 watts while retaining most of its hash rate.

So with Eth and 28 MH/s,
80 watts,
and my California electric rate of 13 cents kw/h
it would supposedly make $3.04 per day

or $91 per month. Which I find to be shockingly high for an ancient Vega 56.
or $1,109.64 per year.

Which is why we have a GPU shortage. If even my old stuff can return its original purchase price in less then 4 months, the demand for the new stuff is easy to justify.
Click to expand...

At the wall though is what you're actually using, not 80W. My 5700XT reports 93W in lolminer, but the actual usage at the wall is 160W. That's what I factor in for cost. It still isn't much, but with 3 PC's going now, it adds up. Of note when I switched out my very old 600w OCZ PSU, I gained about 19W (it was at 179W). I replaced it with an EVGA B5 550w that was on sale last week for $69 CAD ($53 USD) on Newegg. It's not gold, but I wasn't spending an extra $35 just to get gold on a PC that may not even be running for much longer if the price of Eth tanks. The noise on the OCZ was getting annoying. The B5 doesn't make a sound.
 
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Fallengod said:
So basically, I need to decide if I want to build a open-frame all purpose mining rig with mobos that are hard to find, but would be the cheapest option, or build a hyrbid gaming rig that can actually be used for other things AND mining. And then I would for some reason need 32GB and more gaming/higher end parts but would have a box that can be used for multiple things.

I have my own gaming rig, so this second rig wouldnt necessarily be used for "gaming" but I am thinking of things like, being a file server for streaming in house, mining, and anything else I might want. I suppose that is a moot point as being used for mining has the same GPU requirements as being used for gaming.
Click to expand...

I just used old parts that I had kept, even though my wife has been whining for me to get rid of them. My 5700XT 'rig' is in my son's old CM HAF 912 case (with no covers), Z97 board (with a broken pin), i5 4670k, 16GB RAM and a 250GB SATA SSD that I couldn't fit anywhere else. I hooked it to our old BENQ monitor just so I can check-in once in a while.

I still have an ASROCK H81 board with a 4670 and 8GB RAM in a box. Maybe if I can snag another 3060ti or 3070, although my son's 1660 Super is surprisingly good at mining (for $309 CAD). I get 32.4 MH/s at 69W with his card with PM 5.5c.
 
aleader said:
At the wall though is what you're actually using, not 80W. My 5700XT reports 93W in lolminer, but the actual usage at the wall is 160W. That's what I factor in for cost. It still isn't much, but with 3 PC's going now, it adds up. Of note when I switched out my very old 600w OCZ PSU, I gained about 19W (it was at 179W). I replaced it with an EVGA B5 550w that was on sale last week for $69 CAD ($53 USD) on Newegg. It's not gold, but I wasn't spending an extra $35 just to get gold on a PC that may not even be running for much longer if the price of Eth tanks. The noise on the OCZ was getting annoying. The B5 doesn't make a sound.
Click to expand...

I 100% agree about the power supply. A power supply is also a part that does not depreciate in value. Six years ago I purchased an EVGA 650 GQ 210-GQ-0650-V1 80+ GOLD, and it has gained $ value. I may replace my mainboard and everything else, but that powersupply? I am keeping it forever. When I build computers for family and friends I also stick that unit in. The rock solid foundation to build a computer on.

https://www.newegg.com/evga-650-gq-210-gq-0650-v1-650w/p/N82E16817438059?Item=N82E16817438059
(it is actually $27 more expensive now then when I originally purchased it for $74.99 six years ago)

( We use these computers every day, and they sit every day, it seems to me electrical usage cost from standby to gaming is a major cost even if the user never mines. Add in not having to buy a new one, not having damage to components because it never fails, not listening to the fan, it just pays for itself.)
 
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Leeea said:
I already adjusted the memory, I do not have a card that clocks its memory well.

There is no way I am going to undervolt. Yes, reducing the voltage does reduce the noise in the line and allow more consistent power delivery. But it also pushes the amperage up and out of spec, and it is the amps that kill electronics.

If I keep this card in spec it will last well nigh forever. When I am done with this card I will pass it on to someone else, and it needs to be undamaged.
Click to expand...
If you are running at a constant power level with something like a DC/DC convertor, if you reduce the input voltage you will see input current go up because the power has to remain constant. That's not what's happening here though. If you are running at 2GHz and 1V and reduce the voltage, the power used actually decreases and you don't see an increase in current. You actually see the opposite effect, with less voltage applied to the transistors you get less drive current and your current will also go down.

As an example, if I fire up Monero mining on my 5900X, at 3.7GHz all core and a 1.2V peak core voltage setpoint in Ryzen Master, I get 1.138V core voltage, 64.2A core current, and 145.4W package power. If I lower peak core voltage to 1.1, I get 1.044V core voltage, 56.9A core current, and 124W package power. Undervolting gives not only lower power and temperatures at the same frequency, but also lower current.

The downside is that higher voltage increases drive current, which allows transistors to transition between 0 and 1 more quickly. If you lower voltage too much you get to the point where stability at that frequency becomes a problem. Ideally though, you want minimum voltage for whatever frequency you're running as long as it is stable.
 
I'm not too impressed by Nicehash so far. Their profitability calculator said that I should be making about $8 a day, while in reality I'm making about 5 Euros ($6) worth of Bitcoin a day. Also, their software doesn't seem to have a lot of "tweak ability"... I had to shut off the Monero CPU miner because it was pegging it at 100% and making the system run uncomfortably hot. If I could tell it not to use all 8 CPU cores, I'd imagine that it would be fine.

Like some other mining pools, they also don't let you take your profits until you have about $50 worth of cryptocurrency mined. I can't help but think that they do that on purpose, as many miners probably give up before they hit that threshold.
 
ultimatebob said:
Like some other mining pools, they also don't let you take your profits until you have about $50 worth of cryptocurrency mined. I can't help but think that they do that on purpose, as many miners probably give up before they hit that threshold.
Click to expand...

I am using ethermine, which paysout at 0.01 eth ( https://ethpool.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/8000060967-ethermine-org-payout-policy ), which is about 17 USD.

More importantly, even mining on and off sporadically, I can generate that in about two weeks or so.

also, just using the boring opensource (and seemingly safe) ethminer project:
https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer
I found I had to use the --cl-nobin flag to make it work.
 
ultimatebob said:
I'm not too impressed by Nicehash so far. Their profitability calculator said that I should be making about $8 a day, while in reality I'm making about 5 Euros ($6) worth of Bitcoin a day. Also, their software doesn't seem to have a lot of "tweak ability"... I had to shut off the Monero CPU miner because it was pegging it at 100% and making the system run uncomfortably hot. If I could tell it not to use all 8 CPU cores, I'd imagine that it would be fine.

Like some other mining pools, they also don't let you take your profits until you have about $50 worth of cryptocurrency mined. I can't help but think that they do that on purpose, as many miners probably give up before they hit that threshold.
Click to expand...

Yah, I switched to lolminer (5700XT) and Phoenixminer 5.5c (3070 & 1660 super) after about a week of Nicehash. I use Ethermine and have been getting about what I expect from it. They recently changed the payout to 0.1 from 0.05, but I get that in about a week and a half. I'm being told to go by this site when choosing a pool:

https://miningpoolstats.stream/ethereum

You can see the fees and are supposed to use the ones with the highest hashrate. I may try Sparkpool at some point based on that information.
 
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