IS GPU MINING STILL PROFITABLE? - Mining Adventure Part 1

[Hasa]

It's nice to see you guys talk about mining

 

One tip I do have is... don't use Nicehash. Their fee, on top of the BTC fee is too high right now. The fact that they pay out in BTC also is annoying.

 

Have a look at mining Zcash or Zencash with your 1080TI's etc. The 1070 TI is actually the best card ATM.

 

I would suggest overclocking and undervolting for maximum efficiency.

 

One thing that you didn't take into consideration is the Crypto increase, which is a big part of mining. If you made $500 from mining a few months ago, and held that, it may be worth $2500 by now. If you traded that $500 BTC, you may have made $5000 from it, and so on.

 

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

2 hours ago, Ithanul said:

I sometimes think Standford and Berkley need to come up with a crypto coin that ties to their clients.  At least if the coins had a bit of value, you could use them to offset the cost of the electricity used to crunch WUs.

There are actually coins tied to folding at home thiers 2 folding coin and cure coin for cure coin you have to mine in the curecoin team and for folding coin you have to use a specific name so you can actually dual mine both coins at the same time not that profitable though 

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

2 hours ago, Hasa said:

It's nice to see you guys talk about mining

 

One tip I do have is... don't use Nicehash. Their fee, on top of the BTC fee is too high right now. The fact that they pay out in BTC also is annoying.

 

Have a look at mining Zcash or Zencash with your 1080TI's etc. The 1070 TI is actually the best card ATM.

 

I would suggest overclocking and undervolting for maximum efficiency.

 

One thing that you didn't take into consideration is the Crypto increase, which is a big part of mining. If you made $500 from mining a few months ago, and held that, it may be worth $2500 by now. If you traded that $500 BTC, you may have made $5000 from it, and so on.

 

whenever doing mining calculations or when setting up a mine you NEVER assume a coins going to go up to cover your costs since its pure speculation and coins don't always go up and most of the time these days they actually go down and stay down for a good while. other wise i agree and made a similar post explaining about the issues with nicehash

[Injected_Pie]

Mining on GPUs is hard for the average Users / Gamers there are some better ways to "mine"  like Storj and Burstcoin (Using what everybody has some hdd capacity).

 

I Run 1TB Storj Fileshare on my Nas (took 4ever to fill up that 1TB) because it is 24/7 online anyway.

It covers the electric costs of the Nas and gives me some Returns for future HDD Upgrades.

 

I also use  Solar powered rigs to mine Burst on broken HDDs (out of Warranty with Bad Smart but works) getting some cash out of the untrusted HDDs.

 

GPU and even CPU mining is only profitable if you mine some "unknown" coins with big and active development and growing community (basicly mining "eth" now what was 15usd back then) 

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

4 minutes ago, Injected_Pie said:

Mining on GPUs is hard for the average Users / Gamers there are some better ways to "mine"  like Storj and Burstcoin (Using what everybody has some hdd capacity).

 

I Run 1TB Storj Fileshare on my Nas (took 4ever to fill up that 1TB) because it is 24/7 online anyway.

It covers the electric costs of the Nas and gives me some Returns for future HDD Upgrades.

 

I also use  Solar powered rigs to mine Burst on broken HDDs (out of Warranty with Bad Smart but works) getting some cash out of the untrusted HDDs.

 

GPU and even CPU mining is only profitable if you mine some "unknown" coins with big and active development and growing community (basicly mining "eth" now what was 15usd back then) 

no 1 tb in burst doesn't make much (.64 usd a month) and a gamer even if they game 12 hours a day can still make around 20-30 usd a month with a gtx 1060

[LucidMew]

How about a scrapyard wars-esque computer, where everything was purchased from craigslist? Probably would be a whole lot cheaper than buying new.

 

Also, I second the "don't use nicehash" sentiment elsewhere in the thread. You'll get about 90-95% of the potential income for like 20% of the work.

 

Personally I don't like ASICs since they become literally bricks when the difficulty gets too high, and the resale value is nonexistent at that point.

[brandishwar]

I currently have an R9-290X mining Ethereum sitting in an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ system with 4GB RAM. You don't need powerful base hardware to run this. What you need is at minimum 1 core per GPU. So if you have a dual core, like the aforementioned X2, you'd want to run at most 2 GPUs. You could run more, but you risk throttling them if you do.

 

However, if you are going to run a modern AMD card -- RX or Vega series -- or ANY NVIDIA card, use a platform that can support Windows 10. You don't need a powerful CPU, just one with the right core count -- e.g. an i7 with two GPUs is overkill. You can install Windows 10 without a key and it'll run without a problem and never expire. But it will give you access to the latest drivers and overclocking software so you can overclock the memory on the card, which will improve your hashrate more than the core speed. Yes you can overclock on Linux, but it's not nearly as intuitive as on Windows.

 

Along with the aforementioned R9, I also have an RX580 4GB card running on an Athlon X4 with its memory overclocked to 2050MHz. Haven't touched the core clock, yet. But I'm considering tweaking it to see what more I can get. Did have it running on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, but swapped it to the X4 to run Windows 10 and overclock it, which drastically improved the performance.

[Delicieuxz]

Which coin is being mined in the video?

[zubzero2]

I want to start mining Eth coin but every software i come across gets flaged by Norton Antivirus. Any one have any suggestions for ether mining software??

[Egg-Roll]

37 minutes ago, zubzero2 said:

I want to start mining Eth coin but every software i come across gets flaged by Norton Antivirus. Any one have any suggestions for ether mining software??

I noticed Avast is flagging and deleting ccminer now for some stupid reason (perhaps website mining?). The best thing to do is temporarily disable it to launch said program as long as you get it from a reputable source, then reenabling it.

 

I currently mine DGB with my 1070 and have been for months, It sucks at profitability now but i get 140 coins per 2 days or about $14 a month at current rate. Does Not cover the full cost of the computer running but helps it as the computer is naturally on 15 hours a day anyways. I also think my low payouts are due to my pool too (not the fees).

 

Currently feathercoin seems to be the most profitable for me but im too damn lazy to switch

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

2 hours ago, brandishwar said:

I currently have an R9-290X mining Ethereum sitting in an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ system with 4GB RAM. You don't need powerful base hardware to run this. What you need is at minimum 1 core per GPU. So if you have a dual core, like the aforementioned X2, you'd want to run at most 2 GPUs. You could run more, but you risk throttling them if you do.

 

However, if you are going to run a modern AMD card -- RX or Vega series -- or ANY NVIDIA card, use a platform that can support Windows 10. You don't need a powerful CPU, just one with the right core count -- e.g. an i7 with two GPUs is overkill. You can install Windows 10 without a key and it'll run without a problem and never expire. But it will give you access to the latest drivers and overclocking software so you can overclock the memory on the card, which will improve your hashrate more than the core speed. Yes you can overclock on Linux, but it's not nearly as intuitive as on Windows.

 

Along with the aforementioned R9, I also have an RX580 4GB card running on an Athlon X4 with its memory overclocked to 2050MHz. Haven't touched the core clock, yet. But I'm considering tweaking it to see what more I can get. Did have it running on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, but swapped it to the X4 to run Windows 10 and overclock it, which drastically improved the performance.

you do not need 1 core per gpu i'm currently running a lot of rigs with 12 gpus configs and a small number of 18 gpu rigs on 2 core celerons at the same hashrate of when i ran the gpu solo on my test bench with 4 cores but gpu mining puts almost no load on cpu

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

2 hours ago, zubzero2 said:

I want to start mining Eth coin but every software i come across gets flaged by Norton Antivirus. Any one have any suggestions for ether mining software??

yeah everyone will be for eth mining ethminer is recommended you could alos you use claymore but these days i find either does just as well also if you're using a nvidia card id recommend zcash instead it will make about twice as much money and for zcash id recommend miner or ewbf ewbf does have a adjustable fee is the downside but its prettier

 

quick explanation why mining software gets flagged

people have written a virus that will spread to your computer and run the miner or other mining clients on your computer withought our knowledge which is why they block them 

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

3 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

Which coin is being mined in the video?

they are using nicehash which picks what ever coin is most profitable per block so its hard to tell what coin but they did list equi hash which is the algorithm that xmr zcash and a fuck ton more use

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

3 hours ago, LucidMew said:

How about a scrapyard wars-esque computer, where everything was purchased from craigslist? Probably would be a whole lot cheaper than buying new.

 

Also, I second the "don't use nicehash" sentiment elsewhere in the thread. You'll get about 90-95% of the potential income for like 20% of the work.

 

Personally I don't like ASICs since they become literally bricks when the difficulty gets too high, and the resale value is nonexistent at that point.

ehhh atm used components don't tend to be much cheaper since there's so much demand people are selling 390s for 300+ dollars and there's a chance there's issues with it.and its really hard to beat the price of 40 bucks for a celeron cpu which is more than enough and then about 120 for a 6-12 gpu motherboard. the other issues with older gpu is the dag size on some coins which require over 2gb of vram. power can also be a massive issue not necessarily power cost but getting a big enough psu with enough pcie connectors finding ones with 12 - 24 can be really hard and even 600 dollar 1600 watt supplies only have 18 pcie and can only just handle 12 gtx 1060 so the power consumption of older gpus can be a bitch. also instability can really fuck you

[William Payne]

The only thing people really need to keep in mind regarding mining is to not be delusioned into thinking its your gateway to vast riches. If people want to do it then cool go for it but dont be disappointed if it doesn't make you wealthy. 

[CTM Audi]

I picked up mining again back in July. I spent $4k and in 4 months after selling everything (had to move in to a smaller place and had no room for it), I broke even. However I was using mostly R9 290s and 390s which plummeted in resale costs (at the old house I didn't have to pay for electricity so I didn't care when I bought them). So if you account for reselling of the hardware for about 60-75% of what you paid, you can have ROI in less then 6 months if you do it right.

 

For PSUs, I didn't get anything over 1kw, because why pay $250+ for a 1500-1600W PSU, when you can get two 750w for $120 + a $10 24pin bridging cable. Efficiency matters, but only to a certain point. Paying the huge difference from an 80+ bronze/silver to a gold/platinum doesn't make much sense in most cases as we are talking about a few percentage points of a difference. Would take a very long time to get that price difference back in electricity savings.

 

For motherboards, I also don't get the point in spending hundreds for a board that can run a ton of cards vs $10-20 for an old 775/AM2/3 board that can run 6 cards (PCIe X1 ports work just fine), with a Sempron or Celeron for $5. I live near Microcenter and was able to pick up a couple open box ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming boards for $5 after rebate, and Celeron G3930 for about $30. So newer is also able to be had for cheap if you look around. You only need 4GB of ram per system as well.

 

As for the cards, the RX cards keeping losing hashrates overtime with increases in difficulty where the 1060+ doesn't. Also Nvidia cards hold their resale value more. 1060 6GBs are great cards as you can get them for about $250, they mine at 24-25Mhash (ETH), and draw around 65-75W depending on the card. 1070s are also great as they do about 32Mhash at about 80-90w but for $400 up front. If long term mining, than its worth going 1070s, but if you want a shorter ROI, than get 1060 6GBs. 1080 TIs are better than 1070s but at a much higher cost, and I wouldn't personally recommend them. 1080s are just bad because they don't have GDDR5 memory. 1070TI doesn't appear to be much faster than the normal 1070, and costs more.

 

For the OS, I used https://simplemining.net/

Its easy to use, can be monitored from your phone and can change clocks and send resets remotely as well. They charge $2 per rig per month, but that's not that bad to me. You can use https://whattomine.com/ to calculate what coin you should be mining at any point, but ETH and Z-Cash are pretty safe bets to stick with. They have their dips, but spring back later. I would use https://bittrex.com/ for your wallet and trading, then send ETH/BTC to https://www.coinbase.com/ for sale to USD and transfer to my bank.

 

 

Using US prices, your build should be more like this.

 

Motherboard/CPU

$50 combined

Ram

$20-30 (depending on DDR2/3/4)

"Case" Open style rack from Home Depot or Lowes and zip ties

$25

GPUs (1060 6GB)

$250x6 = $1500

PSUs (2x Corsair 650/750w TX-Ms) plus 24pin bridge cable

$130

16GB-32GB USB stick (for simplemineros)

$10

4x PCIe 1x powered USB riser kits (assuming two cards on the board, card temps should stay in the 60s or low 70s)

$40

 

That's under $1800 for 150Mhash or 1800sol @ ~500W (about 600w from the wall).

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth?HashingPower=150&HashingUnit=MH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=600&CostPerkWh=0.10

Should net a profit of around $6 a day and 300 days or so to profit. Also in a pinch you could resell everything for say about 70%, or $1250. So only 90 days at $6 a day to reach ROI.

 

 

Back in July this system would have had double the return with the ratio of difficulty and coin value. So do account for possible worse results in the future. But a new coin could also pop up and go up 1000% in value and make it more profitable again. Its a gamble however you look at it. But bottom line is you can make money period. Just depends on how long you want to stick with it.

[FlatBrokeRacing]

Mining is very much a long term type investment. I have built a rig out of 80% used parts that i have compiled, and bargain hunted for. Its not the most elite rig at all, but it is making money. I do mine with NICEHASH currently, however this is a bit of a short term program for me as i would like to be paid out in a few different alt coins instead of everything being in BTC all the time (imho not that there is anything wrong with that currently). I also dont agree with not using nicehash or windows. Sure there are other operating systems that are easy to setup but unless you have a dedicated rig it becomes a pain. I also find that Nicehash's fee's are not terrible, seems like every pool, etc has a fee associated with it these days so i dont see nicehash being any different. 

 

My rig breakdown currently is:

i3 6100

Asrock H110 pro BTC

2x RX470 4gb

4x RX480 4gb

2x RX580 4gb

1x GTX1070FE

1x GTX1060 3gb

1 used EVGA G3 1000psu

1 used EVGA 850w bronze

8gb Corsair ddr4 2133

1x 120gb SSD

 

total investment so far is around $2200 CAD. I could care less about ROI's, to me looking at ROI is pointless. You have hardware, you have mining going on resulting in theoretical money coming in (if you chose to sell) which i do not plan on selling for some time unless there is a crazy hike in the markets well about 10k for BTC. So at the end of the day, mine away until your sick of it, "not profitable" or the hardware is starting to see its end due to dag file sizes, etc. In which case the hardware can be sold off, recouping at least 50% of input costs back if not more. So right from day 1 i say i am making money regardless of this so called ROI.

[Sfekke]

10 hours ago, Name Taken said:

You can technically find a block of 12.5 Bitcoins = $75000 with any amount hashrate.

True, but it is like playing the lottery isn't it?

While technically (like you said) it is possible, you can technically also win the lottery.

But the amount of people actually doing that, I do not need to explain the lottery do I?

[Skanky Sylveon]

I have a suggestion.  Can we test GPUs thermal output while mining?  Even if you don't make a profit, if they can replace a space heater during the winter...

[FlatBrokeRacing]

27 minutes ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

I have a suggestion.  Can we test GPUs thermal output while mining?  Even if you don't make a profit, if they can replace a space heater during the winter...

my AMD GPU's differ depending on what kind of mining i'm doing. if i am dual mining they put out a considerable amount of heat (it has been into the -15*c range around here) and i have not had to turn the heat on in my apartment. My cards stay under 55*C if i want them do and can even get them into the 40's if i crank the fans to max. Most of my AMD stuff is running around 40-65% fan speed depending again on what i am mining. 

 

The Nvidia cards i have, generally run hotter, my 1070 is running 60-68*C (reference cooler) with the fan cranked pretty high (70-100%), my 1060 runs cooler but also has a better cooler.

 

so yes i am looking forward to some heat subsidy here in the winter months with this rig, in the summer i will figure out a solution to not load the A/C as much but we will see in 6-8 months what that solution will be.

[Teddy07]

I doubt it is worth here in Germany. 0,235 cent per kW/h. Fucking green energy revolution made it rise like crazy.

[Nicnac]

1 minute ago, Teddy07 said:

I doubt it is worth here in Germany. 0,235 cent per kW/h. Fucking green energy revolution made it rise like crazy.

yup my electricity prices are ridiculous as well. And last time they said I was using half as much electricity as a normal single household although my gf is staying almost every night...

[Teddy07]

2 minutes ago, Nicnac said:

yup my electricity prices are ridiculous as well. And last time they said I was using half as much electricity as a normal single household although my gf is staying almost every night...

I pay ~350 € a year. I receive an 80-100 € new customer rebate everytime I switch the electricity provider. The only thing I have to do for that is maybe 30 min. paperwork in total.  

[ahuckphin]

1:50 Is Linus Media Group in trouble? Why couldn't they contact a GPU vendor and ask for 8x of the same gpu? 

 

Or was this video a last minute, got to fill in that slot type of video?

[Ithanul]

5 hours ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

I have a suggestion.  Can we test GPUs thermal output while mining?  Even if you don't make a profit, if they can replace a space heater during the winter...

You can replace a space heater that is for sure.

 

I go full out in Winter months with my F@H/BOINC/mining rigs.  Don't need the heater on at all.  Biggest problem I have, my legs are in sauna of heat because my two computers sit right by me.

 

13 hours ago, Alaradia said:

There are actually coins tied to folding at home thiers 2 folding coin and cure coin for cure coin you have to mine in the curecoin team and for folding coin you have to use a specific name so you can actually dual mine both coins at the same time not that profitable though 

I was aware of curecoin, but I already switch among three teams on occasion.  Right now, I have to stay on by home team.  Got to fight my way back up to spot 23 I lost while deployed (which is going to take a while since I have to get from 340mil points to over 500mil points on that team).

 

4 hours ago, Teddy07 said:

I doubt it is worth here in Germany. 0,235 cent per kW/h. Fucking green energy revolution made it rise like crazy.

Ouch, that is a good bit.  I think the rate in my area is 0.14 cent per kW/h.