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Seems everybody is dumping their Antminers and buying ASICs. Some of us are GPU miners who started with BTC, some of us were Litecoin miners, and some are completely new to ETH mining.

It might seem like a good idea to buy a new GPU because it will ROI in less than 2 months but keep in mind that history repeats itself.

I started mining with GPUs in January 2014 because with a 280X you made like $10 a day, so with $300 retail it would ROI in about a month. Nobody cared about power consumption back then because people were making huge money.

However like most good things, it came to an end the next month when Mt Gox caused a huge BTC price crash and Scrypt ASICs were being deployed.

The Spring of 2014 was a buyers market for GPUs on eBay. There were 7970/280X going as low as $100-125 while a month prior they were $300-400.

The 280X which made around $10 a day, 6 month later was only netting $1 a day.

A good thread to read is from the Litecoin forum about an individual who made good money with a small farm but got killed when he tried to expand at the wrong time.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11743


I am not saying right now is a bad time to stop investing in GPUs. Nobody knows when the turning point will be. But you really should buy used GPUs like the 7970/280X instead of going for new 380X to lower your depreciation on the cards in case it turns ugly and fast.

Good luck to all.

I can only agree with you. Mining profits will probably trickle down in a few weeks/months so it's advised that before people start breaking their banks and stocking up on GPUs to consider what they will do in case the profits go down.

Do you see this as being a fair comparison though? I'm sure the BTC crash would have happened at one point or another, but without Mt Gox the ROI period would have lasted a little while longer I would have to believe. Who is the equivelent to MT Gox today for ETH? Are there any signs, as was the case with recent exchange crashes, that they are on the road to insolvency? As far as ASICs go, unless someone has been developing an ETH asic and kept it secret, I don't think we have to worry about them crashing the GPU mining scene like you did with Litecoins happening anytime soon.

I do think caution should be exercised when deciding how much to invest into ETH however. Nothing that I've read has indicated a reason for the price action we are seeing now, so any calculations have to take into consideration that we are in a ETH bubble currently. Most of the money was made by the people who've been mining since the beginning, with the rest of up playing catch up.

I think the biggest concern any "mining" ETH investor needs to take into consideration is if the ETH price can sustain a price point to make mining profitable with a decent ROI and when POW ends and POS period will begin. Short of that I'm not concerned about much else.

People will get burned buying gpus. Oh well. Just means gamers will get cheap upgrades again when the bubble pops.

In mining, if you aren't already equipped and ready when something interesting happens, forget it. You'll fall into a race to the bottom with the sweaty unwashed masses trying to get in.

If you start investing big when the price is already soaring for any coin, you're already too late to the party...

The good old boom and bust - it's been going on since 2011.  If you didn't already have cards up and mining by end of January it's probably too late.  Looking at eBay you can see the 7970s have already been cleared out.

I was lucky enough to sell my 6870/7870/7950/7970/280X for a pretty penny the last few months on Amazon and bought BTC when it was about 1/2 what it is now.

Unless you have insane $0.01 KWH China power I wouldn't start up a new GPU farm.  No harm in using any GPUs you have laying around but the 380 and 380X are essentially the same card as was released in 2012 just with more RAM and about 25% more energy efficient - but the price has held.

I'll keep my cash liquid to pick up some cheap GPUs in about 6 months :P

BTW, BTC difficulty 4 years ago was about 1/10,000th what it currently is at - 5 magnitudes difference - back when each measly 6870 of mine was making about 0.25BTC/day

Dont' be so sure the initial miners made all the profits , back when eth was launched they were dumping coins at .70-80 cents belive me i was one of them , if i had hind sight would have kept all my eth and make over 20k since i started mining right from the start.

I dont think its way too late to mine if you already have GPU's in hand , if you dont then its probably a bad idea , just buy ETH instead of GPUs unless you have access to cheap GPUs like i did.

I think the bubble has just started ETH is the new LTC it will pop to close to $20 usd at some point , i think thats where the reall $$ will be made , but it will be in buying and hoarding rather than mining, its too late to mine because the hash rate will just keep jumping as soon as the Chinese and their free power get into the action it will be over.

I have to ask and I'm sure I'm breaking fight club rules, but if plans haven't changed from Vinay's blog post here (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/), why would it be a bad time for me to buy GPUs if I'm a speculator, with a conservative slant on pricing and not paying inflated prices? I know everyone is talking about the move to POS, but that won't happen until Serenity that I feel is still a ways off based on the fact that we are still waiting on Homestead, and even once that is rolled out, there will be at least 1-3 mini releases after Homestead before we actually see Serenity. However, it seems the same arguments being made against Ethereum are the same arguments that were made against BTC and it's mining efforts. Then the price spike/collapse(Mt Gox) happened with BTC just like I expect it to happen with ETH. The only difference I feel is that ETH offers a value above and beyond what BTC has to offer. I mean BTC can't even get past the block size debate, yet people still pump thousands/millions into mining efforts. BTC doesn't have Fortune 50 companies as well as Banks investing in the technology. Everyone wants the blockchain, but don't want BTC. I see ETH filling this niche market quite nicely.

I don't advocate anyone emptying their bank accounts to buy GPUs, but certainly it's worth diversifying your mining efforts in todays environment. I mean look at BTC and the amount of money that one has to spend on ASICs in order to turn a decent profit, can you not contrast ETH to BTC in this aspect? BTC of late has had insane difficulty adjustments, so why are those difficulty adjustments okay with the same can't be said for ETH?

Even if gamers will love the upcoming market if/when people start selling their GPUs, but isn't part of the ROI model for BTC selling your ASICS to someone else? Seems the same can be said for ETH as I know I plan to sell my 7970s for 50% of what I paid ($108 USD) when they no longer produce for me. Thats the exact same thing I did with my BTC ASICs.

Even if the ETH price tanks down below IPS sales, I would still mine at a loss because I believe in the technology. I mean BTC traded at the $200 level for over a year from it's highs of $1000, so even if ETH takes a dips from it's highs of today, do you honestly believe the markets won't recover? If anyone feels they can answer this question, can I TX you some BTCs to invest for me as you can clearly have a crystal ball and can see the future. As I stated in my earlier reply to this thread, a price crash or move to POS is the only thing that I feel can stop this train. I'm not naive to think that a price crash won't happen, but a price crash happened for BTC and now look at it. So how can I not think ETH can share the same fate, especially since it has more functionality than BTC, and people don't have to worry about getting burned by ASICs like they did with LTC gpu mining.

I'm a noob and may have my rose colored glasses on to tightly, but this is just my observations from mining BTC, Scrypt and Ethereum.

My concern is that the PoW mining is just 10 months left for Ether, What else can we mine after that?

i agree, one should invest in a mining rig when nothing it's profitable, so he is ready way ahead one something suddenly become profitable, waiting for something to be profitable nd buying a miners is not the way to go ever

If that's the case then why are people still buying BTC ASICs when there are all kinds of threads talking about how unprofitable it has become. I plan to buy and build rigs until I start to see serious talk about moving to Serenity. Anyone claiming to know how long the POW system will last has no clue as the devs themselves don't even know. They could get into Homstead and find issues that take them months to solve. I mean after all Frontier was only supposed to last 3 months and here we are now 6-7+ months later and we are still on the Frontier release.

Once POS finally goes live, I will sell my GPUs and take the proceeds and buy either BTC or Scrypt ASICs. GPUs don't depreciate as fast as ASICs. I mean 7970s are still selling for $180-200 and they are 3 years old. I can spend $1,300 on 6 R9 390s and make $600 in one month and still sell them at a 50% loss and only loose $17 a card. In a 6-10minth time span how much will the resell value actually drop? Even if POW lasted 6 months and you only made $200 a month, you could still sell at 50% mark down and come out close to the top.

As I've said before the only way to loose is if price tanks...or the devs skip Homestead and go straight to Serenity

The hash rate of Ethereum is rising fast. Many people are building the rigs. So it might not be so profitable in the future.

Unless I'm mislead ( depending on initial costs and utilities ) it is very profitable right now.  Yes I know difficulty and price fluctuation always play a part but hey that's the name of the game.  Sure blocks were easier awhile back but if you already have the rigs... why not?  Is there something I'm missing?

Putting aside ETH valuation, rising difficulty, and the specter of PoS somewhere down the road, the Ethereum hash algo will *never* be implemented on an ASIC. It was designed that way. ASICs are great for doing fixed calculations on a (small) block of data. However, the ETH algo is much more than calculations. To be able to perform the hash, you first most load the DAG data, which is current approaching 1.4 GB. That size increases every "epoch", which is approximately 30,000 blocks or, currently, -6 days. It increases because it changes, i.e. it has to be periodically loaded again. For each ETH hash, there are 64 *random* 128 *byte* reads of the DAG, with an intermediate FNV hash between each access. The ETH algo is not compute bound, it's memory access time bound. The limit of current memory cycle times is the limit of the maximum ETH hash rate. An ASIC can do absolutely nothing to improve that, nothing. Not to mention, current mining ASICs don't have any significant memory interface capabilities that could address the needs of the ETH algo. Saying you're at risk mining ETH with GPUs, because ASICs are going to come along, as they did with BTC, etc. is a complete fallacy, it's nonsense, and it reflects a total lack of understanding of what the ETH algo was designed to do, and does very well. The *only* viable way to mine ETH is with GPUs, and that won't change until PoS comes to be.

-Best Care
  David

Sigh, let me explain some basic mining concepts.  There's no need to get all wound up people.

Eth right now is valued quite high compared to its difficulty.  That's why it is a profitable coin for some miners.

Any coin would be profitable if you had free electricity since your operating cost would be near zero and the only investment would be your hardware assets.

Any coin would also be profitable if it were valued 100x what it currently is  - ie if the exchange rate on Polo or cryptsy were to shoot up 100x everybody would mine it.

Conversely

Any coin would be trash if you cost more in electricity to mine than it generates in fiat to cover the cost of the electricity - this is irrespective of the hardware cost. At this point if you believed in the coin it would make sense to buy it with fiat unless you believed so terribly in the coin that you just had to support the network by mining at a subsidy.

Most any coin would be trash if its value relative to other currency went down 1/100th of it's current value.

Putting aside the talk about ASIC (I don't even know why that was brought up - nobody will bring ASIC to the market for a coin/algo that hasn't shown lasting power), the real question is will the ETH mined be worth more than electricity by the time you sell or trade it for $, Euro or BTC.  Looking at history - almost every coin has become less valuable relative to Bitcoin than it has been in the past - some coins almost by a magnitude of 10 or even 100.

So if you can mine RIGHT NOW with hardware IN HAND then by all means go ahead and do so and enjoy the coins rolling in. If you don't have hardware - ask yourself what are you going to do if ETH price tanks because it was manipulated by some cheap dev or some whales. What do you do with 10 R9 390s other than sell them at a loss to somebody else who can mine with free electricity. If you order the stuff from Newegg right now and you get mining 7 days from now the global hashrate will probably be over 1.2TH.  Some with cheap power will still make profits.  Some will be near break even.  Some will be losing money (like myself who has CA electric rates near $0.30/KWH).

If you're expecting ETH to climb in value vs BTC it just makes sense to grab some now while it is "cheap" and ignore the mining aspect and focus on trading and understanding the platform.  This holds true to any coin really.  If you're buying the currency at least you have access to the full assets instead of having to wait for it to trickle in over time from the miners.

Having mined well over 20 different coins which were all touted as the silver to Bitcoin's gold or even being better than BTC - I'm still waiting for one to knock the giant off his thrown.  All of these coins have come down significantly from their highs - LTC, XMR, XMP, PPC, etc.

Mine with enthusiasm, but don't jump in head first just because others are doing so - there's plenty of idiots out there.  The trend has been that most people except early adopters will not make significant profits when mining.

Well a few moments ago ETH hit an all time high against the US dollars. A 280X makes $4/per day right now with ETH.

This is almost as good as the $10/per day I made with Dogecoin back in 2014 mining with a 280X.

you forgot that one should buy a new miner for the future also, for the unknown that will arrive, like eth was profitable now and none knew in the past that something like eth would have been profitable...

this again will happen in the future, many times(it must happen, because the gpu mining scene is self-sustaining), so even if you don't have nothing profitable to mine with your rig, right now...

you simply shut it down and wait for the next good coin, there will always be at least one that will be released in the future

Does it mean the good days for Ethereum will be over soon? Dogecoin mining became less profitable after that.

DOGE is a perfect example (actually all coins are but DOGE is almost exactly 2 years to the date).  Everybody who had cards was able to switch over from PPC or Scrypt and pile on DOGE for a couple of months until that price tanked.  The coin is still alive, but nowhere near its high.

Pop into the ETH threads and you'll hear people talking about insider pumping and dumping.  I cannot validate the veracity of these claims but I would not be surprised if true.  Even LTC which was the darling for 3 years was pumped to 0.03xx a few months back and is back down to 0.007x right now.

Sure some can sit on idle cards for months on end if they have the space (remember some people have warehouses or literal farms).  Some people living with an a wife or GF may not have that luxury  :D

Again, do a little planning and research before jumping head first.

The network hash rate is 833MH/s now. It is more than double last octoboer's number, it is rising fast.

So has the the value of the coin. From $0.6 to $6.50 in a few months. +1000%

Propably stupid question, but isn't there faster memory than what is used in GPUs? That one, what is used in processors? What if someone builds a dedicated ETH miner using that? Or would that betoo expensive?

You're right dumb question, either buy a gpu or gtfo there's no shortcut and please dont ask if you can use a bitcoin miner to mine eth jesus

Eh....

I did not mean that I would do that. You probably did not read the post that I quoted. Question was, can some company build a dedicated ETH miner (using faster memory than GPUs have), which would disrupt ETH mining business just as ASICs have done to the BTC mining.

PS. I'm not Jesus

Even if your theory was sound eth is only  POW for the next 12 months even if we see delays in serenity which is the pow fork you're talking 16 months max , there is no where near enough lead time for anything more than maybe fpa development ASICs are out of the qestion

You don't have to worry about ASICs coming in and start mining ETH.

You should worry about the GPUs that everybody is buying right now and increasing the hashrate or that price won't crash.

you should worry more about those with cheap electricty, those are the real plague that promote centralization, gpu or asic

Yeah mostly the Chinese, at least ethereum is still profitable with high electricity costs right now

The Chinese have cheap electricity. But in some Arab countries, they also have cheap electricity. They can mine a lot of the coins.

If the oil price stay around $30 levels, there will be no more cheap electricity in the Arab countries in the next few years.

Why would you accuse them while the benefits they have are much lesser than the West already ?

I dont think that would be happening ever cause if it gets to POS algo then it is pretty much useless IMO.

Mining would be at its best when funded by itself & not by any jobs or other assets.

PoS will start early next year, so there is no need to worry about ASIC.

there is not only ethereum to mine, its clone are good enough

It depend on if they will change to PoS or not. If they can be PoW mined for 3 more years, it is good.

expanse is not going to pos ever, they said so

It is great news. I might mine some Expanse in the future.

How fast does Expanse DAG file grow?

I believe so. so not for long though ETH might not even be mine using GPUs.  If I have to mine, I would probably just wait til someone sells Asic miner for ETH. To which I too think its possible.
But since the day miners learned about ETH, and if its profitable i'm sure there are tons of those who already bought hardware.

The PoW of Ethereum mining will finish later this year or early next year. So there is incentive to make ASIC.

meh methinks when 2gb is not enough for eth, the hashrate will drop by quite a bit, and those people will have to go back mining something else.

Okay I dusted off a hd7970 rig

Has a special cooler runs quiet.

So a hd7970 = a r280 

so what does this earn in a day?

and power is not an issue.  as If it earns 5 bucks a day I will run it in the solar array.

so lets call power free.

Welcome, about time you joined the gang.

7970 Right now is 0.33 ETH so about $3.50 and will use around 200 watts.

Depending on brand and what clock rates you choose you should expect anywhere from 19-22MH/s

if you have free power i would invest something bigger, at least one full rig with six gpu, now the earning is a bit less, but none is saying that you must dump at the current price, in fact i'll wait for the next pump to dump my ethereum stash

I will do the same. I save all the Ethereum I mined recently. When the price reaches 0.04 to 0.06, I will sell some.

With a 7970 (17mhs) & a 380 4gig (19mhs)=36mhs,I'm getting about .40+ or - per day on Supernova  8)

Wow that's pretty low. I get about 0.32 per 280x which is 21mh. I am using ethermine.

finally got it running on nanopool with ethermine  doing 21mh for 6 hours .

may run it for the summer in house. at 17 cents  a kwatt (summer rates) >   I know dumb but I like something in house.

setup cost = 0

For now power = 9.7 cents  so I can run in house.

Good to see you in the alt section phillip  :)

You should be able to under volt that 7970 a bit through and get much better efficiency if you are not already, altho your power is low right now so its not that big a issue for a few months.  I have 2 7950's and I run them at .98 volts they get 18 mh at that rate and run nice and cool stuffed into my pc case.

I have an open test platform from back in the day.

I have a huge air cooler  my gpu runs under 50c and quiet I will photo.

All this gear made 100% plus more back with ltc.

I forgot how to unlock this for volts been a while

I also subscribe the the history repeating itself mantra and the fact that we go through very very lean times.  With that in mind it makes good sense to pay attention to the power consumption of these GPU's so that as the valuations of the eth or whatever crypto your mining you have a better chance of riding out the lean times.  Perfect example right now in the ASIC mining, if your not extremely efficient with your power consumption or have free or next to free electricity your not going to be profitable after factoring in costs. 

So with that said what is the best GPU for hash to power consumption ratio right now?  I have been looking at the R7 370's and the GTX 750ti.  Are there other cards more efficient than those for eth mining?  I would love the feedback on the energy/hash ratios with the lean times in mind. 

I found alot of info on alot of GPU's by just looking thru this other forum  ;)

https://forum.ethereum.org/categories/mining

My Litecoin mining, back in the last 5-6 months before the GC3355 was introduced, paid outright for my Sapphire 7750, 5x HIS 7750s (of which one has died outright, the other 4 have had fan failures within a year of purchase, the other 4 are now running with a single Delta 60mm screamer twist-tied to the HS 'cause I had several left over from my overclock Athlon Thunderbird/Palomino days), and a couple of higher-end 7xxx series got mostly paid for before Litecoin got unprofitable for GPU mining at my electric cost.

 Up side - I was going to buy most of those cards anyway (AMD cards are GREAT for RC5 crushing, NVidea does very very badly on that particular usage).

 Down side - hmmmm, can't really think of one.


 It mostly worked for me because I already HAD another use for the cards, the Litecoin GPU mining was more about "buy more sooner than I could have afforded to otherwise" than anything else.



 And now history repeats itself - I was going to build up my current rig anyway as a multi-cruncher (RC5 on the A10 GPU, Prime95 on the CPU cores, Folding on the GTX950s) but I'm mining Ethereum for a while on the GTXes instead to help pay for them and perhaps a fair bit of my planned "next multicruncher rig".

 8-)


 For Ethereum, right now the best cards on a hash/power basis are the AMD Fury line, especially the Nano. My GTX950s aren't bad, but at about 10MH each while soaking 90 watts or so they're not directly competative (nor are any of the other Maxell cards ESPECIALLY THE 750Ti) with AMD 78xx/79xx and later rebadge/upgrade cards.

 I'm NOT sure how the 7750 would compare, but I suspect it has the same "not enough RAM" issue the 750Ti has. I might experiment with one of mine at some point, since I've already got a few....



 When a 2 Gig card isn't enough any more, or Ethereum goes POS, a-Folding I will go (unless another good-profit-for-a-short-while type GPU mineable coin shows up).

The speed of AMD 280x or lower range has the hashing rate drop quite a lot since the beginning of the mining.

You're dreaming.  I doubt we'll ever see Ether get that high, at least not unless something bad happens to the bitcoin network.  I personally think Eth hit it's ATH already and will only consolidate downwards from here.  Building the EVM as a mandatory part of the blockchain really isn't very novel or even a good idea.  It makes endlessly more sense to keep blockchain (the ledger) and purpose (e.g. distributed computer) separate.

When I got into BTC if I recall it was 6 to 8 usd a coin.

I used 20-23 gpus and 10-13 pcs to do the btc mining.

I could argue all day long that you are wrong I could also argue you are correct.

I am positioned with  BTC, PPC, ETH.

So in under 90 days the BTC 1/2 ing starts. I am ready I hope

 Because for some folks with VERY VERY cheap electric, it IS still profitable - and even with average electric costs, a S7 is profitable - just not profitable ENOUGH to have a reasonable probability to make back your investment into it.



 
 And the 7750 has even less memory, which seems to affect Ethereum quite a bit. Guess I'll leave them pushing RC5.

The Etheruem difficulty is very high and rising fast. I just put 6x390 into the coinwarz.com, 185 MH/s, and 1720W, $0.2 electricity price. The revenue is $17.82 and the profit is $9.57.

Yeah it was very good 2 months ago. Was making almost triple what I am making today.

i'm in the same position, but with a worst electricity, still there is a small profit to be made but i prefer feathercoin for now, the swing of the diff is greater, thus allowing for an average greater profit

I remember you or somebody else said the 280x could make $8 a day. That is long past. If a 280x can make $2 a day after electricity, it is good.

Well, I was thinking the same, but now how I'm building rigs little by little, I see that I didn't have to invest in 280 and 380, but just in 290 and 390 and I will explain you why !?
290 and 390 are a little bit more expensive than 280 and 380, but one day when ETH stop mining with 6 x 290/390 you have 100 MH/s in lyrav2, 100 MH/s in Quark, 100 MH/s in Qubit, 70 MH/s in X11 and so...
but with 6 x 280/380 you have just 24 MH/s in lyrav2, 24 MH/s in Quark, 30 MH/s in Qubit, 24 MH/s in X11 and you are nowhere, so if I have 290/390 I don't care if one day ETH will stop with mining because I have a lot of other options for earning good profit !! so from my perspective, now when you are investing good money, better give a little bit more and you don't have to care about the future !!! and of course, buy all cards with guaranty, because we are mining 24/7.

Does anyone have a list or spreadsheet with the "general" hashrates of 380 and 390 cards on algos other than ethash?
I am about to build a few rigs and I knew the differences in hashrates for eth but had no idea that the difference was so huge on other algos ?
Just looking for some solid numbers to compare with the ones that plast55 just posted.
I know http://www.mininghwcomparison.com has alot of info, but I am looking for a dumbed down list, if there is one out there.

I am looking to build exactly one of the two rigs he talked about. Either 6x380 or 6 x 380
It's looking like a 380 will run "ROUGHLY" $1,757.87 on newegg + case and risers
and a 390 will run "ROUGHLY" $2,627.86 + case and risers

I ran the numbers for eth every which way I could and the 380 was definitely more bang for the buck with ETH.

380 will be 20-21 MH/S , 390 with slight overclock can get you 30 so that means 50% more hashpower for 50% more money,380 will have lower power consumtion but the less haspower you have the longer time to get your money back eventually ,either way to start mining now is stupid decision....

there is still profit to be made, if you have free energy, why not? i would start now on ethereum mining, very profitable at the moment and you can always sell your gpu without problem i think

U can think that and jump the wagon but the higher the diff goes the lower the reward,price must rise also to be competitite,if it doesn't at the same rate u are fucked,new generation of video cards incoming with 14nm,much lower power consumption etc ....The only way to be sure of profitability is to:

1. Have basically free power
2. New gen of video cards to have bad hashrates and not quite great for mining
3. Enough idiots on the market to keep investing in older gen video cards so that you can sell your cards to an idiot bigger than you
4. POW will end in an year os something,you won't get your money back soon and possible never lol....

Overall,who mined from december-january and sold when time was right,or who invested and buyed when lower price and sold when time was right,or speculants who trade even for 0.20$ margin daily,these people make money from it.

What do you mean with a dumbed down list?

You can filter there... Just Enter R9 380 and you'll get a list of only those cards.. then you can click on the algo header to sort by algo.


I'm working on getting those filter options better though..

My favorite GPU is hands down the sapphire R9 380 ITX.
Now also as 4gb version.

Its small, it uses one 8 pin. It has only 1 fan but cools ok.
If you push it a little, it will do 22mh/s eth.

I went away from the 390s back to the 4gb itx. They are so small and neat to work with too.

And cheap!

Worth looking into.

I mean a spreadsheet With a column of algorithms and graphics cards.
I mean "dumbed down" as in I don't care about variations due to overclocking, underclocking etc.. Just a round number.
When I enter R9 380 on your site I get variations of 2 cards, 3 cards, 380, 380x, Fury X, mixed systems.. and only blake256, scrypt chacha, Neoscrypt and Eth.

It works fine but I just want a spreadsheet.. Would be nice to have a spreadsheet for the most popular cards, So you can just look and see what is the most bang for the buck depending on what algos you might run.
Your site is awesome when I am looking to see what hashrate I should be getting or for a config.

The easiest way to use that one is typing "Eth" in the search.. that sorts out the algo, then use your browser search(ctrlf f) to find the card.
Then you'll have to look at the variations and just do a basic average.  There are so many factors affecting the speed, from configs, miners, drivers to OC.

you only need the first point, other does not matter, gpu have a very high resale value even after one year, so i don't know what you are talking about with the other points

970 for example can be sold easily even after the new card, for those that don't need the last gen to keep playing video game

nvidia 970 can still play any game out there, those aren't idiots, those are gamers...

again if point 1 is true, point 4 does not matter anymore, you can mine something else, and take profit, hell you can mine every shit coin out there with free energy and have your profit...

I've been mulling over what types of rigs to build. 380,380x,390,390x,nano.
It looks like the best bang for the buck FOR ETH is 6 Sapphire, Gigabyte, Asus or Msi 380 with a 1300w Gold or 1200w Plat PSU.
What I didn't take into account was what if eth crashes and/or I want to mine other algos.. What if I want to mine another algo for a new coin ?

Did I pigeonhole myself with getting all AMD r9 380's ?

If my goal is not eth but ALL algo's then whats the best bang for the buck card at the moment ? That's why I was looking for a spreadsheet.
Is user:plast555 right in this post ?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373930.msg14755765#msg14755765

Also, those 380itxs look excellent. Why did you choose them over a normal Sapphire 380 ? I can't find a 4GB version on Newegg or Amazon either..
Do the ITXs draw more power or less than the standard Sapphire 380 ? Power costs don't matter a whole, whole lot to me. My electric runs about 3.5 cents a K/wH

Thank you for your help :)

Gimme a sec and ill do some tests with a single R9 380 itx

I think I know how to get a list.. I use ccminer now cause I have 970 gtxs and it's easy to get a list of what people are getting on different algos in the ccminer thread.
What's the main program for AMD ? cgminer or sgminer or something like that right ? I'll ask in thier forum for a list for a r9 380 and for a r9 390.. Doh! lol


This is why I am confused now

That's like a 200% difference

1 Single Sapphire R9 380 ITX


Draw from wall:
Idle : 9 watt

Dualmining ETH DCR :
Stock settings:
20,434 Mh/s ETH
+ 306,505 Mh/s DCR

Power from wall : 152,4 Watt

stick with 970, don't worry about how much they cost, you can sell them for 90% of their value, probably even 100%, because some of those come with game that you can play, make them cheaper i payed mine 315 euro

also don't look at ethereum only, ethereum will not last forever, you need a good gpu that can mine well every algo, and anyway new gpu are coming i would avoid buying now for that reason

Wonder how much is the card and how much is the system.. Do you know how much it normally draws with 6 cards ? I have nothing to compare it to.
The 6 card 380 guys say a 1300 gold or 1200 plat is fine..

I disconnected everything else and used 1 separate PSU .. so those 154W was only connected to the gpu

(different psu for mainboard and cpu)

Hmmm,, but that is the same price as a R9 390

So what would you build if the rules were. You CAN NOT mine eth. Any other algo but no eth. What is the best bang for the buck rig for now ?

I actually am going to wait and see what new cards come out. I'm about 2-3 months from being where the cheap elec is. Industrial prices there are 1 cent a K/wH. That will help with any algo or rig.

You have a 6 380itx rig right now right ? What power supply are you using ? Whats the draw fully loaded with six cards and a hard algo..
Whats hard ? quark or whatever is hardest..lol

You might find this post from earlier today interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1461408.msg14768588#msg14768588


I only use 5 GPU's in my rigs.
I find the mobos cheaper and easily available, and everything generally is simpler with 5gpus. Also less strain.

I use overpowered PSU's .. just to keep the load fairly low for longevity.
So on a 5 x 380 rig i use 1300+650
On the 5 x 390 is use 2 x 1300 

(i like using sep psu for mobo, disk, cpu, fans and system)

Can you under volt the 380? The default voltage is usually too high. So you can save some energy and use just one PSU.

No .... not without any form of modding i think.


Thats a good selling point for NVIDIAs btw. They can be undervolted, underclocked, and underwhatered ... 
I would love to be able to do that with amds...

With 7990/280x or some R9 390, you can change the Core voltage with MSI afterburner or the Sapphire Trixx.

the r9 380  can undervolt if you get the correct one

xfx 380 and 390 can be undervolted or overvolted with msi afterburner.  Plus even thought the new gen comes out, you wont have a problem selling a 380 or a 390.  Now people with 280x and 79xx well they will find that those cards wont be worth quite as much imo, they are getting old :)

edit:  I mean new gen and even the 380 has so much better power consumption, its crazy. 

there are new nvidia card coming, maybe wait before investing now? you can generate more coins with those card, they also consume less, but it's a pain in the ass to chnage my rig again just for this

The new nVidia 1070 will cost $499, that is more expensive than the current 970. So you might not have return of investment.

Yeah,but will it mine better ??? Won't know until someone gets one & tries mining with it  ::)

Will it work with existing mining software ??? Won't know until someone gets one & tries mining with it  ::)

i think its amazing that neither AMD nor Nnvidia has a pure mining GPU card.

Imagine the market ... a gamer buys 1 "ok" card ..  a miner buys 2-500 of them..

I'm sure that AMD has seen a spike in their cards and correlated it with mining. I'd imagine that in their boardroom there is a long term plan to make sure mining is more viable.
Think about it. Spread a few million $ around us hobby miners and what is the return in brand loyalty etc.. It's very very high.
I can't believe that AMD hasn't realized this and made a coin that you  can use to buy their products and is min-able with only their cards. I BET it happens.

Go look at the quarter reports or yearly GPU sales. Nvidia and AMD sell probably 10 million GPUs every year. There are maybe 100,000 mining right now. And most were the old GPUs like 7950 which were built 4-5 years ago.

They don't make that much profit with miners.

This,we are a VERY VERY small segment of GPU sales.............so don't hold your breath  :D

Ah well it sounded good in my brain lo.. Gotta stop listening to that organ

Its actually not that small.
Here are some intersting articles bout it:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/176724-amd-graphics-card-pricing-skyrockets-due-to-cryptocurrency-mining-could-kill-amds-gaming-efforts

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/02/22/amd-could-be-devastated-by-the-bitcoin-craze/

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-mac-linux-society-1000004/amd-hits-a-massive-gold-mine-with-their-r9-gaming--30985955/

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/12/11/amds-graphics-cards-are-selling-out.aspx

https://coinaxis.com/index.php/entry/litecoin-miners-to-account-for-195-million-in-amd-gpu-sales-coinaxis

http://www.slashgear.com/litecoin-mining-gpu-sales-spike-following-bitcoin-value-drop-off-14308854/

http://vrworld.com/2013/12/09/cryptocurrencies-are-causing-shortages-of-amd-radeon-gpus/

http://bitcoinist.net/amd-launches-gpuopen-potentially-huge-boon-for-cryptocurrencies/


Also interesting tease about external gpus's

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2016/02/29/amd-teases-external-gpu-announcement-hinting-at-universal-laptop-support/#77f9005746d7


Didnt AMD mention gpu mining in their announcent earlier this year?
Its a niche id tap for sure.

You cannot build a pure mining GPU cards. The card could mine well for one algorithm, but mine very badly for another.

I was not having a single algo in mind.. more "industrial" standard.

GPU's today have flashy looks, bad air cooling design, and so on ... id like a shitty looking effective and cooled one.
Like industry vs consumer products.

edit:
Bundled with a riser!! :D
(im so tired of running out of risers all the time)

It was a crazy time GPU's were selling out due to miners... what did AMD do?  They raised price.... and it still ran out for a while till it all kinda crashed.

This time with ETH is nothing like last time as far as effects on GPU sales.   Just not the running out of cards as we saw long ago in the "old days".

This time, the price also rose. I bough at few nano at £379, a week later the price became £425. So it happened this time.

Still nothing compared to rates in "old day's" they jacked up like 50 percent at end if I remember right.  And they still sold out.  There were certain models of AMD they just could not keep in stock. 

Just being able to log on and go to amazon/newegg and buy a GPU makes it far from different then "old days". Heck I watched newegg and newegg.ca the canada site for a while got in cards when other did not.

the difference is that it last longer last time, that's it i think, from doge late 2013 to summer 2014 now it's only few months in comparison, but ethereum is more profitable than doge ever was

If the Ethereum price does not rise, I think the boom will finish soon. The difficulty is already too high.

Back in late 2011 GPU's got really hard to find,even ebay was barren.5800/6900 series were sold out for many months  :(

Exactly, mining ETH is becoming bitcoin mining as well which is becoming unprofitable for most unless those who are almost having free electricity costs. This is why I'm into low inflation POS coins now due to these issues.

I will mine the Ethereum for now and get some Etheruem. So when it becomes PoS, I will have some coins.

Mining is still profitable with the recent price rise. If the price drops another 50%, it will not be profitable.

You guys must have an extremely high electricity price.

On a 100mh righ i use less than 2,5$ in power.
And the reward is  15-18$


There needs the be more than 50% dump for it not to be profitable vs electricity.

But other coins will be more profitable before the price of EL become higher than the reward.
It does not need to drop that much before EXP, SOIL and SHIFT becomes more profitable than ETH.

MY summer power is 17 fucking cents a kwatt!  but  even at 17 cents my rigs earn money.

lets say 50 kwatts a day for 200mh    that is 85 cents x 30 = 255 usd for power!

but right now 200 mh is earning close to 780 a  month     so I net over 500 usd a month.

So if the difficulty doubles and the price drops 40%, you will make a loss. The farms must have cheap electricity.

I think mining ethereum right now still profitable but depends in your GPUs.. i heard that mining ethereum can still mined 10 usd a day..
But you notice that the your daily mined is not profitable many pos out there are releasing and you can still use gpu's to mine other altcoin..

i concur if you have a big farm you need to build it on and exclusively with very cheap electricity, below 0.1 or even better, below 0.05

this is the reason why i never built a big farm, because of my fucking expensive electricity, i have the fund to build one but i can not risk the unprofitable times where the high electricity will kill my earning

Mine while you can, there will likely be a replacement if and when ETH cannot be mined profitably.

EXP is right behind ETH in profitability...
Then SHIFT is really close.. and SOIL..
Then comes FTC.

So, there are many coins to fall back to.

YES, if ALL coins went to POS... AND electricity went up 500%+ .. yes, mining would probably not be profitable.
But neither would living in a house.. or be in a society using electricity...

Conlusion:  Not very likely.

Both of you unfortunately are wrong. There will not always be a profitable coin to mine. If you want proof, just read the litecointalk thread I posted in the original topic and read back at what people were making with GPUs back in 2014-2015.


I sold most of my GPUs at the end of 2014 because with a 280X, I made like $0.30 ( with free electricity) a day. The GPUs were going for almost $200 so I sold them and got some Antminer S3 for $50/each and made 100% more using the exact same amount of electricity. If I got an S5, I would of made almost 150% more with the same amount of power compared to GPUs.

Its out of sheer luck that mining is profitable again with Ethereum, but it won't always be the case.

Its a very competitive world out there. And people are smart these days.

You could have just said, "I respectfully disagree" But NOOOO, you have to be the know it all, predict the future guy. Some day you will eat those words. Especially if you think AMD and Nvidia are going to let GPU mining die off. Just ridiculous.

I would love to be wrong. Because I could quit my day job if I knew the profits would be similar for the next 5 years.

I said this before and I'll say it again. AMD/Nvidia sells like 10 million GPUs every year, they don't care about the 0.5% that are bought for mining.

Most of their market is targetted towards gamers and Corporations.

If they cared they wouldn't let GPU mining die off in 2014-2015.

If you think I am wrong, then sell your house, and buy 10,000 GPUs if you think in 10 years you will be making the same amount of money.

Please, I never said what you implied. I said there will be something else that comes along asic proof and GPU friendly. We have three or four that turn profits..but nothing like it was in 13

The problem is those other coins do not have strong enough market caps to soak up all the gpu mining.  So when ETH plans to go POS and assuming it has good profit up to that point the miners will point their hash to all the other coins making the difficulty too high for decent profit.  If one of coins hit it big then mining could continue, also if you have a big stack of coins in one them and they hit big market caps, you'll be pretty wealthy.

Obviously, this guy has a stake in the success of continued profitable mining. But I would not count on it, mining has always been a low-profit margin affair with spurts of high profitability. Always better to just buy coins than hardware. Plus, can you really trust an Auburn fan? Of course not. RTR.

Well,he has a GPUrig.com in his avatar sooooo,you think he may be skewed to push GPU mining a bit??  :D

GPU mining was pretty much a dead horse till Eth showed up,it will be low profit again after ETH,most likely. 

But it will be more profitable than mining BTC (as diff rises to new heights) with any readily available ASIC's with the same power consumption(1000 watts of GPU compared to 1000 watts ASIC).

Also cuz you can sell your GPU rigs for almost what you paid for them  8)

it's all about electricity, if you have very cheap one like 0.03 or 0.01 like in kuwait, you can basically keep mining forever, there is no dead times for you in that case

even if your single gpu do only $10 per month, with 100 of them you could make it like a full time job, but only with insignificant electricity cost

For most home miners, it is the amount of electricity they can use safely  in the home which restrict the mining operation.

A very nice informative post.

To me, it is entirely undesirable to enter the mining market at any time now. The cost of electricity is pretty damn high here in Australia, and also I'm just not bothered to keep up with the miners myself.

Keep in mind that ETH can crash at any given moment. There is no guarantee.

You read the posts?

If eth is removed, there are still plenty of coins waaaaay above el-price profitability.
Read the posts on the previous page.


Whats the price at you place?


Go to https://www.whattomine.com/coins

Type 100 Mh at ETH.
Type in 1200ish Watt.
Edit el price.


What do you get on daily cost and daily profit?


My 100mh rigs has to use  6800 WATTS compared to 1200 to be non profitable.  (meaning the el price must go up 560% .. by then we'll all be homeless here)
And thats with default el price on the site... which is pretty high imo.

You don't seem to understand.

Read this

[/quote]

The problem is those other coins do not have strong enough market caps to soak up all the gpu mining.  So when ETH plans to go POS and assuming it has good profit up to that point the miners will point their hash to all the other coins making the difficulty too high for decent profit.  If one of coins hit it big then mining could continue, also if you have a big stack of coins in one them and they hit big market caps, you'll be pretty wealthy.
[/quote]

The problem is those other coins do not have strong enough market caps to soak up all the gpu mining.  So when ETH plans to go POS and assuming it has good profit up to that point the miners will point their hash to all the other coins making the difficulty too high for decent profit.  If one of coins hit it big then mining could continue, also if you have a big stack of coins in one them and they hit big market caps, you'll be pretty wealthy.
[/quote]
[/quote]


That is a valid point. But i do believe it will adjust, and new actors will appear.
But it is a risk game, and always will be.
If done right, you shouldnt lose anything.
ROI has been so good that most miners should be way in the green by now.

We are not saying you will lose money. Even the ones with the highest electricity should have most of their rigs paid off.

Problem is these profits simply won't last. Been mining for years and these are record daily profits I am making mining.

That is right. In 2013 and 2014 for a few months, it was very profitable to mine Dodge, but that did not last.

doge at early stage was more profitable than anything else, i was doing million a day with one gpu only, and 1M was then worth 200 satoshi

just do the math, just do it....not even ethereum can dream of such profit

That was 2 bitcoins a day for one GPU. That is really profitable. I wonder if there will any coin as profitable.

GPUs are very expensive, and mining pools aren't very profitable. Summer is coming, and a lot of people are about to find out just how much heat these things produce.

I love when new miners are shocked about their power bill. You will never compete against people who operate next to a dam or some other scheme to get cheap power.

It is just not feasible for home miners anymore and most likely will never be again. Buy coins - don't mine.

There is no way you made $2000 per day mining DOGE with one GPU.

I remember it was more like $10/day with a 280X.

actualy there is because bitcoin then skyrocket to 1200, and i was instamining 10M when doge was launched, then it fall to 3-4 then 2M etc...it did not last long, around 1 week, i can give you that

If you read the posts here, you'll see its about 1/7th of the profit goes to powerbill.

So its actually quite little.

The earlier you came in the better it is for mining while the difficulty is still low but it'll get to the point where mining ETH will only for big farms with low electricity cost.

Is there any cloud mining for the ETH so if anyone who cannot afford to buy mining equipment, we can have an option to just put our investment online?

Yea but mining hardware is at least 3 times cheaper than cloud mining.  Genesis mining wants $925 for 25 mh or you could mine with a single R9 390 card and make 27 mh for $330.  You will be throwing your money away with cloud mining.

You can do cloud mining with Genesis Mining. https://www.genesis-mining.com/our-offer.

the price is not cheap.

The price is $3700 per 100 MH/s. With $3700, you can buy 12 R9 390 and build two rigs with 350 MH/s.

I have not seen any cloud or rent-solution that is profitable so far.
All the ones i've seen has simply been "throwing some money on something to get even fewer in return".

If nicehash started ETH.. that would change it.

You can mine Eth at Nicehash, but that is not a rent market. It is a conventional pool provided by it.

I know, i was ofcourse talking about renting hash like the other algos.