Bitcoin Forum

Yes, I am a noob, and haven't started mining yet. I am trying to find out if mining on my dual EVGA GTX 460 rig would make a profit. I have found forums about it but they are all from like 2011 and I know that something changed with difficulty or something last month, so it is impossible to find up to date information on my cards. I also know that depending on the pool I join my return could vary.

In Baltimore I think I pay like 8.98 cents per K/hr. And I am pretty sure each of my cards would make like 60-70 mHash/sec

I don't need to know exactly how much I could make, but does anyone know if it would be worth my time to bitcoin mine for profit? Or is there just no chance because of difficulty and my cards being Nvidia?

thanks

You can calculate estimated profit of mining here:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

There is just no chance due to your cards being nVidia, Im sorry but its a fact nowadays.
Back in the day you could've broke even, Nowadays you'll break your cards, At a cost too.

If you havent seen it: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
Your looking at about a total of 110mh/sec, for both cards combined
Where a little dinky card like this http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129187 Gets 60mh/sec

the Bitcoins per Block (BTC/block) is defult 25. is that right? google didn't answer that for me. How would being in a pool differ my revenue vs going solo? The calculator is for solo.

Bitcoin difficulty 3275464.5865656
Bitcoins per Block (BTC/block) 25.00
Conversion rate (USD/BTC) 24.71
Hash rate (MHash/s) 130
Electricity rate (USD/kWh) .09
Power consumption (W) 300
Time frame (months) 3
Cost of mining hardware (USD) 0
Profitability decline per year .61

Results
Difficulty   3,275,464.59
Mining Factor 100   0.38 USD/24h@100MHash/s as in these charts
Average generation time for a block (solo)   3 years, 157 days (can vary greatly depending on your luck)
Hardware break even   never
Net profit first time frame   -16.81 USD
Coins per 24h at these conditions   0.0200 BTC
Power cost per 24h   0.65 USD
Revenue per day   0.49 USD
Less power costs   -0.15 USD
System efficiency   0.43 MH/s/W
Mining Factor 100 at the end of the time frame   0.34 USD/24h@100MHash/s
Average Mining Factor 100   0.36 USD/24h@100MHash/s
Power cost per time frame   59.17 USD
Revenue per time frame   42.37 USD
Less power costs   -16.81 USD

yea assuming I imputed things right I guess it won't work well unless being in a pool pays more.

Thanks!

No, being in a pool doesn't pay more (it might even pay less due to pool-fees, or network-lag),
but instead of waiting >3years (on average, with rising difficulty it'll probably be more like 10years) to get 25BTC when mining solo, you get a steady 0.02BTC each day when mining on a pool (and of course less when difficulty rises).

Not really worth the hassle if you're doing it for profit, but fun to play around with. 

Very true, he earns more than i thought, but this is if he overclocks his cards and maybe make the fans run at 100% from  24/7 heat in the SLI setup-etc, its going to be very taxing on his gpu if he does mine bitcoins and personally i think it would be better to Not overclock the cards, im just saying that theres a huge risk of early blowout on one of his cards that he needs to be aware of
Goodluck!

Start it up. You've already got the cards, go ahead and play with them. Just don't plan on any profits. Look at it as a learning experience.

One of my cards I got used, and the other was new but is two years old. I have them in a mild overclock but if I was going to experiment with mining I would prob keep them close to stock. I have awesome case cooling (150cfm 230mm fan aiming right at them) and they have never gotten hot gaming. I'll have some fun with it.

On a different note, my laptop has a 5730 in it, which is not listed on that hardware wiki. It says the 5750 gets like 100 mhash but should I try with mine? It is a laptop so power usage would be way lower than the desktop and almost as many hashes/sec. Is laptop mining a bad idea?

Thanks

I personally use a 460 GTX. Not much of a point other than to just mine whilst away for extended periods of time.

The only case you should be mining with the 460s is if the following 2 are valid:
1) you want to kill the card
2) you have free electricity or use electricity to heat your place

You're better off selling the card and buying a cheap 7850 or 7870 which would mine at double the rate for a lot less energy.

It's fine to do it as a novelty to just play around with a few bitcents, but if you really want to get into the coins buy a cheap AMD GPU (don't commit too much since ASICs are coming shortly) or buy some BTC on the exchange.

  Getting 450MH's out of my ati 5870. Crank it up man just watch heat and artifacts. Then back it off. Afterburner is good.

Low, but good luck regardless!!

low, thats good for 5870. check card speedsheet.

I don't suggest this often, but maybe try mining litecoin and trading those for BTC. The NVIDIA-AMD gap is a bit closer there, because scrypt won't penalize you as much for having less cores but more sophisticated cores. You probably still wouldn't profit, but you could acquire some coin.

any updates on BFL orders?

I really don't understand how BTC mining works.  Why is GPU power so much more important than CPU/RAM power?  I have an i7 Quad-core 3.09GHz with 24GB DDR3, but I'm not a big gamer, so I just put an EVGA 1GB GTX 460 in it.  I didn't even know what a bitcoin was 3 weeks ago, so I'm still just screwing around, but you're telling me that if I just put an $800 video card in my rig, I can make my own?

The calculation to mine BTC blocks and process transactions, SHA-2 works very well multithreaded and parallelizes readily. This means hardware with a lot of cores like an AMD GPU can excel at it. Nvidia GPUs with less cores that each have a higher degree of sophistication such that they keep up in graphics processing lag behind AMD GPUS, because more cores and more threading helps more than the increased sophistication of the Nvidia cores. The i7 with its core count and being near the peak of sophistication doesn't stand a chance.

Okay, so if I ran dual AMD cards in Crossfire mode, would that work?  Or was I reading right on another thread that each card had to have a monitor?

They shouldn't need monitors and crossfire should be optional. From what I understand you ought to be able to just fire up each one as an independent opencl device. I've only ever just dabbled in mining, so the mining forums should be able to give you a better walkthrough than I can.

Crossfire generally complicates mining but yes you can mine in crossfire if you're gaming in between.  You only need to hook up a monitor or dummy plug if you're using certain driver versions with certain cards.  Don't always use the newest drivers.  The newer drives have components in them - not going to go into detail - that actually kill performance on older cards such as the 5970s.

You can mine with GUIMiner if you don't like using command prompt at all, but spending 30 minutes learning how to use CGMiner is worth the time spent 20x over any other tweaks.

I am trying out on my laptop first because its a hd 5730. I downloaded latest drivers but the gui miner says I need the SDK drivers. on this site it doesn't list that its compatible with win 7 or my card. is it possible to min with my card on win 7?

http://developer.amd.com/resources/archive/archived-tools/gpu-tools-archive/ati-stream-software-development-kit-sdk-v1-4-beta/

DO NOT mine on your laptop unless you purposefully want to kill it.  I have a laptop with a 5730 too and I have never bothered to even try it.  A cheap 5830 or 6870 will set you back $100 or less and will mine 5x as fast.  If you kill the display in your laptop that laptop will be worth $20 for parts.

Or as someone one metaphored: NVidia cards are like having 4 MIT grads doing your all your math homework. Yeah, they can do pretty much anything you throw at them, but there's only 4 of them and they can only do so much in a given time.   AMD/ATI cards are like having 1000 high school grad honors math students doing your homework. THey might not be able to do the most advanced trig or calculus problems, but they can do hundreds of times more basic functions in a given time period than the 4 MIT guys.

or something like that.