Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I have never mined anything in my life. I wanted to before but I've read that its very inefficient to mine without a huge investment. I've moved into a studio flat where i pay a fixed amount for electricity so I'm looking to buy some kind of miner for around £200. I can buy a more expensive one if its really worth it.

One most important thing is that it has to be quiet. I would also like it to be well built and be from a good company.

If you think that it would be more profitable to mine a different coin then pm me or something please.

I would recommend an S5 but it's quite loud.
You also have to take into consideration how much power you need, you might not be able to simply plug the miners into a standard wall plug.
Even with free electricty, you would still need about half a year to reach ROI.

Best is to buy antminer s9 but as I see you are looking for powerful miner without noise. I suggest you to use antminer R4, it's made for home mining and it has 8.6 TH/S. Also it's not good alternative but you can also mine bitcoins with GPU mining and it's also not very noisy, depend on how much GPU do you have to store in that place where you are going to mine, also if you want to mine altcoins, than use GPU Mining. If you want mine bitcoin with antminer R4 and altcoins with powerful GPU's, I personally suggest you tu use ATI Raedon's GPU for mining.

If you want something quiet and cheap look into picking up a pair of SP20s/Avalon4s. You can downclock them to 0.5w/gh at around 1TH/s each, and they'll run very quiet. The avalon4 is an excellent home miner, even though it's 3 generations old.

Another important thing is heat. You may not realize it, but these devices produce tons of it: even a modest kilowatt of mining hardware will noticeably increase the temperature in a room, so make sure you have fans that can exhaust the heat outside.

There are very few miners that can be considered quiet - and the only one that is even SOMEWHAT efficient by current standards is the Avalon 6.

The real question though is "are you going to run out of money to buuy miners with first, or are you going to run out of limited electric capasity".

 You might want to consider building a GPU-based rig to mine something like XMR (Monero) with, those can fairly easily be made to be quiet.

I have a few S3s running at my house and also a few modified S5s with replaced fans that made them quieter than they originally were; unfortunately, quiet miners have mostly disappeared from the market with the exception of the Bitmain R4 and the Avalon 6. There's also the S1 if you don't mind the insane hashrate to power ratio; it runs pretty well and is average in terms of sound production.

If you have the cash go for the ANTMINER S9, its hashrate is insane :)

Bro, honestly, if you don't have to worry with electricity, you might look for a S9. Any other hardware will only make you earn few cents and ROI won't happen in years. The difficult makes even powerful miners useless. You better choose another segment to act because mining involves heavy investment.

This, if you don't want to spend too much S5's should be super cheap. That new R4 could also be viable. Probably best the R4 is as it doesn't push the limits of one circuit.

The R4 costs too much for it's hashrate.
Up side, it seems to be in very short supply.

Even with free electricity, the R4 is a waste of money imo, there are much better miners for the price too.

If you want, just switch the fan on the S5 and you'll have yourself a nice, quiet miner. It's got great efficiency for its price, or if you want a reliable but low-hashrate miner, the S3 works as well. It's pretty much a S5 with lower hashrate but much more reliability.

There is one thing that hasn't been discussed: your electricity wiring, breakers, outlets,...
You said you were moving into an appartment with a fixed electricity fee... But it's possible the wires won't allow you to plug in more than a couple thousand watts of equipment before they start getting hot, or your breakers going off,...

Also, a fixed fee is fine, but maybe they'll get suspicious if you constantly use several thousand watts... There might be small letters in your contract forbidding you to use the electricity for commercial purposes, or to use it excessively...

Most people in this thread have been giving valid advice about which ASIC to buy, just be sure you do your electric homework before plugging in a big farm.

Get a used s-7.

Downclock the freq to 350- 400

Set fans low to 25- 40%

It will mine at 3th use 750-800 watts

You can no longer do GPU mining with bitcoins, you won't make profit.

really did not know that.


just being silly;D 


ETH coin  is the most viable with free power and a few gpus.

But since the op did the question in btc the answer is a s-7

Bitcoin directly - no, but ETH, XMR..etc - yes. You can always mine those coins and later exchange them for bitcoins, thats what i started doing once again.
Unlike bitcoin mining, where difficulty (and therefore profitability) is making it hard to reach profit, there are a lot of other coins where you can take advantage of
fluctuations in difficulty and price to make bigger profits. Not having to pay for electricity is just another big plus on your side obviously.

just buy the coins, it goes up faster than u can mine them

That would only be true if the price kept climbing. Unfortuantly the price can also go downhill. With free electricity on hand, I would also mine the heck out my office location.

I would agree with philipma1957, get an S7 and downclock. This will still give you a decent hashrate and low enough power draw that you should be safe with anything that has fairly recent wiring (within the last 20 years). This would also be somewhat quiet, the power supply might be loud depending on what you use. Also depending on the size of the apartment heat might become an issue for you. You are essentially talking about running an 800watt heater all the time.

It also means that you'll use less money on heating this year if you live in a cooler place in the northern hemisphere- although miners don't provide the best heating, they do make a room nice and toasty in just a few minutes. You can always underclock a miner for less heat production if needed.