Bitcoin Forum

(dear mod, I hope this is good forum for this topic - if not - please move)

Hi, I use my main computer for mining, I use NiceHash Miner software and I mine ~37Sols/s (i7 + gtx970). After few days of mining I'm ready to invest some mBTC or $$$ to build PC dedicated for mining.

I dont need case/screen/mouse/keyboard, I will buy cheap 4gb DDR ram and cheap HDD.

My biggest concerns are about motherboard, power supply, CPU and GPU.

I don't want to risk big amount of money ( $200-250 ), so for the beginning I'd like to buy cheap motherboard with 4 PCIe slots, and one GPU, and PS and CPU.
motherboard Asus H81M-Plus - $50, 1 x PCI Express x16, 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x1, chipset LGA 1150 (so i3/i5/i7)
power supply opengate 600W - $25 , or I can buy two opengate 400W $15 each - what do you think?
CPU - here I don't know if i5 is enough for 4 GPUs? or should I expect that CPU will be a bottleneck in this build and it's better to spend more on i7 ?
GPU - I found on ebay used gtx970 for $100 and I think that solid 25Sols/s for this price is a good deal - or do you think that AMD is better?


So what do you think about this build? Is that motherboard good for 4 GPUs? How to calculate power consumption for these GPUs? And how to calculate CPU "demand" for each GPU?

Are you wanting to know how much you will lose by entering the mining game? Don't bother. Unless you have "free" power.

Please correct me if I wrong but for 600w power supply the monthly cost will be ~$50 (cost of electricity is 12 cents per Kilo-Watt hour in my area).


(Calculations from site http://www.overclockers.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-your-pc/ )

So my break even point is ~$1.5 per day, but currently I make ~$5 per day with my gtx970 so it's profitable rigth?

yeah it is, don't listen to anyone say crap like "you are going to waste your electricity" and stuff like that, they just want less diff, because even with 0.5 cent it's profitable let alone 12

just buy one 480 readon and you are done, it can do around 40 sol with the correct miner, should be 0.01 btc per day mining zcash, which is a freaking $200 a month with a single gpu

That is right. The altcoin mining was marginal a few days ago before the coming out of the ZCash.

What miner should I be using for my 480? It's barely getting 30 Sol/s and doesn't seem to be contributing much to my balance at all. I've been running it for two days now :/

i don't have a 480, but this say 46sol https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1660023.0

If you want my honest opinion, don't get into mining if you can't afford to loose cash or invest a bit. There's not point in investing 200$ for some entry level crap hardware that will not return a lot of coins. If this is the maximum you can afford, I would suggest you do something else with those 200-250$.

If not, well here's my advice:

- Recycle. Do not invest in a PC case. I use an ikea dish holder for one of my rigs...
- You can go cheap for CPU unless you want to use it for CPU mining. A Celeron will set you back 40$. You do not need a core i# for a 4 rig GPU, at all.
- you can go cheap for RAM, but stick with good brands. 4Gb would be a minimum for a mining rig
- Motherboard, you can go cheap as in there are quality mining boards from AsRock that cost very little (BTC pro, z97 anniversary etc.). Get one with several pci-e slots and buy some good usb risers (5 for ~20$).
- do NOT go cheap on power supply. The quality of your power supply will impact on your power consumption AND stability of your rig
- GPU: go for AMD cards, they have better mining support. I love nVidia, but their cards are way to expensive anyway. The latest AMD cards are a lot more power efficient too. An RX470 4Gb will hash ETH at 28.5 (optimized) at around 110-120W or 30S/s for zcash. This is I think the cheapest yet best GPU you can buy atm (for mining at least).

This is a wonderful calculation if the price stays put.

OP, I suggest you put aside some % of your earning to pay for electricity and reinvest only the remaining profit into mining. This way you don't lose. Add cards one by one.
Also, read around a little more what GPU is best for mining anything, not only ZCASH. Because this will go great for a while, maybe years, maybe months, maybe days. But after that you will want to mine something else with the system you already have.

470 and 480 Radeons seem to be the most popular choices.

Do you guys recommend 470/480 4gb or do I need to go 8gb ?  ???

four is good if you can afford 8 go for it either does the job 8 may give more hash power for me it more of how much i get for what i can afford.

Simply put, the size of the ram has more to do with the increase of the dag files etc. rather than raw hashing power. I guess within maybe 2-3 years, 4Gb will become obsolete, just like the 2Gb have today. My 8Gbs do 28.5Mh/s on ethereum for 115W @ wall per card. My 4Gb do the same hashrate but that's about their limit (although you can push them past 29 but this means more wattage.

For a budget rig, I would go for the Sapphire RX470 Nitro+ 4Gb and this for a very simple reason: it's good value AND it has dual BIOS. You will likely want to mod your card at some point to increase the hashrate or save some watts. Having dual bios means you can experiment and when things go wrong, switch a flip and get things going again.

Many thanks for replies, especially to @h311m4n for high effort explanation!

Now I see that radeon card is a "must have" for such a minig rig, and you all suggest radeons 470 or 480 but these cards are expensive... $200-250 for a card is out of my price range.

As I wrote in my first post I can risk (and probably loose ;) ) $200-250 in total.


So what do you think about buying radeon R9 270 2GB for the beginning (I found one for ~$50), and mine with this few weeks and buy RX 470 or 480 as a second card?


This is how I see my build:

• $50 - PU Zalman ZM500-LX 500W 120mm
• $50 - Asus H81M-Plus
• $50 - R9 270 2GB
• $50 - CPU Pentium G3260 3,3GHz LGA1150 (or Intel Celeron G1840 LGA1150)
• $20 - 4GB RAM and HDD

What do you think about this build now?

As advised above, $200 is a garbage machine and with only 1 gpu it will not be very power efficient and a lot of time programming it (2-4hrs your first time)

The mobo+ram+hdd will draw around 60-80w. Add that to the 270x and it's around 200w total for ~14MH ethereum. Meanwhile the big guys have 6x rx480 cards in a rig that does ~180MH @ 700w. See the problem?

You need to think beyond your current budget/acceptable loss and hence, see my first post where I advised you to do something else with those 250$ ;-). As I explained in my first post, an R9 270 2Gb is a waste of money. Those older gen AMD cards consume way too much power and won't hash fast enough (especially a 270) to justify its purchase. Do not forget that the difficulty always increases for a given coin. Also, it's a 2Gb version so it will be completely unusable with GPU mining within very soon (imo). You could maybe gain a few zecs (i'm talking like 0.001ZEC) with this but it'll take you a lot of time, even if the difficulty is still low.

I would go for at least a 280 or 290 and at least 4Gb, otherwise your just throwing money away :)

Now, if you just want to learn about mining and see how the whole thing works, I guess if this is the maximum you can afford, then go for it. But be warned, mining tends to be addictive ;D

to be fair, a 270x can probably be found for ~$60 right now, and is making ~$2-3/day at zcash. so theres an okay chance it will break even before zcash/rthereum become fruitless to mine on it, but then what?

youll need a newer gpu to mine beyond the zcash bubble, and its tough to resell a $50 gpu thats had multiple owners and is ~3yrs old. youll be back at step one, but with a $200 rig that cant profitably mine anything and the cpu/hdd/ram probably didnt get paid off while using the 270x to mine (unless the zcash party lasts 2-3 more months)

follow everybodys advice - you need a $1000+ budget to assemble a good 4GPU rig that has a good chance of profitability over a 1year timespan. at minimum, $600 to build something with 2-3 decent gpus

Well, your 270 could maybe get about 30S/s for zcash with Claymore. I don't know how much your rig would draw, but for 300W this will yield you around 2.55$ a day :)

So if you spend 200$, you'll need to mine 78 days to break even, that is, if ZEC remains at its current price.

It is not very possible that the ZEC will remain at this price. But as long as the revenue is twice the electricity price, it is worth mining.

Hello, I am in almost same shoes as you ! But I just had a bigger budget, I tested really small and then went ahead, as mining is kind of addictive.

1stly, dont get demotivated by those negative comments. I think you have already understood the risks very well.

Starting with the main mobo + GPU, it all depends upon how you want to scale, do u want to use this setup for just small test or have space for growing?

If you just want to get started, you can look for some deals online to get a MOBO with just 3 PCI slots ( will always have 1 16x ) so you can right away start with 1 GPU and expand with 1x to 16x extenders later. Also you might land with a PSU with the whole desktop deal, that can support 1 GPU atleast, so you save on the price of GPU aswell.

Regarding the GPU, Nvidea cards did bad until Zcach came into the scene, so now alot of people are using Nvidea cards aswell, So if you are getting anamazing deal and can get a ROI in less then 3 months, go for it. As the general ROI on these rigs is mostly around 9 to 12 months.

This is all I have learned in the last 20 days ! 

So unless people have free power they shouldn't start mining? then what good mining is for if only those with free power having the advantages, why would anyone invest in crypto if only the big companies with cheap power can have all the benefits?

Get a good PSU, gold rated or more.  dont cheap out on that part.

That is a good adice. If your electricity price is high, it is better to buy a platinum PSU. That will save money in the long term.

well, sure you save money but not that much.  go cost / effective.  evga gold g2, gq or gs is good.  its about 5 years warranty minimum mainly, and reliability. (also safety !).  Good quality wires and connectors too.  the whole package :)