Bitcoin Forum

I have been running a couple of rigs for over a year now, mining mostly ETH but also ZEC & XMR and sometimes dual mining with claymore some DCR and LBRY. Probably 80% of the time I have been just mining ETH using Ethos (custom Linux mining distro).

The rigs are mostly AMD R9 290s, and one 390 and a couple of 380s.

I live in Australia where power is very expensive.

I also have a machine which is used as a HTPC and for some gaming which has an Nvidia GTX1070 in it. Obviously I have used it to mine alongside the AMD rigs a lot and it blows me away sometimes to see what the Nvidia Pascal chips can do in terms of hash-rate vs power consumption. For example, today I tried DCR mining just out of curiosity. The 1070 gives me 2.5gh/s at about 130-140W. I haven't tried mining just DCR with the AMD cards but dual mining ETH/DCR one 6 GPU rig does 180mh/s ETH and 1.5gh/s DCR (with the DCR at 20% in claymore) but it's using 2kW.

This got me thinking about maybe selling the old power hungry AMD cards on Ebay and getting maybe some GTX1060s.

Can anyone give me advice about the best Nvidia cards in terms of price, power consumption and hash-rate?

Is it necessary to buy the 6GB version of the GTX1060 or are the 3GB ones enough?

I was thinking about probably mining ETH still, but maybe (depending on coin prices) mining DCR, VTC, LBRY, XMR, ZEC or whatever. Maybe actually taking the time to learn properly and get a CCMINER autoswitching multi-algo setup going.

Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.

I think that after making the calculations of buying brand new 1060 cards vs the power costs you would pay by keeping the old chips would make it a wise decision to keep the AMD cards.
How much is the electricity in AUS?

If you talk about just a few rigs, that this might be an option but it all comes down to numbers since most Nvidia cards re much more expensive then AMD ones. If you want a larger farm, then I suggest you JV with someone from countries with low electricity cost and set up your rigs there. I know this generates the trust issue but not everyone s a scammer. Other then that, you ll be just hunting for pennies cause as we all know, current crypto mining profitability spikes re temporary and people in developed countries cannot be competitive in terms of electricity price.

Best ones is the 1070 and the 1060 3GB. The 1070 can do 2750 decred at 120W or 440 sols / zcash at 120 watt.

Gtx 1070 3Gb is the best Nvidia card.
I completely agree that they have a better hashrate/power usage ratio, but before than buy 20 of those you should check if the price difference is not bigger than the power advantage!

Yes I know that buying new 1060s is a big investment, but I'm also thinking about the current value of the AMD cards vs. what they will be worth in 6-12 months after another round of releases of new GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. People seem to still want to buy R9 290s and 390s - I recently sold one to a guy from Chile via Ebay. I think that in a year though, they will be worth way less.

I am paying $US0.17 per kWh unfortunately. So power usage is a big deal to me. My 1070 uses about 60% of the power that a 390 uses for the same hash rate. I'm guessing that it will be a similar situation with a 1060 vs a 380.

Tonga (380) is a bit more power efficient than Hawaii (390), but the 1060 should still be way more efficient. make your calculations and decide for yourself. I don't think 1060 or 1070 cards will hold their value as well after the next generation releases. they will fall just as much as the AMD cards.

If you under volt the AMD R9 290/390, you can increase the efficiency. I have 6XR9 390 with ZEC 2070H/s using 1050W.

Yes I have tried doing that a little using MSI afterburner but my preferred OS is a Linux distro so I would have to flash all of their BIOS I guess right?

Is that what you did? It's always made me nervous really, but I have wondered about the "stilt" BIOS many times. Unfortunately I have many different kinds of 290s - only 3 of them are reference versions so if I went down the rabbit hole of BIOS modding I think it would take me a lot of reading and learning (and risk of bricking cards).

Another issue is that I mostly run them with core overclocked (1100) and memory underclocked (1125) so undervolting is going to complicate that too right?

This. Hawaii needs some tweaking to be more efficient. Obviously it will never get to pascal levels in terms of power consumption but still with this weeks earnings they are still very profitable. Yes you need to flash bios on linux to downvolt.

I have a rig with two 295x2 (=4x290x), not even trying to save power with it. 1050/1250 gives 29MH ETH + 870MH DCR, 1200w at the wall.

300w is 7.2 kWh/day which makes $1.22/day with $0.17/kWh. Next week earnings could be different, you never know with cryptos...

edit: you can also save power by lowering clocks/ dpm state. Gpu-z to save your bios, hawaiireader to read what clocks are at different dpm states and then try those clocks. Easy way to save power without modding bios.

Yes I love my 1070. Amazing what it can do for so little wattage.

Are there any or many algorithms that would not mine on a 3GB card? Is there any reason to buy the 6GB versions of the 1060?

I don't think buying new 1060s is a big investment for developed countries like Australia. PNY offers it at only 219.99 USD as you can see in their website here. If you check at ebay you will see that the price is higher than PNY.

Here is the link in case you wanna go for the investment.
http://pny.com/geforce-gtx-1060-3gb?sku=VCGGTX10603PB (http://pny.com/geforce-gtx-1060-3gb?sku=VCGGTX10603PB)