Bitcoin Forum

Hello wonderful mining community,

I'm looking to start mining and I'm looking for a gpu. I have everything else I need and now just need to find a cheap gpu that will work well. My budget is in the $100-$150 range. Thank you for any suggestions.

RX 460 with ~11 Mh/s ETH (Ethereum)

RX 560, you MAY get very lucky on eBay looking at newly listed graphics cards and get a 3GB 1060 for ~$150.

The GTX 1060 3 GB would make a good budget card. You should be able to pick up a used one for less than $150. It does ~23 MH/s on ETH and ~260 H/s on ZEC. Other good options:

1050 Ti - ~14 MH/s on ETH and ~185 H/s on ZEC.
RX 560 - ~ 13.8 MH/s on ETH

BBT has several rig videos focusing on these budget cards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uhSfOpvHks&feature=youtu.be&t=7295

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W3W1YAavSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkDjsWbNriY

Cheapest i see for 1060 is over 200

You need to pick up one second hand on eBay most likely. You'd also have to troll until ones listed an buy immediately as at $150 a 1060 will instantly sell.  

Got a 970 for $135 after 10% eBay bucks which isnt bad, OP should look for deals like that.

These are within your budget; r7 370, r9 280x and r9 380x. But bear in mind  that the best solution isn't the graphics card that has the highest number of mega hashes, or the graphics card that is the most power efficient - you should go for a balance of what works best for you.

What is your PSU and cost of electricity? If you can handle the power requirements you could get an older, AMD GPU, such at the ones just listed ^ that do pretty well with ZEC and similar coins, just takes allot more power. Probably the best RoI option for your budget....

Unless you get VERY lucky, you're not going to find any HD 7870XT/7950/7970 or R9 280/280x/290/290x/380/380x/390/390x under $250 of late.
 I've even been seeing HD 7850/7870 cards listed over $200.

Pricing on those has gone through the roof the last couple of months, as they are all good ETH or ZEC (or both depending on the specific model) mining cards.

 Best bet at this point for a low-end mining card is probably the GTX 1060 or RX 560 (460 if you can find one but those have been out of production for a month or two).

 Welcome back to 2013/2014 - but this time it's not just Scypt (and later X11), it's a whole BUNCH of different algos and their farmers eating AMD cards like candy and begging for more!

 At least this time around NVidia is competative on SOME of the "bigger coin" options....

It depends what you want to mine? If Zcash then you should consider buying 1050ti - very low power draw and decent hashrate (about 180h/s).

Thank you all for the suggestions.

How much power does the 1050ti consume? I'm finding conflicting results.

1050 Ti consumes 75 watts or less, as they don't normally have a PCI-E power connector - how much less seems to be card-specific, but usually not much if ANY less depending on usage.

PCI-E can supply only 75W. 1050ti consume about 50-60W