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My friend began to be interested in cryptocurrency.
He dont want to spend 2k on asic stuff and whatnot, so he probably just mine ethereum or something like it. He wants to use his old laptop, but I know that's gonna dont work.
So, need cheap gpu. Any ideas, links?

At this point, any GPU worth mining on is selling for somewhat more than $200, due to the demand exceeding the supply in the case of most of them.
This situation HAS been easing some but pricing is still inflated on RX 470/480/570/580 cards a LOT, somewhat so on GTX 1060 (and a little on the GTX 1070 but those are NORMALLY a lot more), and availability is still very spotty.

 You could get somethign like a RX 460 or GTX 1050ti, but those don't mine a LOT - on the other hand, their pricing hasn't inflated much if at all as there is almost no demand for those cards from miners DUE to the low performance - on a per-card basis they're efficient, but on a SYSTEM basis they don't work out so well.

With some deal hunting, you might be able to find a new 3GB 1060 for just under $200. (Think Newegg, $25 off $200 promo code with your first MasterPass payment, and no sales tax for customers in a number of states.) These are capable of around 300 H/s on equihash if you can adjust their clock settings a bit.

But if profit is his main goal, I sincerely hope he's not buying a motherboard/CPU/RAM/etc. just to mine with one budget card. One sub-$200 card would take a long time to pay for the rest of the parts for a rig PLUS its own original cost.
His electricity rate is also an important factor to consider. At higher rates, having all those other components powered up to support only one GPU would cause a sizable dent in his expected profit.

If his interest is in cryptocurrency and not specifically in mining, perhaps you should suggest that he consider taking his $200 and trading it for some various cryptos. (This is sometimes a better move, even for miners with much bigger setups.)

On the other hand, if he already has an existing system with an open x16 slot and suitable PSU, perhaps he may as well get a graphics card, especially if he might need it for other purposes (gaming, heavy photo/video editing, etc.) down the road.

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti

Most profitable algorithms past 30 days
NeoScrypt: 1.3%
DaggerHashimoto: 81.3%
CryptoNight: 4.2%
Lbry: 0.5%
Equihash: 10.9%
X11Gost: 1.6%
NiceHash.com

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti
Approximate ROI **   164 Days

It's more profitable than 1060/1070/1080/1080TI/RX570/580 at current price

He can try hunting for a r9 290, it gives good hashes on eth, zcash and monero but it takes a bit too much power

buy gpu cards on alibaba. you can buy 2 rx 480 cards with $200.

Except you won't receive any cards.

nicehash is a joke lolz, they be rippin yall whom use it

1050ti is a good ROI on card cost, but the return is very low even plug full 6 card in one motherboard.

Always deal with high transaction level and with trade assurance its legit bro

Thanks for the full answer. My friend listened to your advice and bought on ebay EVGA GTX 1060 3GB



Thanks. But there are only 768 cuda cores in GTX 1050 Ti.
GTX 1060 3GB = 1152 cuda cores

You can try GTX 730, 960 540 series. These are most cheapest gpu you will find in the market. Go for 4 gb power and try to get second hand which would be even cheaper for your friend. These gpu are still profitable if managed with rig of three to four units. Single gpu from them won't give you much profits. You will have to have six gpu in place. You can go for mining zcash. You will have almost 30 sol/s hash power from these models which is pretty fast with these oldies and ROI is about one year. :-)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2125643.0;all

 It's not TECHNICALLY a GPU but they're well under $200.

 The GTX 960 isn't a particularly profitable card (I have 2 of them) - better off to look at the GTX 750 ti in that generation of NVidia.
 I would IGNORE anything before the 9xx series except the 750 ti - too low of performance for the power draw.

Gigabyte RX560 2GB version with micron memory 15.5-16MH/s is pretty good card for mining
etehreum clones (expanse, ubiq, musicion), you get 30MH/s for $200

I have a GTX 1060 myself and it barely makes a profit if I was mining. This might be due to my high electricity costs of about 30 cents/kWh but my recent calculation for my revenue was about 1€ worth of Ether but paying about 60 cents in electricity, so a net profit of about 40 cents a day.

Ethereum requires a huge amount of graphics memory, about 3GB and soon more. Therefore cheap cards cannot mine Ethereum reliably as they often lack enough memory. To cite a post from stackexchange (https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/426/what-is-the-current-dag-size-when-do-we-expect-to-hit-gpu-limits):
"The 3GB limit will be hit around mid-April 2018".
This means that from April 2018 on you need atleast 4GB video memory on your GPUs to mine Ethereum.

As a rough approximation, I'll take a card of 200€ and expect a profit of about 50 cents. This gives me a ROI time of 400 days. It takes me over a whole year running the card 24/7 to barely break even. Factor in the noise and heat, you probably do not want to do this in your own room or appartment.

The only chance you have are other altcoins which are not as memory hungry. Mining those early on might give you big rewards when they hit an exchange, but you could also end up with a net loss because the coin does not gather interested folks and fails. This will leave you with a huge electricity bill and little to no value in coins.

Unless you have super cheap electricity or super cheap hardware, it just does not make sense to get a dedicated mining rig with such a low budget.

$0.30/kWh is a pretty insane electricity cost for a miner. If I had to pay that much, I definitely wouldn't be investing in more GPUs.

Theres still profit to be found in these cards but you just have a very high electrical cost. Most people I know that mine in the US have costs around $.10/kwh and I get around $.07/kwh. I wouldn't mine at anything above $.15/kwh as the profit there is just minimal. You are right about the DAG size, but in your case electrical cost is a much larger factor.

I assume your friend wants to mine ETH, so you will need to more than 3GB memory for single card.

You can choice 1050Ti 4GB, 1060 3GB, AMD Rx 560 4GB

But if you just mine some coins for fun, any GPU will be fine for the mining rig.

And you can download minergate, and you can mine a lot of coins by single CPU

Heck, I've been mining Bytecoin from my old Galaxy S6 just for the hell of it. 23 h/s, 5w/hr power draw. Definitely not making any money but it only costs me $0.25 a month to run.

Just upgraded my CPU/mobo (was an old i3-540, now a FX8300). Looking for a budget mining/gaming GPU myself actually. Just can't pull the trigger on anything.

If you don't care about that phone, you could just sell it and use that money to buy some coins to speculate with. Phones, of all mobile devices, were definitely not meant to be pegged 24/7. They don't even have fans or cases that allow for proper passive ventilation. (If you opened it up and made a little cooling system just so it could mine, hats off to you.)

Currently, a used S6 is worth much more than you'd likely mine with it over the course of its expected lifetime.

But it is hard to buy RX480, it is out of stock most of the time...

Ditto. The used ones on eBay are still selling over the MSRP of new units at the time of their release.

I've seen Fry's have a few open-box/refurbished RX480s, but unfortunately, none of them have been available at stores remotely close to me. (Nearly always in Texas, for some reason, and for in-store pickup only.)

Buy a used RX 470/480 or Nvidia 1060. It isn't worth to even start mining on $200 GPU, actually, but if you want to have some experience now, then okay.

With price You mentioned snake oil should be included too.

I will skip from wish list everything cheap for building mining rig.
These is very good business, so you need stability and durability, not oposite.

It all depends on price, as I said you can get 30MH/s with two $100 cards

Would you say mining rigs require a lot of repair an upkeep? Middle tier and upper tier is what I'm considering...

0 repair and very little upkeep if you automate them. Best ROI are mining edition RX480 (I like it better since it still has one video port and can actually be resold after use) and p106, which are for mining only. Next best are: the RX 470 for funny coins and 3GB 1060 for everything else. If lucky you can get all of them under 200$

I got some old HD 7950 GPu's if you are interested :p

At the rate prices are going, the bottom end RX 470/570/480/580 cards should get back under $200 in another month or two.

I picked up 40 GTX 1060s for about $190 each shipped after taxes. I also got cashback of 6%.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&O=&Q=&ap=y&c3api=1876%2C%7Bcreative%7D%2C%7Bkeyword%7D&gclid=CjwKCAiA9MTQBRAREiwAzmytw2AvcQwjxR1n2XvsuhMLlCufgHvFGAMya0mexUE4j6JpbyRACOqTehoC0MIQAvD_BwE&is=REG&m=Y&sku=1279813

Sorry for Hijack this thread but what if for example I would like to mine Nexus or Shield.

I know these altcoins aren't profitable for now, but I would like to know.
If under 150W of power consumption even better.
If cheaper than 150 great
And if can be found online, huge win.

Can anyone give me some advice?

Regards