Bitcoin Forum

All,

While I wait to be be-noobed and able to post elsewhere, I did have a question I was hoping some of my compatriots on this board could answer.

I have a beast of a system - do you think it will be able to do a decent job of mining?

Dual Xeon E5-2660
256GB DDR3-1066R ECC RAM
Dual Nvidia GTX550Ti (2GB) video cards (not SLI)

At the moment, I am trying out GUIminer under Windows 8 Enterprise, and getting around 50Mhash/s.

I look forward to your advice and input! :)

i'm sorry but no. CPU mining is useless. As for GPU, well, you have nvidia cards wich are not good for mining. Sure, your system is powerful and good at gaming and other things but not for mining

Hi!

If you want to mine bitcoins it's recommended to use a ATI card instead of a Nvidia card

I'm using a XFX Radeon HD6570 DDR3 card and gets around 80GHash/sec!  :D

or is it MHash/sec?  :-\ :P

That configuration is more like a server than a normal computer.

However to agree with Gabi, it's not really powerful to be worth Bitcoin mining on.
CPU and GPU mining is overall not advisable any more, with FPGA and ASIC being more normal.

CPU mining is slow is considered slow, it's not really worth doing
GPU Mining on Nvidia Cards, can be done, but it is generally a lot faster on ATI cards (Different design approach happens to be better).

I can't speak for popular Alt-coins like Litecoin, maybe that would be better suited for this setup.
I know they are very Memory intensive and are still in an era where GPU use is normal.
A setup like yours, is over kill for a Mining rig, but Litecoin instead of Bitcoin mining would be a better direction.

Would a CPU *ever* earn any Bitcoin rewards anymore?  It might not be worth it in terms of cost of electricity but can we expect a CPU to ever get lucky?

80 ghash/s, you wish !

nope, its MHash/sec

and you still might be off in those figures. Which software/miner tool you using?

Reference to mining hardware info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Ok, so I understand the relative obsoletion of CPU/GPU mining now. So, what if I just bought one of these beastly 50GH/s ASIC miners? If you were me, would you buy one, and convert the BTC to dollars and make your ROI in xx days?

Buying them isn't the issue, getting them to your doorstep is. The only company that has shipped a 50+ GH/s miner is Avalon, who only takes orders in batches.

GPU mining is not obsolete. Mining with your GPUs is. You'll need high-end AMD GPUs to be mining efficiently.

Well let's say I bought a handful of the 25GH/s ones from Butterfly instead. I'm trying to look at the big picture here and determine if I'm missing anything, or if this could really be profitable, if  made the capex investment.

Like I said, getting them to your doorstep is the issue. Butterfly labs does not have any 25 GH/s units that are currently shipping and no one knows when they will start shipping. If you order now you will have thousands of people ahead of you in the queue.

Try some Altcoin

*sigh* Butterfly has orders still pending 10-11 months, that have not shipped. Do not consider buying from them.

Avalon or ASICMiner are your best choices. They at least have a decent track record of shipping products in a decent time frame and within the specifications they said it would perform at. The same can not be said for BFL.

Try mining powercoin.

Haha, I was ironic, btw i'm using cgminer as mining tool. I get 80 MHash/sec @ 45W and 336 MHash/sec @ 2,5W with my Block Erupter USB

great! Work it!

GPU mining is not profitable if you have to buy a GPU because the cost of the GPU is more than it will ever earn. In this case it is better to buy the bitcoins outright than to try to mine them with a GPU.

For those that already have a GPU, mining is only profitable as long as the revenue from mining is greater than the cost of power. Your profit depends on the difficulty and the price of BTC.

For example, if your electricity costs $0.10/kWh and your GPU uses 250W then your power cost is $0.60 (or about 0.0060 BTC) per day. If your GPU's hash rate is 600 MH/s, then it currently mines about 0.0072 BTC per day, and your profit is 0.0012 BTC (or about $0.12) per day.


Go to http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ for more accurate calculations.

No.

However, try mining an alt.

Mine ltc and trade for btc.

Try mining PrimeCoin using your CPU. You should be able to earn a reasonable amount in doing so.

Such GPU exists?
overclocked ATI 5850 delivers 375MH/s and takes 250W

600 Mh/s? yes. at 100W? no. I changed it to a more realistic 250W, around what you would get with a 7970.

I was mining with 8 ATI cards up until about 2 months ago when the power bill surpassed my mining 'profit' - in retrospect I should've kept it up though - the future of bitcoin is largely unknown so if it cost me (for sake of argument these are simple numbers) $100 a month to run a miningrig which was generating 1 coin a month I'd essentially break even (right now) but if the price rose to $200 that 'break even' would be much faster.  Right now I'm mining with a couple of asic sticks which I'm just playing with while I wait for my other hardware...  regardless, you really need to understand that your mining bitcoin, not USD.  If you choose to convert it, that's great.  However, there is a good chance that the prices will continue to rise OVER THE COMING YEARS and your investment (even if it's just power that your paying for) MAY pay off in the long run...

Not agree! With this superior for a single PC CPU power he can mine XPM with good success!

BFL is shipping a few of the Little Singles right now but it's just so painfully slow. If I were you I wouldn't buy from BFL. I would get KnCMiner because they have a better $/Gh and they might be shipping right around when BFL clears its humongous backlog, hopefully with my order not lost somewhere.

I'd offer that GPU isn't necessarily obsolete.  I have an ATI Radeon 6850 and getting ~ 170 MH/s on it.  It's complementing my other hardware :)