Bitcoin Forum

Hey, im new to mining, and i want to know if my computer is good enough for mining, before people starts saying, buy ASIC Miners, In venezuela is tough to find dollars, and if i get to find an ASIC, it would be on skyrocket prices, well back to the point, my computer specs are:

CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 610
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8gb (2 x 4gb) DDR3 1600MHZ
Memory: I cant really remember the brand of my memory, since it was installed due to my other one not working, but i know it has 700 GB.

I dont really know if my rig is good enough to mine bitcoins, or any cryptocurrency.

Simple Answer: No.
Long Answer: No, no and no.

No. CPU and GPU mining for bitcoin is worthless now
you only make some dust and just wasting your electricity power

this is an understatement. GPU mining has been unprofitable for well over a year now.

How many Gh/s you are able to reach?

This setup will be much less then 1 GHs. It is probably less then even 1 MHs.

IMO, not a good idea, even for scrypt based alts.

The video card is utterly useless for any kind of mining, the GT 610 is slower than most on CPU video like the Intel HD4000.

You might be able to get a few hash out of the CPU for cryptonote, but a GPU would be about 100x as powerful - so not energy efficient.

Basically you should not mine with that setup. Spend the money buying coin, not buying new hardware.

so what do you guys suggest for mining these day?, which asic mining?

If you want you can try usb miners. This one is 11Gh/s +

https://www.asicrunner.com/HexFury--11GH-USB-Stick-Miner_p_9.html

You probably won't even profit with it. It all depends on your electricity price.

I suggest you don't mine because you will end up loosing money.  Why are there so many people mining then.... well basically everybody thought they could make money so they followed the herd and picked up axes (mining equipment) only to enrich the people who sell such equipment.  Those sellers are either becoming rich from those sales or they use the sales to fund their own massive multi-million dollar farms.  This is not speculation - this is known and documented - case in point are BFL, Avalon, KNC - all ASIC vendors.

Unless you have over $1 million dollars to throw at mining you won't be able to compete with the big boys and you will lose money.  You can buy a small and cheap miner like an outdated USB stick or even a soon to be obsolete Antminer S1 and learn how mining works and do the calculations to see how bad it is.

Best financial advice is to buy the coin directly. Spend a little bit on a miner if you absolutely need to mine for enjoyment.

Mining now is pretty much converting USD to BTC.

your pc is not suited for mining, you will end up paying more for electricity than what you would make by mining, hence negative profit.

LOL... Negative profit? What's that? Surely you mean loss.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/negative+profit (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/negative+profit)
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/negative-profit (http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/negative-profit)
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091201084217AA42jvo (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091201084217AA42jvo)

Seriously? Who the heck uses oxymorons in real life?

Hmm... maybe people with a better grasp of what a figure of speech is? , maybe somebody who knows how to use them?

I dont understand are you trying to be sarcastic or just answering your own question. Well that means you will pay more than you will get. (Negative profit - loss)

I suggest you to forget about mining. As others have explained, it will be very hard to get profit in mining nowadays.
You may use part of your money to buy some bitcoin and hold them for at least a year instead.

GPU is long gone from the mining game. Furthermore, Nvidia GPUs are less efficient than AMD GPUs. If you want to experience mining, try to get some AMD GPU and mine ASIC resistant Alt coins, no guarantees you can make a profit.

I have an AMD card, pretty modern but pretty useless nowadays. the mining dream is over  :'(

Unless you have money to invest in mining rigs for example ASICS were the craze. But if you haven't got money to invest then yes the dream is over.

Even if you have the money to invest in ASIC, it is hard to get your investment back, considering the rapid uprising difficulty.

doesnt have to be, did u explore x11,x13 and other alternative algo's ?
I am not saying that you will ever see the kind of profits you had in dec-feb , but it still makes a positive earnings.

If you dont currently own gpu farm tho, its a better idea not to build one now, im just saying that owners of gpu farms still can squeeze some juice out of gpus, before selling them.

Cheers

Not good enough for mining, but good enough for some high end games...

That's true. But, if you have enough money to invest and the knowledge to invest that to make a profit then you it can be done. It's hard because of the ever rising difficulty but still if you can purchase a preowned ASIC for a cheap price then you may be able to breakeven pretty soon and profit before the difficulty goes up.

Since bitcoin and scrypt GPU mining is over, people would switch to alt coins with other algorithm, it is possible for the difficulty to rise very fast. Those who use GPU to mine Bitcoin switched to Scrypt and most probably would switch to ASIC resistant ones, the difficulty would increase, making you less profits.

If you want to try the nice feeling of discovering blocks, just rent a cloud rig and mine a coin at the launch  :)

Although mining alt coins can be profitable it's also a risk and could potentially be a big waste of your time as most are pump and dump and means you have to sell at the right time and also find people willing to purchase the coins.

So, i shouldnt do any kind of mining?, i know nvidia gpu's are **** for mining, but i cant squeeze anything from the CPU?

You can, but I think the bitcoin/altcoin you are going to mine with your CPU will worth less than your electricity cost.
In other words, you will be very likely mining for a loss.

Well, electricity is a little bit cheaper here in venezuela, with the bitcoin i would be producing it wouldnt be such of a problem.. (did i tell you that dollar is on sky prices over here?) And a last question, what cryptocurrency would be better on my computer? or they all have the same requirements? (i know some vary depending on your GPU)

Get a new bang for buck GPU if u want to mine, it will pay out sooner or later and it will enjoy you more playing them gaimz

Considering your GPU is not even a GTX type, you would not have much profit. Try mining X11/X13 for a little bit of coins. The payouts will still be very low since their prices isn't high and your GPU isn't fast. Your GPU lifespan would likely to be shortened.

As others stated, it's not. In general, unless you are already in the mining scene, I would avoid entering now. It is dominated by ASICS (now both on sha256 AND scrypt) and those are just so costly (but sometimes you can get a nice deal, for example I saw a 28mh/s going for $650 or so, that's pretty amazing).

even today's ASICs will likely not ROI ever at current difficulty and miner prices

I'd agree.... but some of these scrypt asics are extremely cheap and will earn you $10-20 a day for less than a $1k investment. But then again, prices are unpredictable. I just don't know.

Yeah i completely understand, ASIC domined since they arrived,low electricity costs.. left GPU Farm's nearly obsolete, and man, they sure are expensive, Tho isnt there a coin that i may be able to mine at a decent rate with the CPU?, i've heard that dogecoin isnt that hard to mine, well thats everything i want to know.

Mining with ASIC is only good, if you want to make profit. Try to find an ASIC miner which has least price. :)
Kindly,
      MZ

Asic's are your best bet.  There are some who continue to mine with GPU's, but sadly for most day's of profit are done with GPU's.  A asic in your price range would be your best bet.

From what I understand about mining, ASICs would be the best thing that you could get. I can't say if you'll get an ROI, so that's up to you to decide.

Well very few ASICs have actually made profit for the end user.  You should not figure fiat exchange ratio into the price since you could have acquired the Bitcoin on an exchange for 10 minutes of work (instead of months of mining).

Consider this:

If you buy Bitcoin right now with $40k USD you get 64.9BTC instantly which you can sell at any time (what you if need the $ for a cancer diagnosis).

If you spend $40K on pretty much any ASIC besides an Antminer S3 you will mine less than 64.9BTC in the next year.  This includes KNC Jupiter, Spoondoolies S30, BFL Monarch, BTCGarden or Rockminer equipment.  Even the S3 is questionable - people with free electricity will probably make a decent profit.  People with expensive power will end up with less the 64.9BTC they could have bought.

The ASIC manufacturers will have made somewhere between 10 and 25BTC off of your ASIC purchase (which they will either keep as profit or use to make their own farm to compete with the equipment they sold you making your equipment worth even less).

If the goal is to make a profit then the majority of ASIC purchases would result in a loss.  If you want to learn about mining or enjoy it as a hobby then nothing can replace having a miner and buying a few isn't going to bankrupt most people (except maybe BFL gear).

The only reasons end users have AT THIS MOMENT to mine are to support decentralization, and if they have MASSIVE power to create anonymous transactionless coins.

Mining is profitable only for mining hardware manufatcturers,
they use the preorder funds to build themselves new machines and they sell the older ones to the common people.

Give it try to Monero, you can earn pennies with this rig  :P

Isnt monero a X11/X13? I remember seeing earlier a post about those.

Monero is CryptoNight, it's a CryptoNote coin so its not a fork of Bitcoin.

Not profitable anymore after GPU invade it.

That is why he told pennies. ::) Is there any coins which isn't invaded by GPU, yet?
Kindly,
       MZ

First of all your GPU is nvidia, so NO. Second of all, its a very low power nvidia, so NO NO. And third, gpu mining is dead

Nothing I am aware of at this moment. And if there is such a coin, it will get invaded by GPU before getting popular. :)

I have eight NVIDIA 750Ti, they aren't so bad for mining, expecially for the new coins.

Yeah, you can mine x11 coins with much success.
There are now optimised kernels for nVidia, making it even better choice than AMD in x11 mining.

Why has nobody suggested mining CPU coins?

Here is a list of them:

http://www.cpucoinlist.com/ (http://www.cpucoinlist.com/)

Bitcoin mining is only for ASICs now, which OP doesn't have. Scrypt mining is for AMD cards and ASICs, which OP doesn't have either. But CPU coins can still be mined with OP's CPU. These can then be traded for bitcoins on an exchange.

CPU uses a lot of your total CPU usage. It isn't good if the OP is also using it for browsing. The heat would typically get quite high and you can't get a few of those CPU in one machine. People uses botnet to mine those CPU coins and the difficulty would rise. Alt coin's value are typically very low which isn't even enough to cover the power cost.

For that to be effective you need to know of that altcoin and if it is a pump and dump or if its just going to crash and not be worth wasting your electricity.

CPU coins are only temporary, someone is going to make a GPU miner for it after sometime..

Most of those "CPU coins" are no longer CPU-only.
For example, X11 and X13 coins can be mined with https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=616786.0 while CryptoNight coins can be mined with https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=638915.0.

No brother.

Switch to cloud mining please.

Cloud mining would be quite worse than mining with a GPU you already have.

The rates there are ridiculous, and only the company makes money on that. Plus, it encourages the centralization of mining.

Yes. They give us a small fraction of what we pay but there are a few hosting sites where we can choose our own pool. The price is bit higher than cloud mining price but it is better. They pay all the hosting and maintenance fee for 1 year. In some we can only mine for few days which will be insufficient to get the BTC you spent. Always calculate what might be the outcome of the action.
Kindly,
       MZ

A calculator like this one: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator is a good way to know what the contract could give you, by considering the increases in difficulty.

I use coinwarz.com calc. You can compare other currencies and you can see which coin is more profitable. You can also you individual calculator. It is good for people who want choose more profitable coin.
Kindly,
        MZ

Coinwarz' calculator has the disadvantage of not considering the increases in difficulty, which is actually the most important variable.

It's fine when calculating for short-term, but it is not accurate at all for longer-term.

CPU is ok, GPU is not.
I suggest you use 750 Ti as GPU.
Check your mother board to see how many PCIe it supports

Mining doesn't use much of the CPU, so if you insist on that CPU, it is ok. However, it can overheat easily since it is so old and likely to be already degraded. You can find a cheap CPU at a even cheaper rate. I suggest you to just custom built a new computer for mining. It can have a better airflow if you use crates to built one. I doubt you can profit from mining by building one rig. Most coins isn't stable or already have a high difficulty so it's difficult to profit from mining.

Sell the rig for $30 and buy 0.05BTC with that - that's more than the hardware could ever mine.

I think the rig worth much more then $30 just not worth for mining..

It seems to be OP's main computer, not sure he'd want to sell it just to get some cryptos.

IMO, the computer is very very slow. It would be more logical to get a new computer. He should be able to get a new computer for a very cheap price. I personally believe it can sell around $100 or so, sure worth it to try out BTC or get a new computer.

I was about to try mining with my 750Ti but I'm sure it isn't profitable anymore...

Well I live in the Los Angeles area and if I asked more than $30 for that rig it wouldn't even get a lowball offer.  Obviously the value will vary based on region.  If the OP doesn't need the machine best bet would to sell it and buy BTC directly given the current fiat price drop.

Absolutely not.  You'll burn far more in electricity and wear and tear (particularly if this is your main computer) than you will ever generate in coin(s). 

If sold only as a mining rig, sure, but this is a good PC which gamers would pay a few hundred dollars for.

It is really bad, especially the NV610, an entry level GPU.

Even games need a good GPU, the current GPU is too bad, it is even worse than the integrated GPU of a new I5 or I7

I don't think this GPU can be compared integrated graphics. Using integrated graphics cannot run most of the games and needs to be at the lowest settings. I believe that GPU and integrated graphics is at the same level of performance.

Invest in your own power supply for mining rigs and anything is profitable over an extended peroid (post power source payment).

I started BTC mining in 2010 and poured my 1st gen of profits into a 1.5kW solar panel array for my house. That was when GPUs were profitable and ASICs were stilla pipe dream.

With the advent of current ASICs, a hybrid power source (300W solar + 300W wind turbine) for about $500 will see you with an independent power supply. Set up your miner via an UPS, I got 3 for $1 each on evil bay (2nd hand), and use the RS232 interface to wake & sleep your mining rigs based on battery power levels. Depending on your current draw, you could get 24 hours use for something like a 30GHs R-box or 12~18 hours for a couple of mining setups.

Are you kidding?  The GT610 is the lowest entry level card nVidia has and is essentially a free after rebate type product.  Intel HD4000 blows it away, let alone HD4600.  For $200 you can build a PC that's 4x as fast from Microcenter.  But that's neither here nor there.

A PC is not really meant to be used for mining currently since all the driver hackers end up GPU mining any CPU coin.

No gamers will buy that PC as they can't play new games on it for high graphics quality at a high frame rate.

Even so, it's still worth a lot more than 30$. It would be silly to sell it that price to buy coins.

No gamer will buy rig for 30$, unless it is an awesome deal.

I was exaggerating when I said $30.  The CPU is worth about $75 used.  The RAM might fetch about $50.

Anyways the point is all that extra "useless" hardware can't really result in any coin production.  You could have a 5x5TB RAID array and a 30" 4k display and it still won't make any more coin than the base video card.

If the goal is to acquire crypto, downgrade the CPU and the RAM (sell them locally) and buy Bitcoin with it.

I'm hoping that solar power becomes more affordable. Then power wouldn't be an issue.

Buy from a wholesaler for about US$0.50 per watt then self-install  :)

I have the same idea for getting cheaper electricity, but I dowanna die falling off from roof..

The problem is the output. Aircons eat electricity so how would you maintain constant power while keeping your hardware cool?

It wouldn't be the best choice to cool them down with aircons. They eat alot of power also if your power is cut off, water vapour is bound to condense on your hardware, damaging them. Fan cooling is the best IMO, you don't need to worry too much as they usually eat lesser power.

Even with free electricity , ROI on GPU is very difficult these days.

I hear you. Now that i think about it a Kyoto wheel would be the amazing for running a mining operation. :D