Bitcoin Forum

What to buy for 1 mining unit
best speed/price/power usage per unit ?

RX 470s are very popular because of low power usage, and cheap card prices.  RX 480s can be just as good, provided you find one on sale. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1584973.msg15913928#msg15913928 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1584973.msg15913928#msg15913928)

cpu: athlon II x2 20w - $15 used
mb: ga990fx-ud3p/msi 890fx gd70/any board with 6 pci-e - $60 used
ram: random non ecc ddr3 4gb - $10 used
psu: cheapest 1kw+ gold psu from reputable brand (corsair, xfx, seasonic, evga, delta, some rosewill, some thermaltake, among others) - $100 new
gpu: rx470 4g with elpida or samsung ram - $160 new, x6 (undervolt/underclock core and mem controller, overclock mem modules, and strap mod the bios)
risers: x1 to x16 non powered if your card has 8 pin & doesnt use pci-e power, else x1 to x16 usb cable powered riser boards ($2-7ea, new)
heatsink: alpine 64 gt - $8 new
hdd: random cheapest working sata drive - $7 used

*if power is a serious issue, use 80+ plat psu and ssd, maybe nvidia cards but they are much more $/mh
*if building many rigs then get all new parts for less hassle, like h81 pro btc v2 with pentium cpu
*rx470 4g cards that can use unpowered risers that i have tested: msi gaming, msi armor, gigabyte
*estimated speed: 28mh/s eth + 420mh/s decred per card
*sometimes hynix 470s or 480s go on sale for much cheaper, get those in that case. hynix 470 does 26.5-28mh/s depending on how tolerant it is to OCing

Rx 470s/ Rx 480s are the current best at mining eth, you can also go gtx 1060 if you're mining Zec but i would go for amd, if you can find an asrock btcpro h81 along with an old cpu/hdd/4gb ram module, you'll just have the power supply to worry about, a good one shouldn't cost more than 120$. you can also check out Pandaminer.

Do keep in mind that ETH is *supposed* to shift to Proof of Stake sometime this year - at which point all the ETH mining will be looking for new homes, driving the difficulty of all other coins in the "basket of appx equal profitability" up a lot very very quickly.

You can boot off of a usb for an even more ghetto setup- that'll save you maybe a few bucks off of the overall build. Unless you're running Windows for some reason that'll do just fine for a mining build.

Right now I'm buying high throughput hash power in reduce time windows with nicehash to do solo mining (https://tutorials.technology/blog/06-best-method-to-mine-virtualcurrency-in-2017-bitcoin-zcash-litecoin-ethereum.html).

The problem is that you could loose all the money, but if you know how to calculate the odds... :o