Bitcoin Forum

I bought about 20x 7950/70 early this year just to mine bitcoins.

Everyone was calling me stupid, crazy... ASICs are gonna take over, they said.

I knew they were right, but I knew they were wrong.

Ironically, it is a BFL ad on Slashdot that brought my attention to the rising BTC price early February.

I bought many, many GPUs in the new and 2nd hand market in just 2 weeks (no pun intended), and soon I was mining bitcoins at the "crazy" rate of 8.5 GHS, at a difficulty of 3 million (yes, that's about 50 times lower than current diff).

I had ROI on all my purchase in just 4 month instead of the 9 expected month in my initial plan. Moreover, smart investments in stock markets allowed me to turn the profits into much, much more BTCs in the end.

Maybe I could have been just as fine by buying BTC instead of GPUs, but the fact is that GPUs are resellable even after a total crash of crypto-currencies, so the risk taken was less than buying pure BTC.

Also, of course, I could have bought BTC early Feb at 28$ and sold off just before Apr 10 at 250, but of course that is the time-machine thing. I can't say I regret not taking this move, in hindsight.

So I switched from BTC mining to scrypt, mostly LTC mining in the last few months, after the first ASIC wave. It was nice until the moment when profitability dropped to zero for me, at about 0.20$/KWh. After a couple of weeks mining at loss, the late price drop of LTC gave the final blow to unplug the rigs, and it saddens me :(

Although I used the profits of my 8.5 GH/s GPU power to reinvest up to my current 550+ GH/s ASIC hash power (already hashing for me, not labcoin style lol), which I hope was a clever move (time will tell), I kind of liked the direct touch with the mining rigs. Now most of my hashrate is spread out between friends' locations, group buys, virtual mining etc. and I only have about 10% of my hashrate physically at home.

tl;dr: buying GPUs in February wasn't that stupid after all. Buying GPUs now would be stupid, check BitFury, CoinCraft, CoinTerra etc. (avoid BFL of course, unless you trust them for some reason) if you want to enter the race -- good luck and be careful.

Cheers

So... how much are you selling those 7970s for? :)  I'm buying at $250/card for reference designs with the single blower.

for the right price I would rent some script hash power from you :) ( give me a pm if your interested )

The problem is I don't think there is any way to make profits currently at 0.24 USD/KWh (corrected price). That is why is consider selling the hardware. I will follow up here, watch this topic. Thanks for your interest :)

At what voltage do you run the cards? I can't really be sure, but I'd bet one can run 7950's at 0.95V (down from 1.188) and still get around 90% of the scrypt hashrate, for 65% of power usage.

I knew about that kind of tweaking, but I haven't tried it. I did tweak, however, lower the core and mem clocks, up to the G-spot where I would get the best kHs/kWh, and keeping all temps between 65-75°C without too much cooling.

If you (the forum in general and those who PM'd me) manage to get profits out of my hardware, I'll be happy to post an inventory soon :)

I will also post pictures of the rigs here.

Holy shit thats high.
I pay .061 if im above 25kw usage (getting close!)

Yes... on the other hand, the electric CO2 energy footprint in Switzerland is close to zero because it's mostly hydraulic power (the mountains help a lot) and about 30-35% nuclear, and 5-10% wind/solar. Although the latter is to be shut down within 20 years due to the concerns after Fukushima, solar and wind power are currently explored and deployed on a small scale to compensate, etc. All this has a cost and is partly subsidised in some way by the utilities price.

So I guess my hashpower (about 10 Mhash/s scrypt) will need to be a power refugee somewhere else ;)

For those interested, here are a couple of pictures, some of my retired GPU rigs.

Sorry for the blurry pics, I was in a hurry ;)

https://i.imgur.com/sqF3nNw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/uVNgJL9.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/vQr1joh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/i4TbsYi.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/VCgECX7.jpg

You could still be running them for litecoin if you had cheaper electricity! :/

+1


Was an interesting story :) Especially for a veteran GPU-MINER :.)

This is crypto only the tough survive  8)

Can you tell total amount you spent on GPU rigs just to see how much they lost on velue.

And don't be sad, you didn't lost money like some fresh comers :)

Nice move, many people still haven't recover their money from the recent asic and usb eruptors orders.

Tough to recover in these conditions

Solo-mining GrandCoin and Diamond the last month or so was often more profitable than LTC/FTC (http://www.coinchoose.com/), but I too am on the verge of switching off the GPU rigs.
My BEs can last until diff hits 4,500,000,000 (23x from today's) at my current electricity costs, though.

How much is your electricity price per KWH?

This is exactly the kind of post i was waiting to see before i "flipped the switch" on my GPU's
Since im paying .08kw/h, I should be "good" for a littlewhile longer.
I still plan to mine btc at a cost of (unlimited) Fiat to gain some of the Limited bitcoin amount
I'll basically be buying bitcoins with electricity XD

Do you have any good quality XFX 7950's? (non double D)
They are rocksolid cards if you get a good one, I RMA'd mine twice, The third one i got feels immortal
Read a forum post where a guy had like... 40 RMA's of this specific card, But he kept RMAing them because he knew how good they were when Properly checked through QC

That's a shit story, man.  It sounds like the power costs are the only reason you aren't mining LTC?  I'd suggest mining LTC and holding it to see if the price rises.

I just got my power bill for last month.  $193 for 2228 KiloWatt Hours!  That's not just the miners though, thats my main PC, my testing pc, the air conditioners, oven, fans, etc.  My power bill says 6.2 cents per KW, and that bill includes the cost of the taxes and fees in addition to the power itself.

Have you looked into the idea of sneaking a power cord to the neighbors' house and plugging it in somewhere?  Or something like that?  :o

You situation could be worse, though.  You could be one of these 'tards who bought lots of USB Erupters!  I've been telling people for months to not buy ASICs and no one listens.  ASICs are a dead end, the BTC surge is over.  LiteCoin is the next big thing.  LTC is now where BTC was a year and a half ago.

At least with GPUs, you have a solid asset that can be used or sold for a good price once you get tired of mining or when mining becomes unprofitable.  ASICs can't do that! ;D

I'll quote you for posterity. :)

By the way, my electricity cost is 0.0651, so as I mentioned before, BEs will remain profitable for me for some time to come, sans noise and heat.

Elec in Australia is US$0.3kWh  :(

GPU mining of BTC died over 6 months ago...

Where are you from?

A certain Northern country, which has a surplus of water, that we don't even care about burning our own oil :)

Doesn't seem too unreasonable, I pay .061/kwh at home in the midwest USA (or around ~.07/kwh after all their little charges and surcharges.)

I've got 3 phase 480V service at work, that goes for .012/kwh due to volume  ;D

+420 interwebs for you dude i wish i had done something like that before the massive difficulty spike but i was sadly too lazy :(

Hello,

Thanks for all those who supported me, and those who contacted me here or PMed me about the sales of the GPUs.

I would like to experiment with providing an on-demand, "cloud" style scrypt mining service, a bit like CEX.io with BitFury for SHA-256.

For this, I would like a first beta tester. The tester will have access to about 1.2 MHS scrypt mining, for a couple of hours during the tests, based on 2x7970 (690+510 KHS). The tester may keep the mining rewards, there will be no other reward.

The alpha version of the interface allows dynamic pool switching, i.e. you can mine any coin and use the interface to change the pool instantly.

At this stage, the whole system is a proof of concept and not yet secure enough for public deployment. In other words, I am *not* asking and granting permission for pen testing at this stage -- it's not what I'm looking for yet.

Thanks for your interest.

Matt

What, you don't like the Double D XFX? I RMA'd that damn thing 4x, in 4 months, didn't even run the fans fast, couldn't get a month before 1 fan or the other died. I've got it sitting in the warehouse right now with 2 delta fans on it, man it kept cool, haven't tried to sell it, cause what gamer wants a 7970 with 2 delta fans attached? I do suppose some of you might want it, if so, PM me.

The XFX seem to have a bad reputation.

To be perfectly honest, of all my GPUs (those I got new and the second hand ones), the only one that I had to RMA after about 2 months of use was an XFX 7970. It took *three* full months for the RMA facility in the UK to send my retailer a new one. And I wasn't even surprised, as he had warned me...

I would be interested in other miners' experiences about XFX GPUs

Well XFX is another name of the company which own also Sapphire
The sapphire is probably the better one of those 2

However i have mixed results with them, even though many complain about them.
Some say these are bad but i had pretty good cards from them and only 1 out of 30 went defect
These often where minor defect like fan braking but most was improper usage of the owners,
Like breaking the case by those taking the cards home secretly for gaming in the weekends.

Over a year time we had pretty darn low fallout of these brands, but again i saw less problems with the sapphires
 
I have had loads of cards used in the workstations doing all kinda different tasks, most of them been pretty battered and abused.
The company owned at that time in total 2850 pc/workstations containing about around 3500 cards, almost all where dual cpu heavy workstations containing 3 or 4 gpu cards each.

At first many had nvidia and later i threw most of the nvidia's out where ever i could.
Though some programs sadly still needed nvidia for operation.
But i had to switch many of them, so the local chefs had to decide themselfs what brand and models they wanted to buy (budget).
Those who choose powercolor, club3d, gigabyte, asus and alike cards had much more problems and fallout. The figures did not lie, all other brands then xfx or sapphire failed more often.
And clearly had much bigger problems so we had todo alot of rma's on the other brands.

Let me be honest with the prices dropping on any of these cards which probably are not cheap to make i fear in the last years they cut on quality of the cards to still make profits
Nvidia at certain moment completely stopped making certain models because they where loosing money building them.

Do not forget those who make/grow/catch products are often not the ones making good profits. The resellers/markets are often the ones making the massive profits
Small example shrimps caught by fishers are bought by a reseller for $0.30 per kg
The reseller package those in crates, or peel or and whatever they do (often not very much). Then they are offered to shops and suddenly these cost $2.25 per 100 grams, then the store puts in their own 100% and poof in the shop you find 100 grams for $5.50
 

a Dual Fan GPU is just a way of saying "One of these is going to fail, also, one of these fans was not enough"
I've see like... 70% of Double D XFX 79xx's have a broken fan within a month
and then like... 30% of Non Double D's are Someone Else's RMA'd GPU that they overclocked to Fuck and Back that will fail within three months.

I've only ever had problems with XFX's Dual fan cards, all the others are fucking glorious.

Now we goto a comparison on the Shappire cards
(fuck your Gigabyte,MSI,Asus,Powercolour, they all blowout and break)

In comparison, the Shappire cards run colder, but a Tiiiiiiiny bit louder
They also dont have as much overclock headroom (in my experiance) but the overclock room that they have is Much easier to acheive
EG:
XFX stock"OC" 900mhz core, runs at 1000 without touching the volt. 78°C fan at 80%
Shappire stock"OC" 900mhz core, runs at 980 without touching the volt. 76°C, Fan at like, Fucking 58%

20% of shappires are just Totally DOA
60% have No problems and are great
20% are AssKickers that can overclock like Magic but also die like Magic if you clock them too high

I've personally found the XFX cards to be Physically more durable than the Shappire cards. However the Shappire cards are techinically more durable under standard usage due to the lower operating temperature.

Lucky you, I still have not ROI my hardware that I bought 2 months ago.

You are one lucky fella, you have recovered your investment!!

Matt,
I'd be willing to take some time and help you with this testing and do a write up for you on the testing.  Alts are currently getting about .02 BTC per 24 hours per MHash before electricity costs around $25 a month for 2 7970s at .1 per kWh so still profitable and some room in there to make a slight profit on your end for someone willing to pay to not have the headache of maintaining hardware, cooling, etc.  PM me details if you are still looking for someone to help!

Not for many people have the choice as they will need to migrate to other country to get cheaper electricity, some country are just expansive for some reason.

The profitability (or lack off) is a signal from the market to either continue, or stop doing whatever it is that you are doing. Don't feel bad, you are just acting rationally and playing a very important role in the great global network that is called "the free market".

You cant loose so much money if you buy GPU's cuz they are resellable. Not for the same price but close enough