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My mining farm has been in operation in various sizes since mid-2017. I sold off most of my GPU during the end of 2018/2019 reinvesting that money into Crypto(Ethereum/BTC) when it was at it low points of ($100/$3800). I doubled my money with the recent bull run and now I recently acquired 104 RX 470 4GB Nitro+ with a plan on acquiring 52 more for cheap(total of 156). I also purchased 38 P104-100s MSI/Colorful(24 pictured rest are enroute). In addition, I have 13 GTX 1660ti's, while my friend has 20(hosting it for him). Total GPU account will be over 200+ GPUs. Thinking about Documenting my recent mining journey now with these RX470s 4Gbs/P104s. Mind you all I got them all cheaper than usually find. RX470 4GBs for $53 and the P104-100s for $180


Plan for the RX470 4Gbs is 13 GPU Rigs on Windows 10 running Claymore 14.6 soft-modding the timings with as low as power as I can get. Preliminary testing shows each card can get about 30.9mh/s @ 110w~(test with motherboard + CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD/PSU was 145w total from wall). Electric rate is .010c/Kw. The P104-100s with Claymore's new straps allows me to do 43mh/s @ 125w per card. Overall I'm positive about getting back in big time!



Edit: For those interested. Per WTT as of today(June 12 2019)

30.9Mh/s per GPU x 156 RX470s = 4820Mh/s (110w per GPU) 17160w *Estimated*

43Mh/s per GPU x 38 P104-100s = 1634Mh/s (125w per GPU) 4750w *Estimated*

Ethereum combined hashrate = 6454 @ 21910w @.10c/kw *Estimated* = 50K Revenue yearly 31K Income with current prices and difficulty. (YMMV)


ROI time of approx 6 Months(just for the purchase the GPUs). Obviously, this can increase or decrease based on crypto markets price and difficulty.

@Voskcoin you should come down sometime brother! :D

UPDATE June 26/2019
https://ethermine.org/miners/531E893595875098c10994dF91edF6D886aF6B63/dashboard

The build is up to 3.5Gh/s(Effective 3.7Gh/s Reported). Still in the working out bug phase. I've never had RX470 4GBs before so it's a learning curve with them and there OCs.

Claymore STRAP feature which I was so hoping for to work, has failed for me, as I cannot get all 13 GPUs to run without it crashing. So the 31Mh~ is out the door and currently, I have them BIOs modded with RXBOOST for about 29-29.5mh/s at 75w a GPU(117w~ real). I've reached out to Claymore and he is helping me with this issue, which I greatly appreciate!


https://img.techpowerup.org/190626/crypto.png


UPDATE BUILD IN PROGRESS!
https://img.techpowerup.org/190616/20190614-210253.jpg
https://img.techpowerup.org/190616/20190615-162519.jpg
https://img.techpowerup.org/190616/20190614-210240.jpg

The goods, with more on the way!
https://img.techpowerup.org/190612/20190611-171935.jpg

nice one, u sold it in time.

for $53 is a bargain, the person who sold will not be happy in few months. all new? but then again, mining is good only if eth price does not rise, if it rises, the money in eth would be many times better.

Used, the person I bought them from was a reseller for a Miner who had over 1000 units of them. They are in good condition, he also gave me Extra replacement fans should any be worn.

Sweet you got some extra fans aswell!

You struck the goldmine right there man,  sapphire superb gpus! Also price 53 usd per piece is just dirt cheap :P

What do u mean they won’t be happy in a few months lo, mining eth is only getting harder with new ASICS coming out and reduced rewards coming

for $53 is not that bad.

That's very cheap dude, i got my rx570 4g for $85 each and rx470 4gb for $75 each in my country. Im still waiting for bitcoin to increase even more because im still not yet get decent money from there.
If the ethereum price doesn't increase and the mining difficulty will be lower than when it was increasing a lot.  

Nice price you got there dude. Compensates for the fact you bought soon-to-be obsolete hardware! ;D

Tbh I'd love to expand my mining operation properly. I just lack one thing: a dedicated space to do it. Here in central London, forget about getting anything at a decent price.

Like what Metroid said. If eth/btc rises you made a mistake and was better off holding coins. If it drops then good thing you hedged by getting mining gear.

Selling coins you get hit with a taxable event. But you offset some of that by getting mining gear. However you now pay taxable income each day you mine. If you held your coins you won't pay double tax like you do with mining or get taxed daily.

This means that if you sold 100 eth and bought mining gear you will have to have that mine back 130 ETH to break even.  Why 30 extra ETH one might ask to break even ? Because of taxable income of 30 percent on average.

My guess is that btc and eth will be higher than now by end of year by 2x. In my opinion I think you made a mistake and sold too soon during what appears to be like the beginning of a long term bull market.

Mining gear should never be worth more than 20 percent of all the coins you hold at a 10 cent electric rate.

Ya and the fact you also got soon to be obsolete hardware at 10 cent electric rate puts you in a risky situation of losing money on a bad trade and topping that off with wasted time baby sitting gpu rigs.

I think he is well aware that now is not the time to sell mined coins. Although the low price of the GPU can relax, as the break-even time is close.

Selling coins in a growing market at a profit for hardware or further hodling of coins is a strategic issue.

With so many GPU beasts, in any case, all the time will be on the farm.


A good time to start when the price and difficulties increase for a long time. If the heat does not disturb.

I think people are offloading their ethereum mining gear before they go pos. Mining gear will flood the market around that time so you'll have trouble selling them afterwards

Like you could only mine eth  ::)

That Ethereum is switching to POS has been said already back in 2017.  ;D

I'll only believe that when it happens.
POS simply has a few crucial disadvantages, like 'Nothing at stake' etc.

@OP
Very good buy! Have fun mining!

And what will you do with these cards later? After all, then they will be difficult to sell, because nobody will need them. Maybe it's better to buy something more modern, which can be resold in a year or two and return some of the investment in equipment?

You did get a great deal. The RX series GPUs have horrible resell value at the moment. My guess is AMD has made tons of these GPUs and nobody wants them, even with people who got power <$0.10 kwh.

Since you paid so little, unless they fry themselves you can probably sell them for $50 second hand (third hand for you) and get break-even. Even if the mining scene is dead by then.

You did great job by doubling your budget and re-buy more gpus. Do you have any plan in your mind if the ETH goes pure POS? Will you continue to mine other dagger hashimoto coins or will you switch another algo?

Read your post on reddit too. :)
For $53, I am sure you'll break even in three months even with the profitability right now.
So yeah! Good going!

being a miner does not limit you to be a miner..

you can POS coins, masternodes, invest, trade, buy gold, buy real estate, when you limit yourself (in your mind) to be a miner then you'll just be a miner.

well, this might be crazy in an extraordinary sense. if you do this alone, I think you have extraordinary principles. when the ETH price has risen again, you might get a ROI in a short time. just wondering, how many dollars can you make in a month with a GPU like that, and what is the electricity cost, and the maintenance of the gpu you pay? this might be a good reference for beginner miners.

I actually didn't sell my coins. I put them into a DeFi loan from Nexo. My plan is to HODL as much as I can mine with these GPUs. Your right Hence the am I insane lol! It is definitely a risk considering its older hardware and the DAG size is set to be 4GB(should ETH mining continue) in Dec 2020. I'm hedging my bets.



I plan HODL whatever I can and to stake my mined Ethereum. As far as GPU mining I'm still interested in RVN and UBQ. So I'll continue to mine those, maybe at a smaller scale than what I'm planning now.


I've looked in POS/Masternodes my problem is usually the cost to buy the coins outright. Other coins like ZEN/ZELCASH I'm interested in running 'secure nodes' but never have had the time to fully dive into building one. I've also traded my earned coins... heavily during the 2018 market and while I made out on some I lost quite a bit more on others. I've learned I'm a terrible terrible trader and make better returns by just HODL until price hits ATH.


Thank you, I've learned a hell of a lot from starting a small mining farm in 2017 thru the run-up and then crash in 2018. I've made a ton of mistakes along the way some very costly. I've taken a much better approach and more thoughtful one this time around. I'm thinking I'll make some documentation and blogish style of my adventure here with these GPUs. To truly see if GPU mining is 'do-able' for the everyday residential miner person.

Nice job. I thought about selling GPU that time and rebuy it about half a year-year later, but decided to continue mine. Buying BTC-ETH in the lowest prices really great. If all this story is true, i can just congratulate u.

On worst case scenario then this would be the last resort so it would turn out that he's on win-win situation.

Those cards are really a good buy and i cant even think for those cheap prices.Roi is pretty fast basing on the calculations.
It might not be precise nor accurate but we can able to see the profitability.

Not quite lowest, but bought 1 BTC @ $3800 and hundred ETH @ $136~ with some more ETH bought @ $170. So I definitely made out well. This weekend Ill be racking all the GPUs! pictures will follow!

Good luck bro
Keep us updated, with pictures

If you have 0.10cents rate, you'll be good, the hard part will be to keep your rigs working  ;D

Really nice. Unfornunately, I`ve reached power limit till the middle autumn and right now can just exchange my 10xx to 20xx series or, at least, to 1660. It can become a problem of the price will grew up.

I think you have made a good investment and I don't think you are insane,you are the opposite,a very smart person.
The fact that you bought the cards really cheap is another factor why I think you are a smart person.Good luck on your mining adventure.

Just why not, still investment. Now you are able to gather almost any crypto for long-term.

No longer considered investment. Now considered taxable income.

To me this is a big deal and a lot of miners forget to account for this as the tax amount can be fairly high at 30 percent or more depending on your tax bracket.

I think in this scenario it's okay. He made 2x gains, He didn't cash out he borrowed and use his coins as collateral. I don't know what rate he's paying but I know maker Dai borrowing fees went up high at 16- 20 percent credit card levels.

So he still has skin in the game for more upside without getting left in the dust mining at higher difficulty if price rise.

This. Nexo's loan rate is 16%. And yeah It's non-taxable until I use Crypto to pay off the loan. Since I'm running this as a sole-proprietorship under Schedule C(In America) it's counts as 15% income taxable.

Not really, I mean if you made a profit out of it so why not? Ordinary people might think you are insane because they've only bought GPU for gaming and not for making money, but you are making money that could be called as a productive act.
Agree with that, there's plenty of worthy altcoins other than ETH so there's nothing to worry about.

think your insane? 

nah, you said power cost is like a penny, and you paid like 55$ per card :O
far as im concerned, your SMILING :D
two largest factors to mining are: what you pay for power, and what you pay for cards
and you hit those right on the money it seems :D
just dont let shit burn down haha
and reinvest all you can, consider using the hashpower to secure other coins with nodes and shit, they pay insane some of them, and give no monthly electricity bill :p
Good luck man, keep us updated! 

Very cheap GPUs, great deal, you will ROI very fast because you don't need to make 100% ROI, the GPUs have resale value.

From a tax accounting perspective any sold GPU will have to be reclaimed by IRS if you took an equipment deduction tax benefit. Best to run them down to the ground. Geez you small time miners are amatures.

If the market goes up. Not only you have to Roi on dollar amount. You must also roi on crypto coin amount if someone sold their coins to buy gear.

If dollar amount is roi but crypto coin amount did not roi then you lose bc of miss opportunity of just holding coin would have offered better gains.

This does not apply to him since he took a 16 percent loan as a hedge in case market goes up he keeps his coin gains but pays a 16 percent interest as insurance if market goes up.

If market goes down and stays bear longer like over a year than best if he did not take a loan and just sold to hard cash for hardware or just kept his cash to buy coins lower
 

well I will not say that you are crazy, but I'd buy a bit of Asic + graphics card. It was necessary to distribute a little Finance

Rx470 8gb why not ?

^ This. All equipment can be depreciated but then if you sell it, it has to be sold at "fair market value" then detected as income. I'm not an expert on how that all works. That's pretty much my plan run these babies until they die and dump them at E-waste. Considering ROI time, and possible crypto-booms I'm really hoping for good income from them even after they can't mine Ethereum anymore.

Updated the OP with more rig pictures build in progress. Another 52 cards are enroute and P104-100s are racked! Currently testing 13x RX470s and 13x P104-100s.


because when you're dealing with 150+ GPUs that's an increase of cost in thousands of dollars. RX470 4GB's offer the lowest cost and still perform well-meaning faster ROI.

At $53 you should be fine! That is a great price even if a few die along the way.

Most of your costs must be electricity, maintenance, and probably a whole lot of time.

I don't know why, but I really enjoying seeing a full mining farm set up. It's like my mini mining rig but on steroids :)

Let a man dream! ;)

You should put up a chart with ROI estimates and each day you mine and sell tick off a box on the calendar. When you finally pay off your cards or whole rigs, put a picture of the calendar with the marked boxes in this thread.

you are making 9$ per month per Card after electricity (at best), and that's considering you don't have to pay taxes or you evade them.

I guess i will never understand why people do this kind of frikin investments.

Because I can spend say 15G and invest in Ethereum at the current market price of $260(June 19') and get 57 Ethereum. Or I can put 15K into mining GPUs and earn 16 ETH a month or about 200 in a year. What makes more sense? yes there more involvement with mining, but it takes risks to make money. With what I'm putting out for investment is minimal compared to the returns for cryptomining. Plus I'm just an IT/Tech enthusiast also work as IT for a living. It all goes hand in hand.

Right now I'm trouble shooting the RX 470's. I got one rig of P104-100s up and running hashing away fairly easy.

I cannot get the newest Claymore 14.6 STRAP function to work without crashing. Unsure what's causing it. Now there is a bit of a caveat Since these were used some cards were BIOs modded others left stock. I put whatever was BIOs modded back to stock from other GPUs that were stock, however, I noticed in windows that quite a few GPUs have the 'ERROR 43' in windows which can only be fixed by applying the ATIpixel patcher.

Setup:

13x Rx470 4GB (Stock BIOs)(Hynix, Samsung, Elpida)

Asrock H110 Pro BTC+

G3930/4GB RAM/EVGA 450w PSU (for motherboard)

Delta 2400w Server PSU (For GPUs)

Windows 10 (1903)

AMD 19.5.1 Drivers



Now when I tested the STRAP function with a single card, works fine. Will launch and I'm seeing good hash rates of 31mh/s~. However, when I plug in all 13x 470's try the STRAP feature, it will get to 2nd GPU applying STRAPs then Windows will crash and restart itself. This happens every time without fail. Now if I only apply it GPU 0 the STRAP then works fine again, however applying it to GPU 0 and GPU 1 it will hard crash and restart windows. Trying GPU 0 and GPU 2 results in the same thing. Also, note that RXBOOST works perfectly fine. The cards will hash fine with stock BIOs or even Modded BIOs using RXBOOST.



So Far I've tried

Raising voltages for Core/Memory or just leaving it stock. Doesn't matter.

Updating Microsoft .net framework and C++
Flashing various Stock BIOs(found online) and even Modded BIOs.

Different Windows versions 1809 vs 1903.



Furtherest I've gotten was 4-GPUs using the STRAP function. Once I started adding the 5th and 6th or more it would crash and restart windows. My Assumption is that it has to do something with the BIOs and the ATIpixel patcher? However, I'm unsure how to remedy this since only 1 or 2 GPUs seem to not have the error 43 in device manager. I'm unsure of this and wondering if anyone has encountered the same problem.

Very powerful farm, really quite insane. The price you turned up is very good....
I have a question - for mining, do you rent a room or do you keep it in your basement \ house?
Just interesting about amount of costs.

I only could say wow, you are ready to get big rewards ;D With all of your hardware, you can get a big hashrate, and if you are mining small coins which can increase later, I am sure that you can double or even triple your profit when the next bull market comes. But I wonder why you don't buy RX 570 or RX 580? Is still too expensive right now? Because I heard that some mid-end GPU hardware was down because of the miners selling their hardware and that makes the price of each series get down too for the price.

LOL you bought over 150 cards and can not handle it? If a AMD card has a Modified bios, windows give you the error 43. Apply Pixelpatcher and reboot. If you put another card in this rig, then you must apply the patcher again.
 I Think you have bought old mining cards and some has modified bios and other has original bios.
Sorry bro i found your thread interesting, but now. These are basics and all know that for long time. And forget the strap function from claymore, flash bios is the best way.

Windows version does not matter, all work fine

Claymore straps are fine, 32 mh/s for my Micron babies with Claymore straps is the best I could ever get from them.

I wish all the luck to the topic starter, 10c per kWh doesn't sound attractive though

mining on windows is nothing but headache and way too much work, with the number of riggs you are dealing with is a full time job and than some. the down time alone will eat up your profit quickly if i were you i would look into some linux distros like ethos smos.

i am a hobby miner IT guy myself and been testing mmpOS and i really like it it's been super stable for my AMD cards

Best of luck!

about your power cost, is it 10 cents or 1 cent?
most power companies in US charge extra premium after 1000KW or so, is yours a fixed amount?

now it is very profitable to take AMD rx570 SERIES graphics cards, they come out at $ 145-150 which is very cheap for such a hash rate. concerning nvidia, they are cheaper, too. and it turns out not a bad farm

I had a farm of RX570 and RX580 cards, I did not know any problems at all, as soon as I managed to sell them at a better price. but now I look even at this course, they are not yet relevant. better I think to wait

I know what to do, I've owned RX580s previously and BIOs modded them myself. Spent hours tweaking. With Claymore's v14.6 I was REALLY hopeful that it would simplify this entire process without the pain of BIOs flashing each card, then tweaking each card for Memory voltage/overclock based on whether they can handle it or not. Looks like I was too hopeful.

I found I can reach 5-GPUs and Claymore STRAPS work fine. Anything after the 6th GPU crashes regardless of anything. I've tried different drivers 18.6.1,19.5.1 and 19.6.1 all same the problem. Tried various C++ and .Net framework same crash.

Looks like I'll just have to BIOs flash them myself.

It's a fixed amount but PA is weird They charge a 'supplier rate' and 'Distribution rate' So while my Supplier rate is .04599c/Kw hr the distribution is what it costs to get that power to my house. So my total is .10C/kw. There is no Seasonal rate or anything.

How many GPUs do you have per rig using Claymore straps? I can't get more than 5 to work. No idea why.

I am really sorry to disappoint you now, but I am running 12 AMD GPU rig almost with no problems. Uptime is around 6 days. Using Windows (as it's free and straps are working; once strap function is available in HiveOS I might switch to it).

My setup is a little different though; MOBO is Gigabyte's

upd: I re-checked your first post and haven't found anything about your MOBO lol. I had a feeling you use different one or mentioned it in some other post.. w/e

my piece of advice is to distinguish each GPU's bios and put GPUs with the same bios in the same rig.

This would help you to flash them much easier.

The motherboard I have is an Asrock H110 PRO BTC+
Of course, I've done this. Each rig is separated by memory type. Samsung/Hynix/Elpida. Strange that you don't have this issue. Wonder if it's something to do with the motherboard then?

Should bout gpus for grin/beam lo

Gosh I hate Asrock stuff :)

I don't question your flashing skills, but could you share what exactly have you done with AtiFlash?

I faced the problem that the bios of my GPUs was 256kb instead of needed 512kb in order to flash correctly.

So I believe I haven't flashed them at all, and just used Claymore in-built settings.

Well, I've played around a lot. Trying to get Claymore STRAPs to work with multiple cards

So I used whatever stock BIOs were on the cards that were shipped. It crashed.
Then I tried stock BIOs from Techpowerup. No difference still crashed.
Right now I'm running modified BIOs using PBE and RXBOOST just to get the rigs running.


I can get up to 5 GPUs working with STRAPs. Soon as I add the 6th and launch claymore with STRAP, bam hard crash right at the "Detecting best straps", and windows reboots. it doesn't matter the 6th GPU either I went one by one and it does the same thing every time. I can get -STRAPs to work if I enable it for only GPU 0 out of 13 then it works normally. If I then apply it to GPU 0,1 same thing. Crashes at "detecting best straps"

After work today I plan on testing some more trying various configurations. It seems to be a Claymore, Windows, AMD Driver problem, unfortunately, I just don't know.

As of right now I have 4 13x ELPIDA RX470's BIOs modded, setup, and running...or crashing. I hate BIOs mod, I'm on fairly conservative settings yet 2 are crashing. 1950mem/1125 900/900 clocks. I used the BIOs mod from here,
https://1stminingrig.com/sapphire-rx-470-nitro-oc-4gb-bios-flash-mod-tutorial-hynix-elpida-samsung-micron/
I noticed 2 rig's won't Hash right with that BIOs from FirstMiningRig they get 24/26~ so that may be on what you're talking about different BIOs sizes. So I used different BIOs for those 2.

Current Hashrate
https://ethermine.org/miners/531E893595875098c10994dF91edF6D886aF6B63/dashboard
 

How have you set up your motherboard's bios? Are you using PCIe Gen1/2/Auto?
What AMD driver are you using? Make sure you do anything but install Wattman, that piece of crap has nothing to do on your system.
How many AMD cards per mobo? How good/old are your risers? How strong is your PSU?

The motherboard is setup like so: PCI-E GEN 2 all, Use onboard IGP, POWER-ON, Security settings Disabled,



AMD 19.5.1 also tried 19.6.1. Correct I only installed AMD Driver, I don't use Wattman. I use Claymore's miner to overclock the GPUs.



13x GPU per motherboard, this is done for Density and space purposes. I've ran 13x MSI RX580's 8GBs previously without any issues. Risers are risers? I've previously used them before in my mining setup which ran for a year +. I run a PSU/Server combo. EVGA 450w PSU to run the motherboard/SSDs etc and a Delta 2400w PSU that runs all the GPUs.

I'm not saying I'm having issues there, everything mines fine using BIOs mod. Just fine tuning on what memory speeds/voltage to get them from crashing takes a little time since I've never had 4GB cards before. I just noticed in my testing(using 1 GPU) that Claymore's straps are far more effective than any BIOs mod for Elpida/Hynix 4GB's. When I BIOs modded one I noticed tons of memory errors around 2000mem clock, using claymore's STRAP feature better hashrate and same clock, but no memory errors. Obviously got me excited.

Maybe you should try to specify the value for each GPU

eg: 3x GPU used parameter -strap 1@2100,2@2000,3@1900

it means 1st GPU used strap #1 with a memory clock 2100 Mhz, 2nd GPU used strap #2 with MC 2000 Mhz and 3rd GPU used strap #3 with MC 1900 MHz. You can play with strap index and memory clock values for getting the best hashrate and maybe avoid crashes. The higher strap index (strap 1) supports higher MC than strap index 2 (You can learn it from readme.txt in your claymore folder)

Pos = death for eth.

Do I think op was smart. No as he has 10 cent power.


But if he pulls it off good for him.

Thanks. Still hoping to pull it off lol! When Ethereum goes PoS that will be the BIG question considering how many GPUs are mining it. Are those farms going to shut-down? how much GPU-mining power is going to mirgrate. This is things I'm thinking of. But we don't know till it happens. So I'll keep my farm running until then and play a 'wait and see'


Yeah, I've tried everything in the Readme, what happens is as soon as reads the memory type "Applying best Straps for POLE4"(for example) and once it hits the 2nd GPU GPU 0, GPU 1, then bam Computer crashes with a black-screen and reboots itself. This happens when the 6th GPU(or more) is added. 5 GPUs work normally. So far still at a loss of what causes it. ill take a video and post it later today.

I actually did the same thing a few weeks ago. Still had all the components for two rigs here - only thing missing were the GPUs. Now I bought 16 more RX470 for around $50-$55 each. But I have free electricity (included in rent), so I am pretty sure I will ROI within a few months.

Be careful how big you go.  16+ gpus won't go unnoticed on the power bill and your LandLord will notice that.  Might even increase your rent

When ETH goes POS, miners will just switch to other algos. C29 algo is quite popular with Beam and Grin, right? And both of them have been quite profitable as of late.

bump for update

2 observations here, pay attention to them.

This thread was created on June 12, 2019, today is June 26, 2019, so 14 days. Now, on June 12, eth was 242 usd, 14 days after that eth is 360 usd, so in 14 days eth had an increase of 118 usd which corresponds to almost 50% of 242 usd, so when I say buy eth is better than mine, you trolls must pay attention.

His post stated that he would roi in 6 months, so 50% is 3 months, pay attention that his earnings also increased too as eth values more but still a bit around 5 months and some days to roi.

Anyway, this is a very interesting observation.

Been getting it up and running, currently at 3.5Gh/s. ill update OP with some pictures! Having a ton of BSODs and crashes so it's taking longer than I would of hoped. Without Claymore STRAP feature working correctly(He is working with me on this issue) I have to painfully BIOs mod and flash each memory type then adjust for Memory clocks. It's real pain. Some BIOs mods are better than others etc.


Also, on that same note that my ROI time has now decreased for these GPUs. Really wish I could have gotten them early March/April. Now I'm in a frantic race to get these up and running to acquire ETH during this bullrun. Wasn't really part of my plan  :-\

Since eth price is higher he will roi on dollars faster but in eth amount will take longer to Roi if at all. High price equals higher difficulty thus slower to mine and missed opportunity to sell his eth higher to buy 50 percent more gear.  if he just held his eth he would have been better off I'm afraid.

Now he's stuck trying to get his 150 gpus running correctly, wasting his time bios modding and trying to figure things out on soon to be outdated gear.

Word of advice. Value your time, the best play is to do nothing and hodl your coins You don't need to feel productive by mining and spending money on gear as this exposes you to missed opportunity from a huge rally and lead to less crypto coins.


His only saving Grace is that he was smart enough to take a loan on his crypto as collateral instead of selling and liquidating his eth.

Things did not go as he planned so any mining newbs about to get started mining need to remember and learn from this experience.

When you decide to mine you are saying I'm hedging into depreciating assets and I will pay taxes on any earned income. Maybe I get lucky mining new shitcoins or maybe I will just get rekt mining coins like every miner did in 2018. Hehe

This is what newbs fail to calculate. If the ROI interval shortens that means the coin is making good profits and even people with marginal electric rates will now jump in. That happens and the difficulty will go up. So while the fiat return may be the same or perhaps even better, the eth return is typically worse. The only time you can beat ETH returns with a rapidly rising coin is when you have a monopoly on specialized mining equipment. In this case granny is turning on her old PC to mine ETH and difficulty is shooting up.

It's hindsight, but better move would have been to buy ETH with the money spent on the 150 cards. OP will never make as much as he could have bought. NEVER. But if he/she has fun mining then who's to stop them. Just know it would have been better to buy than mine. This is true will all established coins in almost every scenario. Buying also affords you option to quickly exit the market should you decide you've had enough profit or loss - opportunity cost.

Very good point and to add to that, I guess the op is having too much work, rigs crashing, fans need to be replaced, gpus dying, other issues that need to spend a lot of money on and also the fact that it might even burn the house down if no precautions were thought up.

As ETH price rises difficulty rises, I mean, before all this rise eth was around 1721, right now is at 2168 and people are holding out for new amd cards I take. So only the eth he mined prior to the rise will be worth more if he did not sell it. Bullmarket is pointless to mine cause the coin rises more than is worth mining by ten to 50 times, bearmarket is pointless because you could buy the coin far cheaper than mining it, so in the end mining is just a wasteful workload. Now if you have 1 to 5 gpus as a hobby then is fine. You are not going to lose your time and time is the most valuable thing in life.

And there is that thing to resell the crap of it if you dont want to mine anymore, reselling old hardware is hard and not worth these days, sometimes is even better to throw away in the garbage. It saves a lot of time.

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

now the market is on the rise, I think it is advisable to buy or video cards or miners. prices for miners have increased, but for video cards yet.

^Hell no, I'd rather buy the coin.

You would be surprised but computer equipment actually sells pretty well. I've sold most of mine on Craiglists at asking price and if that didn't work there was also eBay as an option.

GPUs like the RX 470/570 are not considered old. A R9 280X is considered old but I had no trouble selling them in the last 12 months. Yes they are power hogs and ancient but AMD still makes drivers for them and they are great for Crossfire.

So in a couple years or so, the RX 470 will still be worth something. Never worth it throwing away in the garbage. Throwing away in the garbage is maybe worth it if the GPU is damaged and not worth the time to repair it.

OP I salute your grit.

I think OP's goal was to get more ETH with his current ETH stash, since he did not sell his existing ETH but used them as collateral for the loan to get equipment to mine more ETH.

He would've been successful if crypto prices stayed the same, OR prices dropped. But this bull run has wrecked his plan. He will not get mucho ETH; he will get less ETH than he expected.

He may still come out ahead, albeit with a longer ROI window, so long as he can mine enough $$ to repay his loan to get back his ETH.

Not a bad play OP. Very creative. But who would've though a big bull market would come NOW.

Short update. It's been a challenge finding the right BIOs mod, settled with SRBN which has given me excellent hashrate and power consumptions for Elpida and Hynix GPUs. I have 10 GPUs fail and or DOA on me. Which I'm in the process of returning to the seller. Currently only 1 RIG down and at 6.0Gh/s for my farm! Net earning per day are currently at a total of $146. This includes all the RX and Nvidia GPUs mining Ethereum. Will try to update with pictures soon and a 'what i learned'

It's too much work, too much money to spend to make all work and then all need to be maintained every single second. People that say mining is easy they have no idea about it at all, yes it's easy to maintain a single rig with 6 gpus and not much is needed, now, many rigs is very hard because after some rigs start the problems and the first will be heat, too much heat, you will have to upgrade many things for your farm to work and that will cost too much money if you do it right.

If you can ROI on your USD and Eth amount plus Additional 20-30 percent as a general income tax rate.  I will consider this a win.  Anything less is a fail and waste of time

You definetly timed the market correctly with your sells and buying back in. Hopefully Ethereum will be mineable for some more months/years. When ETH becomes POS your weight on the chain will vaporize..

With 1-2 rigs you have little problems but little profit. When you are growing up your problems becomes bigger but profit grows too. Someone without IT knowledge hires someone to service his rigs, someone trying to do it by themselves, someone stops extending. Anyone decides by himself.

some facts.

you can expect around 30,5mh/s x 6 gpus from every rig (that makes around 183mh/s). You can expect something around 135W for every card. so around 22kW of power considering all the gpus + components.

Your ETH hashing power should be around 4800mh/s. If your Electricity cost is around  0,10 you make 511$ right now (that's not even considering ROI, bill taxes, or government taxes over profit. 0,11cnt/kW you make 352$ right now. 0.12cnt/kW you make 194$. and at 0,13cnt/kW you make 36$.


Now, the average price in my country for every kW is around 0,15€/kW (we pay 26% taxes over electricity prices due to leftists "idea" with green energy). Which is around 0,17$ (including all taxes). Talking in numbers, a guy living in my country with your setup, will be losing almost 600$ per month at current prices.

I can add some information, that can help you to collect some more facts.
The average price in my country - less about  $0.06/kW.
In the first post TS shows Mh and power consumption - totally it 6454/21910. And $0.1 per kW.
Less profit - much miners turns rigs off - difficulty down - more profit.
More ETH at low cost and low difficulty - HODL - more profit.

Give some more facts please.

fact is, difficulty is not going down and price is 50% lower and as I can see difficulty is not going down at all because trend is to hit all time high by the end of this year.

you seem to be like one of those poor guys outthere that would kill for 10$. Sorry, i don't want to deal with people like that. It makes no sense. Ohh, BTW, at 0,06$/kWh you live in a third world country, so i undestand your way of thinking. You make more mining than working, so 10$ for you can be way more money than working. It makes sense. For 10$ profit per month, i don't even take the cotton sheets from the equipment.


Oh, BTW, at lowest prices on ETH (80$ more or less), it never went down of 134.000Gh/s. Even if we have seen a drop in value of over 35% in last month, the hashrate went from about 145.000gh/s to actual 172.000gh/s. In last two days, with masive drops of nearly 25%, it increased from 162.000gh/s to 176.000gh/s even with bloodbath in the streets.

So people turned on their equipments even at heavy loses, which show how "intelligent" are miners nowadays.

That's because the difficulty is a lagging indicator. When the price first started jumping to $250-300 difficulty actually DROPPED. However, as the price increased and stabilized for a couple of weeks difficulty increased. I suspect if this price drop continues or stabilizes around $160-200 we'll see about 2.0T difficulty, but it takes time for the farms to react.    

Further updates
I've been busy trying to stabilize my rigs, 90% of my problems involve riser issues and cards "falling off the bus" the rest is just the typical overclock/undervolt issues and finding the right settings. I have to praise SRB BIOs mod. It literally saved me as 'one-click' PBE was awful for these Hynix cards. Resulting in tons of crashing and BSODs. Once I tried SRB it increased my hashrate for Hynix and Elpida to 30mh/s per card at 1950-2000mhz@860-875mv(core/mem) which is about 120w~ a card. Total hashrate for my rigs is around 385-393mh/s for 13 GPUs @ 1650w~ total power per rig.

I've been mining since 2017 and one thing I learned is to HODL the coins you earn as much as possible and never ever sell during down-periods. Right now while my rigs "aren't as profitable" due to the down-turn. In one month time that can literally change as markets pick back up. I cover my electric as much as possible with my normal IT job and sell coins to cover the rest.

As of the time of this writing, since I started this thread and my farm back-up mining ethereum in Ernst I have collectively mined 9.5 Ethereum. Mind you I was slowly getting rigs online and lots of crashes so this hasn't been 24/7 mining. This is one-man operation as well and I have a normal 9-5 job, girlfriend, and life. I spend as much time as possible working on my farm as a second job. My goal is to achieve 90% stability by End of July with everything fully stable and running by August. Right now I'm at 65% with 11/14 rigs running continually but with a few crashes/restarts due to GPU crashes in claymore.

Currently using a mixture of Windows 10 OS and HiveOS. HiveOS to spot out and detect bad risers and Windows OS for testing Voltage and clockspeeds. I'm thinking once everything is stable at clocks/voltages for the GPUs. I will BIOs flash them to that specific clock and run everything in HiveOS. However I'm not 100% on that since it costs me $3 per rig per month in HiveOS while i have already paid/own Awesomeminer for 20 rigs and there is no monthly reoccurring fee.

mmm....big farms react almost instantly. changing their algo can be done almost automatically with their software. There are people outthere that can switch coins with one click. Moreover, they can also tell the computer to switch to certain algos during certain times. They load profiles directly on the miner (not bios) and as soon as they load the miner, the program gets the card working.

I myself was able to switch from ETH to ETC miles away from my house when i was mining back in 2017.

Now..... i don't normally help people with issues, but i´ll give a few tips in case they can help.

the sweet spot for RX 470-570 (mines were 570's ) is:  1150 mhz on the core, 2100 mem. AFAIK 470 and 570 are almost the same card, but 570 is a bit better, to be honest.

My experience is that you should not undervolt the memory. My Sapphire RX570 nitro+ cards did crash a lot if i undervolted the memory, so i left them at 1000mv stock. 850mv on the memory...well...maybe it's ok for 2000mhz, but take into account that RX 570's nitro+ at 1750 stock mem clock had 1000mv stock.

Now, the voltage.

i have 3 RX 570's nitro+ 8gb

1º 1150/2250 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 31.4mh/s
2º 1150/2190 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 30,8mh/s
3º 1150/2125 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 30,3mh/s

They were stable for months at this settings. I tested for two days all of my cards before going into the mining rig. i programmed the bios in all of them and i tweaked as much as possible the voltages except for memory. ETH is a pretty intensive algo with the memory, and i prefered to forget about having problems with undervolting. I suppose your undervolt saves you some money.

my 2x6 mining rig are off. and they will continue to be off for a large period of time. I will only turn them on if i can get 100$ profit per month or more after electricity bill, which i think will not happen this year.  At current prices , and the very expensive cost per kW i would be losing around 15 $ for month with bills of around 350€ or a bit more in summer due to fans having to work hard in my room to deal with heat, specially where i live.

So....yeah...mining is not worth for me.

Are you sure applying different voltages have an effect ? What about power at wall ?
In my case, applying differents voltages between core and mem had no effect, the higher voltage was always applied on both. Confirmed with power at wall.
Not retested recently, i'm always applying same voltage on core and mem.

Oh rich man from rich country with 12 GPUs counting about $100 profit. With such tips i can understand why rigs are off for years. Your room-mining opinion is very important. But only for 2-5 rigs.
Big miners have several more problems then "expensive cost per kW" but they can decide it.
If you want to try to understand how it is possible - you can read this thread from right-country man
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4789787.0

You picked up all these GPUs at a sweet prices, I think this is a great deal . RX470 4GBs for $53 it is generally a good investment, as they will pay off in six months or earlier. I think those who sold you these cards will regret it in a few months.

The problem with running them at the stock voltage for the memory is power savings. Sure your cards are stable and can clock high without problems, but not all cards are the same. You could be saving 100-200w per rig and still have the same hashrate just by downclocking memory to 900mv - 950mv, some down to 860mv. That's my philosophy, the one that cannot do it will spit out errors. Well then just up the voltage higher or downclock memory. Power is mining's biggest expense/cost. More you save power the more you save money!

And you seem to be like one of those discriminating people that would kill for no money just for fun or ignorance. Sorry, i dont want to deal with people like that either. You live in a "FIRST" world country, so i understand you little peace of s... thinking. You make money, but your mentality its poorer than any of those "third world country" people.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?ac

You cannot make mistakes when mining is not worth the time, anybody that has no ability to work around and make their miners efficient then they will not survive in times like this, by downvolting they increase their chances to stay in the game for few months more hoping profit will increase if that profit never comes then they will exit it. Times for mistake was when a gpu card like the gtx 1070 was giving 10 usd per day, now is barely giving $0.20 per day after power costs.

Seems insane to me to start up mining with POS just around the corner. I sold my rigs a few months ago and that was long past when I probably should have. In fact, though I made a nice amount for the investment and it was fun to do, I probably would have been better off putting the cash I used for making the miners into just straight up purchasing eth and btc.

Interesting regarding SRBBioseditor i found that his straps for hynix a way tighter and more unstable the PBE (elpida is more the same). But with his straps xfx 570 4gb hynix i can barely go over 1980 and get like 29,9 (and seriously unstable) on PBE i can get to 2015 w/o errors and reach 30,4mhs

For sure they would realize that they had done the biggest mistake and $53 for a 470? Its a sweet deal.150+ GPU's for eth mining with current difficulty+ energy cost would result out to non-profitability or longer ROI but paying off on what you had invested is always be reachable.

The person who sold all these 150 gpus was relieved from heavy sleepiness duty ehhe

He sold and took a long vacation and never looked back. This person was finally unchained.

You trolls will never understand what freedom really is until you do exactly what this person has done ehhe

This person enjoy and understands what freedom really is ehhe

I dont sure that it was in such a way. Probably he changes GPUs. It explains why TS telling us about GPUs but not about rigs. Or may be these GPUs were bought from different sellers(and the price is just average).
In any way it is nice deal. Even if TS would decide to sell it - he can get profit.

He maybe changed the cards to the new Radeon Vega or even Rx5700 with Gddr6 memory now that the Dag epoch is at number 272.He was also smart selling them because Eth will not be mined anymore with these cards from April 2020 where the dag will be bigger than 4GB.

i don't think a guy that has sold RX 470 for 53$ is willing to invest in more gpu mining. Almost sure he forgot about it.

it's not profitable at all. you can make 0,2€ per day per card at the cost of big electricity bills and high room temps in summer. You could argue it's good on winter to heat up the house, but not in summer at current prices.

But is incredible for me, is to continually see the ETH network hashrate and difficulty increase.

Either three things:

Or people are mining at loses because they consider that in the future they can get profit if the coin bumps (mine to hold)

Or people have very very low price per kW because they live in third world countries where electricity is so cheap that the profit, even small, is important (example: Venezuela)

Or people are using ASIC (which the fuc*ing devs don't want to crash in the ETH network) and are mining 480mh/s at 850W which are numbers that GPU miners cannot even dream of.


So no, if you sell, you just give up. And it's the smartest thing to do nowadays.

It's the summ of all three together  ;D
Some people mining at a loss, some have very, very cheap electricity, and there are some hidden asics with a company (everyone know which one)

You have to consider people with a large amount of GPUs and Asics, with 0.05 USD electricity, it's very profitable if the guy or company have 1000 GPUs for example

The funny thing is that this is how I felt when I ran a large GPU farm. I still mine but with a few GPUs here and there and mostly for fun. Basically only betting on ETHBTC going to 0.05BTC one day and will sell it all for BTC and Hodl that.

I remember the stress of having GPUs crash and I had alerts set and was awoken many hours of the night. And when I wasn't home I kept getting alerts about crashed rigs and had to drive home, reboot the rig, and drive back. This got very stressful during the $5/day/GPU when there was alot of profit on the line.

Now that the profitability is much lower you can sleep throughout the night and not worry, because a crashed rig doesn't cost you as much as before.

@OP

At 53$ a card, that was clearly dirt cheap. I'm not sure I would have pulled the trigger, but you seem like you played the trading card well.

I always enjoy looking at other people's farms and rigs.

However if I'm honest, I do kinda see the end of GPU mining coming relatively soon, it no longer makes that much sense to me. Profits are small if not negative...especially with global warming, no one can ignore the fact that running huge farms is just bad for everyone at this point.

That said, I still mine to this day, most of my gear was purchased in 2016/2017. I personally still run about 40 of those sapphire cards (mix of 470/570s) at home in a dedicated room, but strictly on solar power. I developed my own script that monitors what my solar inverted is putting out and turns rigs on and off depending on how many kW I produce. It's been working super well for the past 9 months. I make about 4-5$ a day with 0 electricity costs related to mining.

Good luck with your operation.

I tested the wattage for 1000mv memory and your insane for 13 GPUs that about 2000w! I'm achieving 390mh/s~ @ 1650w-1700w~ and just a little tuning for the GPUs. That 300w extra per rig and I have 11 RX470 rigs so thats an extra 3300w! I'd rather suffer some crashes or restarts tuning and finding stable wattage then that.


Luckily I don't have to drive anywhere since it's in my garage simply a walk. However I do still get a little stressed or annoyed because when they do go offline I don't know why, which is the big problem. I very much just want to achieve some stability but right now I haven't gone a full day without at-least one rig going completely offline :\.

Some new cards are coming with a mining block, commonly known as error 43 if you modify their bios and atikmdag-patcher won't work on them. Probably manufactures dont want the bios of the cards to be modified anymore, but the interesting thing is that the card if not modified will hang every now and then if mining.

This is probably the end of mining as we know.

It's just a matter of time for this to get fixed.
Also, you can't put 13 RX cards on one rig. The 13th card must be an Nvidia.

With the current markets the way they are I wouldn't have done this, especially considering those cards are basically only good for Ethereum, which is going the way of the dodo. It's not just those cards, I wouldn't invest at all in GPUs right now. While BTC has almost tripled in price (it was at one point) since earlier this year, altcoins have not enjoyed the same benefit, which is where we make money as miners. Revenue is almost exactly the same as it was 6 months ago. Static revnue while BTC increases in value means we're at equilibrium.

Mining popularity has also skyrocketed, which in turn means in order to get very meaningful profit again, we would need to see a huge surge in alt/btc prices, to roughly around 50k. Assuming some of the altcoins also see the benefit from BTC. I can't imagine that happening anytime soon.

We've seen almost no new profitable pastures besides GRIN and that was knocked out within about a month and a half. Usually we get six or so per year. Formerly profitable coins are being taken over by ASICs and FPGAs with most devs not caring about their mining community disappearing.

People here seem to not understand that it's not just about being profitable. You can be profitable with 0 cost power (you shouldn't be mining with GPUs anyway with extremely cheap power), but hardware depreciates in value and most GPUs aren't going to see recoup without a huge surge in price before they're outdated again by newer hardware. Furthermore those GPUs are only making peanuts and you need tons of them to make any sort of meaningful profit (for you as a person), the profit per unit just isn't there.

ASICs have been the only hardware worth investing in for roughly the last year or so due to the hate they receive and lack of interest from a lot of miners, as well as the bloated state of GPU mining due to popularity.

Why? We have a rig with 13 RX550 running.

Not so long ago people speeding lies about 8 being the limit, I thing the are lying because they don't know, not intentionally.  But then there is very few real info and lot of lies. So maybe it is intentional to scare people away by putting out lot of bullshit.

And then Metroid is trolling hard for years now.

1000% wrong.

That's why the ignore user function is usefull :)

I recall there being driver limits with AMD cards, never tested it myself though. I never put more than 8 in a rig myself. Those boards with 8 or more pci-e slots came out more or less when mining was getting unprofitable anyway. I saw no point in investing in further hardware.

It`s possible to put 13 RX in one rig, but as for me - the optimal is 8 GPU per rig with Vega, 1070 or higher, and for RX450-580 or 1050ti-1060 - 12 GPUs per rig. This allows you to use one PSU per rig.

 :D :D :D :D

error 43 and you can´t solve it XD LOL noob

how long have you been preaching the end of mining? Please do us all a favor and just go. become a gardener or similar.

something should be wrong in your config. both of my 2x 6 RX 580 were using 850W from the wall at 1150mhz 850mv more or less and 1000mv mem. with 13 gpus you should be using around 1850W rock solid, not 2000W as you said. That is due to PSU ineffiencies. It depends on the type of PSU you use, the power it provides, if you have both of them linked and so on.  

Now, the point. You can undervolt your mem with this ideas.

1º you want less power consumption, not performance. So you go for the same voltage and same mem clock with all cards. That is at the cost of performance, so less mining power. My cards were tested individually. So, i would never apply the same numbers for my cards not considering i can extract a little more from each one. i know for a fact that all of them are giving the max performance at the lowest possible power consumption.


this are the numbers

401mh --- 1850W   59.10$ (profit) 55%  0.02682 (mined day)   0.8047 (mined monthly)   <-------- my config
390mh --- 1700W   63.19$ (profit) 64%  0.02609 (mined day)   0.7826 (mined monthly)   <-------- your config

This are average numbers.

This means that, in a investment to profit ratio, your undervolting makes sense. You use a bit less money on bills, but at the cost of mining less ETH per month than me. Who do you think is going to get more profit if the coin goes up in price?? And, on the contrary, you would win because you would be more power efficient which is very good when prices are low.

At a certain point, if the price scales, the more you mine, the more you make because that extra mined coin will be totally worth the extra electricity. In fact, i have two bios for my cards. One at 1150mhz and another one at 1240mhz, which adds like 0,3-0,5mh/s to each card.

with my config, with 13 cards, i would be doing like 406mh/s. With my 2x6 rig (12cards)  i was doing something around 376mh/s. I would never be able to obtain those numbers applying the same config for all cards.

by that time, i prefered to have more coins rather than using less electricity because it was worth. Now...well...my config would be more expensive to maintain. But if coin goes up, it would be worth that extra power.

Anyway, you can just stick with 850mv and deal with crashes or increase the ram voltage and forget about having to get the car at night to solve the issue. That's the difference.

1000mV on memory is a complete waste of power and building unnecessary heat. Its not just the powersaving its bringing down temp as well

3 RX 570's nitro+ 8gb

1º 1150/2250 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 31.4mh/s
2º 1150/2190 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 30,8mh/s
3º 1150/2125 831-837mv core/ 1000mv mem 30,3mh/s


These cards easily hit 32~32,4 with following OC (hynix)

1180/2150
850mv core/ 850mv mem

--REF 30

I have also 4gb version which runs for months without any issues

it is very difficult to lose on video cards. They can also sell to the automotive industry, after mining. Here is Asic here is this roulette, Igar 50 on 50.