Was looking for this Asus Mobo but newegg is currently sold out... but came accros this MSI H270 that looks very similar in specs. and it's on sale for only $85 after rebate!

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130980

Has anyone used the board for mining and confirm that it can take at least 5 GPUs?  Seems it could probably take up to 8 with M2 adapters but mainly I need to just make sure others have mined at least 5 cards on this board :-)

IF they can get their wallet situation resolved AND fix the multiple issues with all of their pools... then yes, this has potential... but until that time, no thanks.  There are so many projects out there that actually release a polished product front to back and ETN has been a joke since it's first launch a few months back.  FYI, any coin that touts to be "phone-minable" is at best a joke and at worst, a scam.

Personally, I don't believe the entire altcoin market will crash (or bubble pop as some say), but will instead continue it's nearly 1 year pattern of correcting 15-25% after a big run-up, then erasing those losses and going even higher days/weeks after the correction. Certainly, this cannot continue at the same rate it has over the past year, but I think the pattern will continue, just to maybe a lesser degree.

What we have seen over the past 2 days is already a correction of the new year's run-up... total market down about $100B as of now ($830 to $730), so I am predicting maybe a couple more days of sideways trading before the next market-wide rise.  I will therefore be looking to buy into a few of the cheaper coins that took some of the biggest hits last 2 days as most will likely see bigger % increases in this next swell.

Another thing to keep in mind that supports a theory of another big swell hitting soon is that wall street bonuses start getting paid out early next week.  There are many that firmly believe a huge portion of that money (and it's a LOT of money... avg bonus expected to be in the $150-$200k range) is going to get directly invested in crypto as most wall street people typical exhibit a high-risk high-reward mentality, and there is no better place to get that than the crypto market.  I think this influx will boost the market over the $1 trillion mark... certainly by the end of Q1 but probably sooner.

As for the BTC piece, many have hit on the notion that a big BTC run-up will suck money out of alts.  While this has been somewhat true over the past year, I'm not convinced BTC will explode enough to suck a super material amount out of alts... especially not the major alts like ETH, DASH, XRP, or even XMR, or ADA and many others in the top 20.  BTC has many problems facing it right now and solutions are not yet clear.  I think it would take some kind of monumental positive action on the BTC side to make it go up so high that it would suck significant $ out of most alts.  Granted, I do think it's current share of just 34% is probably too low and may go back to closer 40%, but many of these alts are solid and have proven resiliency over the past 6-12 months.

With that said, I do think that there will be a separation within alts that starts maybe around mid-year. Right now, pretty much every alt is way up, but eventually, when the money gets a bit tighter, I think people will start scrutinizing a bit more and support will swing towards legit alts with true purpose and solid road maps. Those alts will continue to rise while others will assuredly lose value.

Hey Spike, welcome to this great forum. Unfortunately, now is a horrible time to try to buy the components to build a mining rig, mainly due to the sever shortage of good mining GPUs.  There are quite simply no good mining GPUs available at any retailers, which means the only ones you will find will be from 3rd party sellers (like ebay) where you would have to pay 2-3x retail prices for them. I would NOT recommend doing that, as tempting as it might be with prices if coins still very high, even after coming about 15% off the recent all time highs over the past 2 days.  The best you could probably do with 2k would be to get a rig with either 2 Vega's or 2 1070ti/1080's, but that would hardly be worth it.

Given this, I would suggest maybe investing directly in some coins you like. You mention XP, which is one I've had my eye on for some time but have yet to pull the trigger on.  Not sure about mining that or SAGA, but for Electronium, the best GPU by far would be a Vega (56 or 64), as those can hash close to 2,000 on CrytoNite algo.  However, as mentioned, good luck finding any of those at a reasonable price.  Retailers should be getting new ones in eventually, but you would have to be very diligent to get them before they sell out.  Not only that, but it seems like even places like newegg are going to price gouge with the new Vega's as the few that have shown up on their site in past few weeks have been ridiculously priced... like in the $700 range!

Might be typical for Oz but it's pretty much that bad or worse in US and rest of the world right now. Simply impossible to get a decent mining card at anywhere near retail, unless you happen to get onto a random stock up somewhere.  I did this with both an MSI 570 8GB ($300 on newegg) and a 4GB (for $270) and moments after i ordered my 1 limit, they were gone, which defaulted to the 2x retail prices 3rd parties are selling them for.  I really wonder if any big shipments of anything are in the works for the near future... I mean, how long has it been since Vega's were sold out... close to 2 months now?  Just crazy!

Good to hear about some good Mobo alternatives. I've been mostly using ASRock H81 BTC Pro R2.0 with good success, but clearly need to get away from that LGA-1150 architecture as those EOL'd CPUs are getting very tough to find at reasonable prices.  The 1151 for this board opens up a lot more reasonably priced options CPU-wise, I think i might pick up 1 or 2 of these if they really can support at least 6 GPUs.

Wow has ETH been on a wild ride!  Was watching it all day yesterday... topping out at about $1,230 on GDAX (I broke down and sold 1 at just over $1,200 lol). Then overnight, it crashed all the way down under $980, only to quickly rebound and now be right at the $1,150 mark and possibly headed over $1,200 again.  Thanks to this latest bump, my rx 470's are netting over $3/day... something I never would have thought possible, even 3 months ago!  Granted, it's nowhere near the close to $10/day on the higher end GTX cards, but hopefully i will get on that train very soon.

Absolutely diversify your portfolio!  True with stocks, 401k and other investments... also true with Crypto!  I've got roughly 1/3 BTC, 1/3 ETH, and 1/3 in other alts.  Those other alts are also diversified by type... meaning don't put all your eggs into the Privacy coin (like XMR etc) basket... branch out and get into storage-based coins (like Burst, Sia, Storj), other smart contract coins, medical field coins, etc, etc.  This methodology has enabled me to mitigate losses on big BTC downswings.  Granted, this market is crazy and nobody can predict what will happen, but at least recently, alts have made huge gains vs BTC. I know a few you-tubers were preaching moving all of their altcoin investments into BTC back in early Dec.  If you followed that advice you would have lost big time as BTC has gone from about 52% of the total crypto market value to under 35% currently.

Personally, I have heard mostly bad things about the Armor cards, which is likely why they are one of the few models of 570s left available at this point.  The ASus 4GB is probably ok if you are willing to risk building with 4GB cards.  Nobody knows for sure when but 4GB cards are likely to start having issues mining ETHash relatively soon. Something to do with the increasing DAG size I think but dont quote me on that.

From your list, the best by far IMO is the Nitro 8GB. If you can really get them at $355, I would buy as many as possible as quickly as possible since I doubt they will be around much longer, esp at that price.  In fact, if your source happens to have more than you need, please shoot me in PM as I would immediately buy up to 5 at that price.

Good luck with your build!

Yeah... all good mining cards are now gone from primary markets. Looks like a few 4GB 570s around but I don't want to invest anything less than 8GB at this point in order to future proof. It's one thing running 24x 470 4GBs... which are amazingly still very profitable... but anything I build from here on out will be 8GB and up only. Still need to get an electrician out to assess my house's capacity. I have 4 1070ti's ready to build and a 3x Vega rig already built but not running for fear of blowing up my house lol.  I also have 1 measly MSI 570 8GB that I somehow got for $300 a few days ago. Ideally, if my house can handle it, would like to get 2 more Vega's and 2 more GTX... either 1070ti or 1080... and then possibly 5 more 570 8GB.  But at this point, that is impossible, so will just concentrate on hopefully getting those Vega & 1070ti rigs up with 7 total cards and then see what happens with the market.  Sorry, but I refuse to pay 2-3x retail for these things... even with the insane current profits.  I sincerely hope some heads are gonna roll and both AMD and Nvidia over the 2nd horrendous under-call of demand in the space of 8 months!

Yeah, newegg.com absolutely does.  I did a bit more reading and it seems likely that you need to open a bitpay account/wallet in order to use that option but any advice from Phil or others who have used it would still be appreciated.

Can someone who has paid BTC for NewEgg purchases help me out possibly?

I just tried to do this for the first time but got stuck at this point:

- I want to pay from either my Bittrex wallet as I sold off a few alts in order to pay this invoice (I assume this is possible).

- After choosing Bitcoin payment option on NewEgg, the bitpay window pops up wit hteh QR code (on the scan tab) for a phone scan.  Since I want to pay with exchange wallet, I click on the Copy tab and the exact amount of BTC appears, along with a URL that starts with bitcoin... https//bitpay.com.... followed by a string of numbers that doesnt look long enough to be a BTC address.

- The instruction say to copy that full URL into your wallet's send screen, but I don't think this will work in the BTC address field send screen on Bittrex, will it?  Doesnt that need to be a standard BTC address only?

Am i missing something or can you not send payment from an exchange wallet like this?

Thanks for confirming Phil... I was about to pull the trigger on 1-2 of these but then I saw these EVGA 750w G3's on sale for $99 after rebate.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16817438093

My question is, what kind of challenges are there with running 2 x 750w PSU's to power a rig?  Could I do something like power the Main & Molex Mobo + CPU and maybe 2 GPUs on 1 PSU, then 4 more GPU's on the 2nd PSU?

Hey everyone... so I am looking at this 1500W Rosewill PSU (originally brought to my attention by Phil) to support a 1070ti build but have what is probably a stupid question...

All of my other PSUs (Rosewill and EVGA) have am 18+10 pin connector for main power. But, looking at this model, it doesn't have any port anywhere near that long.  It does appear to have 2 x 14pin slots, which still equals 28 pins total like the other, but just trying to make sure that the other end of this connector will still fit a standard Mobo as I have not seen this configuration before.

Any of you this Ripple/CoinBase story?  Just yesterday, CB not only quashed rumors about adding XRP but stated that they "would not be adding new coins any time soon".  I understand them wanting to douse the flames on the XRP rumors, but why would they make a blanket statement like that when just a couple of weeks ago they indicated they would definitely be adding new coins in '18??  Ok, maybe some thought that meant early '18, and maybe they were talking more like mid-18 but still.

Personally, I never thought XRP was a prime candidate for them to add since it does not meet their "decentralized" criteria for adding new coins. After all, when 1 entity owns 60% of it and controls everything, it's not exactly decentralized like many other alts are.  Many others assuming Dash and/or Monero or even something like Verge, but the privacy issue with these coins also looks to not conform with CB's policies. Seems more likely they would add something like Cardano, Stellar or IOTA, but this latest statement seems to indicate nothing will be added soon, which is a shame IMO because whatever gets added to the worlds biggest crypto exchange/market will most certainly help infuse even more $ into the overall market.

Yeah this shortage is truly insane!  And it's not just the high end cards any more.  After weeks of no Vega's being available, i jumped on the 1070ti train. Was lucky to get 2 MSI Platinums from newegg at $480/each and 2 ASUS Strix Gaming for about $500/each, all but 1 arriving tomorrow. I even started trying to accumulate MSI rx 570s 8GB and luckily got what now seems like one of the last ones from newegg yesterday for $300. But now those are gone too and can't really find one for under $400, which I will not pay for that card lol. Still seem to be quite a few 570 4GB left around various stores but I am not going to double down on that since I already am running 24 470 4GB cards and need to future proof my current purchases with no less than 8GB.  B&H has a lot of GPUs with "stock expected in 7-10" days but I am not going to tie up money ordering those and then have them end up not shipping at all or being way farther out than that estimate.

Yeah, I was equally impressed with this project and luckily got in back on 12/27 when it was at 3.6 cents. Just bought 2k that day due to lack of time moving some BTC around, but when i saw it at that same price point 2 days later i bought about 3k more.  Currently it is just about to hit 30 cents lol!  so, up 10x in about a week. Gotta love this crazy market lol!

To be honest, $1,300 is not enough to get into GPU mining at present time. Mainly, this is because of a severe shortage of GPU, which means many top mining models like Vega, 1070ti, even RX 570 are either not available at all or you will have to pay 2-3x retail to get one. Therefore, until supply opens up and prices of GPUs drop, you simply will not be able to build a decent rig for $1,300.  If you had twice that, you could probably throw something together but in all honesty, if you pay current prices for GPUs you are likely to never ROI them.

As far as trading goes, I assume you meant that you loaded $200 in BTC to Bittrex and bought some other coins there that havent done well?  Honestly, if you put $200 into almost any coins last Nov you should have seen moderate to huge profits but maybe you are just unlucky. If I were you, I would do some research and try to find a few very cheap coins that are promising tech but haven't blown up yet.  Lately I've been looking for coins at 1 or 2 cents or less and if their project seems legit, I buy in.  This trend has held true lately because many people new to crypto would prefer to buy 100, 1000 or 10000 of something rather than .02 BTC lol. 

One I can tell you to check out is KIN.  This is the native token of the KIK app that already has millions of users. I bought into it about 10-12 days ago and it is already up 4x. But you can still like 25 for a penny i believe.  Check that out and maybe something like BitBean.  Other than that, if you really wanna try some kind of mining, you could probably get into BURST decently for about $1,300.  Assuming you already have the PC, you could get probably close to 50TB of HDDs, which at current rates would make you maybe $60-$80/week.

Anyone here running rx 570/580 rigs dual mining ETH + either DCR or PASC?  I read a few places that while ETH results are about the same as 4xx cards, the dual 2nd coin piece is apparently quite a bit better than 4xx.  Has this been your experience? If so, about how much more hashes are you able to get out of 5xx vs 4xx?

Also, does anyone know if mining PASC with ETH is any less stressful on the cards than DCR & ETH?  for some reason, 2 of my 470 rigs cant seem to handle ETH + DCR any more... even if I lower the clock speeds and DCR intensity.  Same rigs can run ETH for days with no crashes, but adding DCR makes it reboot within 10-15 minutes like clockwork.

You are correct about HBM2... there are shortages for sure as I have noted this in my job (financial analysis for various types of memory used by my employer). Let's just say that the bosses are none too pleased about 1) can't get enough HBM2 to meet our demand and 1a) what we can get is costing about 30% more than originally projected.

Still, I think even aside from this AMD missed the boat big time. and, the HBM2 issue doesn't explain the Nvidia shortages on their higher end cards.  THis is a lot like the market shortage back in Q2. First, all the AMD 4xx & 5xx disappeared then Nvidia was next to go short. I think there are still a lot of people that think AMD first when it comes to mining, given they were clearly the better choice before so many Equihash coins become very profitable to mine with GTX.

Anyway, I have my Vega rig built with just 1 of 3 installed as I am waiting for an electrician to do an assessment on my houses electric capacity before I fully ramp up any more rigs.  I also have 3 1070ti's arriving on Friday, so that will start my 6th rig, assuming my house can handle it lol.  I feel more confident I can get 2-3 more 1070ti's relatively soon vs the 2-3 Vega's I would still like to get.

Dang! total market cap hovering just below $700B!  What an amazing 2nd day of the year!