Check to make sure Win 10 didn't "auto-update" your drivers - VERY widely known issue with 10.

 Among the many other issues that make it totally unstable worthless junk IMO.

Solo mining often sees long accumulation between payouts, unless you keep a LOT of coin on hand to stake with.

 Wear on the drive is fairly minimal - your "days" estimate is crazy talk.
 It would have NO effect on SSDs, flash memory only is damaged by WRITES not reads.

 SSDs aren't a good choice due to their much higher cost per TB vs conventional hard drives - and that is unlikely to change for the forseeable future, though flash HAS narrowed that cap quite a bit over the past decade.

 The only reason I do anything with BURST any more is that the cost of a 3TB drive isn't much more than the cost of "whatever is cheapest" in a machine that needs some sort of drive anyway (trying to run BOINC projects or FAH on a USB "pen" drive is a slow nightmare).


 Hard drives are DESIGNED to spin 24/7 - current "power saving" setups actually hurt longevity of the drive due to the starts and stops being FAR more stress inducing than just letting them spin.
 The amount of seeks for BURST aren't high, especially compared to doing stuff that DOES hammer a drive like "big file server for a company" usage.

 I'm seeing shortages on the 64 as well, and BOTH are getting some price gouging.

 I suspect the production bottleneck in HBM2 is still around as the probable reason.

Might need to tweek the core clock and memory settings for other models/brands.

 My next planned buy is a Zotac 1070ti mini, due to a "physical fit" issue with the new shelf setup I'm building.

 Put the fan right over the blower intakes - blow cool air into them (and the air pushes the heat from the backplate away from the blower intake).

 If the fan is placed near the back of the cards by the brackets, it would make sense to have it pulling air out, but I believe it would be less efficient at keeping cool air going into the cards - and it shortens fan life since the fan it having to deal with hotter air.

 And that is the fault of the coin HOW?

 ANY investment has a risk, usually comparable to it's potential for return.

 Sure, it would be NICE to see Gridcoin get up above 10 cents/coin - but I'm not holding my breath on that.

 Most of us are NOT in Australia.
 The rules and requirements for importing miners vary WIDELY from country to country.

 In the USA in particular, the rules get a LOT more stringent if you import more than $2500 or so in one shipment - and they get CHECKED a lot more carefully for enforcement.

 Your user name on Flypool IS your wallet address - which is what I was TRYING to say but apparently some folks misunderstood how I phrased it.

 There are at least 3.5 million GPUs mining ETH alone - the large majority of those are AMD.

 ALL OTHER COINS COMBINED don't manage 2 million GPUs.

 NVidia is the most prefered on many coins, but not all and not by miners overall - there is a reason RX-series card prices are still majorly inflated while NVidia card prices are pretty much right back down to where they were 6 months ago.


 XMR is the ONLY place the Vega stands out as a superior option per all of the info I have seen about it to date - Vega is NOT competative on hash/$ or hash/watt on anything else, usually failing on BOTH when mining anything else.


 1080 ti is very close on both hash/$ and hash/watt when you compare complete systems vs the 1070 ti, but it falls just a hair short in ZCash/ZEN/ZCL mining - difference is only a percent or two on efficiency and less than 5% on cost/hash but the 1070 ti DOES win.
 The "fewer cards to deal with" issue though might make it a "better option" for some folks anyway, and it's close enough it doesn't make sense to shut down existing systems using it.
 It's also close enough that cards going on sale or ANY noticeable price move out of NVidia could change it.

 At this point I would not bother with the 1070 or 1080 - they're noticeably behind the curve - unless the card is in an existing system.

 Not me - seems like the peak efficiency point is VERY VERY close to that 60% point I came up with (and others have also independently determined).

 EWBF stats keep showing 2 of your cards using a lot lower power level than the 3'd card - and one of the 1080 ti cards running pretty hot despite the lower TDP than the other one.
 Starting to look like a cooling issue preventing the low-TDP card from boosting enough to need more power or hash fast.

 Fan on top of those cards isn't going to help much unless it's blowing air down at the "blower fan" intake for the cards - in which case it might help some.

For most mining pools, your ZCash address is your user name (or username.rigname in some cases like Flypool and Nicehash).

The "at the wall" measurement includes power lost to inefficiency in the power supply.
 It will COMMONLY be 8-10% or so higher (depending on the efficiency level of your specific PS at the point you are operating it) than what the system itself is drawing.

 The power supply "rating" is for how much you can pull out of the PS - 80% of THAT is what you should be aiming for as a max, which will be more like 88-90% when measured "at the wall".

 Also, most power supplies get less efficient fairly quickly when you push them much past the 60-80% range.

Cisco switches tend to be rock solid - have worked with them professionally in a couple of data centers.

 Used ones CAN be quite cost effective, as the older ones get retired in favor of newer higher-throughput ones.

 10Base-T is PLENTY of bandwidth for a lot of miners on one switch - 100Base is overkill though you can't find new switches any more at less than 100Base and even THOSE are starting to dry up as Gigabit cost gets close.

ZEN has been pretty consistantly beating ZCash this month - but usually by a very small amount.
Everything else that has bounced above ZCash profitability so far this month has only been there for a day or two at a time, then fall back down again.

 GTX 1070 ti is a little more efficient even at the SYSTEM level on both hash/watt and hash/$ than the GTX 1080 ti at the most efficient point for each card - but it's close, really can't go wrong with either option.

Most of my 1080 ti cards are running 180-200 watts for cooling reasons, but the Aorus in my gaming machine (it's the only card in that box) IS set at 250 watts - it's also the ONLY one in an A/C environment, and the case it's in has good airflow so it stays plenty cool.

 The most EFFICIENT point for these cards seems to be around 150 watts (60% on most models) but I've not tried to "fine tune" a lot on any of mine yet as my power cost is low enough that I get better return by pushing them harder.

 Board it a bit overkill unless you want to go with a LOT of cards in one rig, but it does work well and the built-in multi power supply management is nice - and the cost of the board isn't all THAT much higher than "lesser" 6/12/13 card mining boards - and gets QUITE competative when you compare it to an 1150 based board like the H81 Rev2 that has a fairly short list of available CPUS generally with higher prices due to supply shortages....

The answer is "it depends on what algorithm(s) you intend to mine".

 And as a hint, not all "big" mining operations are ASIC-specific - again, it depends on the algorithm.

 Big GPU-based mining operations tend to be smaller scale than big Bitcoin based ones since they don't NEED to be as big just to compete for the same % share of available coins....