Fastest equihash (ZCash and clones) card at this point is the 1080ti - a highly overclocked one might exceed 800 HASH/s but not by a lot.
 R9 280x is more like 300-350 hash/sec.

 800khash/sec would be a SCRYPT (Litecoin/Doge/etc) hashrate ballpark figure for the R9 280x.

 Their external 8GB (which is USUALLY an Archive drive inside) is commonly the lowest cost/GB on the market, and tends to cost less than buying the bare drive.

 Poloniex has had "issues" with slow deposits and slow withdrawals for MANY MONTHS now - among other issues.
 I strongly recommend avoiding them.

 They're probably buying hash via Nicehash.

 BTW - you DO realise that "1,811,000 MH/s" is "1,811 GH/s" which would be a very minor hashrate variation?
 I'm guessing you mis-quoted one of those figures.

In theory, suprnova SHOULD work - but I've been VERY underwhelmed by their performance every time I've tried to use them.

I tried to do that once - and figured out eventually that the Intel drivers don't "play nice" with anything else under Linux.

 *IN THEORY*, you should be able to install the Intel drivers, then do a manual installation of the Nvidia drivers using their "don't install the openGL files" command line option - but I've found that option doesn't work against recent Intel or AMD drivers or it's just flat out broken in recent versions of the Nvidia drivers.

 The penalty for running your monitor on one of your mining GPUs isn't big though - perhaps a percent or two - if you're just running the desktop on it and not actively doing anything on that desktop.

 BCH is a recent fork from BTC - uses the same SHA256 algorithm and ASIC-based miners, so forget trying to mine it with a GPU.

ETH and ZEC are the "core" for the last few months of the "basket of similar profitability coins" - they're both well known, and as profitability in one rises a number of miners swap from one to the other causing profitability to even out.
XMR is part of that basket, but a bit less so since it has a significant presence of CPU miners not just GPU miners.

Most smaller coins are not part of the "basket", but sometimes one or most jump up for a short period to a higher level of profitability than the basket, and some of the smaller coins then end up IN the basket as they get better known due to that - though if they drop back on price enough they'll sometimes fall back OUT of the basket.

 None of the AMD A10 line have a TDP higher than 95 watts - COUNTING the CPU side not just the iGPU.

There are some Scrypt pools that don't work well with high-capability ASIC miners, though fewer than there were 2 years ago before the Innosilicon A2, KNC Titan, and Alcheminer showed up.

 The L3+ is NOT "specialized for Litecoin", it is specialized for Scrypt mining.

 TheBlocksFactory should work well for you as a DGB pool on Scrypt.

 DOGE - don't bother, it's a merge-mined coin not worth mining it on it's own.

 I forget what pool I was using briefly to mine GAME.

 The "3GB" 1060 does not use the same GPU as the "6GB" 1060 - has a few less cores (768 vs 896 I think, might be 896 vs 1024), so it probably WILL perform a little lower on Monero.

 IMO Nvidia should be facing a fraud lawsuit over their naming of the "3GB 1060".


 AWS is very "negative' on cryptocoin mining on their servers (Azure and Google Cloud are about as negative) - they WILL shut your account down with no credit issued if they catch you at it, and they have the legal right to do so as a "contract violation".

 As far as Monero hashrate jump the last month - I'd bet on it being folks that moved over from OTHER cryptocoins due to the price spike that briefly put Monero ahead of most other coins for mining with MOST GPUs - no need for no botnets, just the long-standing tendancy of many cryptocoin miners to "chase the most profitable coin of the day or hour".

 I am pretty sure at least a couple of the "multi-aggro pools" like Suprnova support Cryptonight mining as well as Nicehash, which would also account for some of the extra hashrate.

 I will state FROM EXPERIENCE that litecoinpool works well when you point Nicehash at it.

 Best bet is to point "US hash" at a US pool address and "EU hash" at a EU address for maximal efficiency.

 To btcconnousseur:

 D3 is X11 specific, you CAN'T mine Litecoin with it.
 L3+ (or the older L3) is Bitmain's Scrypt miner that you can mine Litecoin with.

Should be a viable idea, as long as your neighbors aren't close enough to object to the noise level *OR* you have a very good muffler setup on it to keep it quiet enough.

 Natural-gas powered generators come in many sizes, up to POWER COMPANY MAIN GENERATOR level.

At that electric cost, profitablity on an S7 is very marginal NOW - and the odds are good it will be UNprofitable 2-3 months from now.

 The ONLY reason it is profitable NOW is that the BCH fork has caused some mining to move to that coin - if there was no BCH, BTC difficulty would be high enough NOW to make your S7 right at break-even.

 You need to find a better place to put your miner with MUCH lower electric cost, it's NOT going to make your money back at all as all of the income is going to be eaten up paying that electric bill.

 Crazy profit, sounds like a sensible reason to sell it - especially if you need the power capacity to run your "arriving fairly soon" miners with.

I see this whole "certificate" concept as just adding one more layer of complexity and confusion with no benefit at all to those of us that fold, especially since a normal Folding rig generally already HAS it's CPU cores tied up feeding data to the GPUs to DO the folding with.

 Might be less of an issue if you include the "mining" software as an inherent part of the wallet.

 Overall perhaps of ALL of their lines, but NOT on their 12/16nm node line(s).
 NVidia specifically moved to make their GTX 1050 and 1050ti at Samsung because TSMC didn't have the CAPACITY available to make those with all of it's then-current contracts (including the NVidia one for the 1060 and up).

 TSMC DOES have other lines still running on older nodes, like 28 and 40 nm (possibly 22nm but I'm not SURE there) that are kept busy enough to be profitable - AFAIK they still have at least one line running 55nm for older chips that don't NEED the current node but are still practical to use.
 In example, you don't waste the money making a radio/clock/alarm chip on current process because it doesn't NEED the ultimate in efficiency - same for Car "radio" stuff, boomboxes, televisions, and such.

 External drives are slow to plot on, but you can mine on them just fine even the SMR-based drives like the Seagate Archive line (which are pretty much perfect for BURST usage).

If it works, don't mess with it.

 9-)

 The REAL, PRIMARY reason profitablity has dropped over the last 2 months is that lots of miners have been adding LOTS MORE RIGS with LOTS MORE GPUS chasing the same rewards and thus diluting the rewards between those LOTS MORE GPUS - coupled with ETH pricing and block payouts being nearly flat over that timeframe.


 The diff increase is a mostly a byproduct of MORE FOLKS CHASING THE SAME REWARDS coupled with the (so far small) ARTIFICIAL increase, and not a direct impact on profitabilty (though it does have an indirect effect).
 Ice age on the other hand, so far, has had a very SMALL effect on the difficulty.

 The Ice Age artificial increase does NOT affect profitability, only the "more GPUs mining" part of diff increase does because that does NOT affect all miners equally, while the Ice Age artificial diff increase DOES affects everyone equally.
 I continue to state it is a stupid concept with no real reason to exist, since it affects all miners EQUALLY and doesn't change the rewards gained from any particular block - it's the dropping BLOCK PAYOUT that is effecting that.
 It also doesn't affect block rate over the long term.

 Consider Bitcoin, which also uses a difficulty system which has gone up a TON more than ETH has yet the block are still targeting the same timeframe to be issued - it's just SHORT TERM that adjustments get made due to diff changes - and in the case of ETH the "short term" is very short indeed.


 You might want to consider looking into ALL of the facts before you call someone else ignorant.

 You won't see 31 Mh/sec on ETH with those cards. Might see 140-160 total with tweeking if you push them hard enough.
 ZEC numbers sound about right per posted hashrates I've seen on those cards.

 The i3 is a waste in a pure mining rig. Lower-cost G-series Pentium would be plenty.

 I wouldn't pay more than $2500 for this rig AT MOST, $4000+ is a ripoff.