Never owned that one, but I've worked with a lot of MFJ gear over the years - they tend to very solid designs that last a long time.

 1. Most of my GPUs have been bought from NewEgg, but a couple were bought from local folks via Craigslist and I think I got a couple at one point from Tiger Direct.
 2. WIDELY varied, depending on which GPU. Current active total is around 40 ONLY counting the ones I've bought as seperate GPUs and done cryptocoin mining on, and I've had 2 more die over the years.
 3. No clue what you are asking here.
 4. Many areas have "Time of Day" rate that will help lower bills some.
     The way I lowed my bill a LOT last summer though was to move to "The Land Of Very Very Low Cost Electric" in Central Washington State.
 5. I've done a little CPU mining of Monero, I do some BURST (Proof of Capasity, needs a LOT of HD space) and I have had quite a few ASIC miners (currently still have some Innosilicon A2 units mining away).
 6. See 5 - but be warned that CPU mining and BURST aren't real high profitability unless you have appropriate gear for them already.
 7. I'd estimate that my investment into my current farm is between $30k and $40k - most of that paid for with reinvested profits out of a few years of cryptocoin mining.
 8. Again, no clue what you're asking.
 9. This question makes ZERO sense.

 And the other 2+ million GPUs will be doing the same thing, KILLING most or all profitability on most coins since all other GPU-mineable coins COMBINED have ballpark 1 million GPUs mining on them.

 Better have REAL cheap power at that point if you want to make anything.



 The way profitability is going, due in part to the large DROP in coin pricing over the last couple weeks, we might not get TO that point on ETH.
 Folks with high enough electric costs are ALREADY getting squeezed out of GPU mining for a profit, and I've noticed that network hashrate on ETH seems to have flattened out a LOT the last couple days (it's not QUITE stopped on growth, but pretty close).



 Yes, I can see this turning into another version of the 2013 "boom" 2014/2015/2016 "bust" cycle in GPU mining.

Try using the 16.10.1 WHQL drivers instead.

 The "Relive" stuff at best is crazy bloated and many versions just don't WORK well for mining rigs.


 Also, make sure you have the "ultra low power" box in Afterburner set to make that option NOT active, as it tends to stick cards in "idle" mode.

 Fairly common in recent years - though certainly not needed for a mining-specific rig.

 Seems like a LOT of current "monitor" designs are based on TV designs - or vice versa (all current TVs CAN work as a monitor as pretty much all current GPUs have a HDMI port, and the ones with a DVI-D port only need a "wires" converter to go to no-audio HDMI).

I only have one rig mining ETH - and it's already got a long-term home planned, from before it STARTED mining ETH.

R9 290 does about 29 Mh/s right now on ETH with a BIOS from TheStilt to let it overclock without thermal limiting and some undervolt, he also did R9 290x BIOSes as well.

 I've never been impressed by dual mining, seems like the return is only rarely noticeably more than just mining ETH straight up and often ends up costing more in ETH than you get from the "second" coin income, especially when you factor in the HIGH electric usage (and a fair bit HIGHER when dual mining) that a R9 series card uses.
 It MIGHT work out better on RX series cards as they don't use nearly as much power either way.

 No.

 It's the old FALLACY that mining profitability has any effect on the price of a cryptocoin.

RX 560 should be able to mine anything except ETH (DAG file too big), possibly ETC (ETH offshoot, DAG file is smaller but I don't know HOW MUCH smaller), and possibly any other ETH offshoots.

 Almost any motherboard with 3 x 16-bit PCI-E slots will work, as they pretty much all have the same spacing.

 I used to use the ASRock FM2A88X Extreme6+ as my go-to MB for 3-card no riser rigs (using either a Gigabyte ITX-type card in the "outside" slot, or a Zotac shortie in one rig), but have switched to the ASRock 970 Extreme4 as my current go-to board as I'm moving away from "mixed" rigs.

 For the same "new" price range most folks pay for an Intel dual-core low end Pentium G-series, I can get a quad-core AMD FM2-based APU, or a 6-core AMD AM3+ based CPU which gives me enough CPU horsepower to mine BURST on the same machine I'm GPU mining on - but I'm usually SAVING significantly on the motherboard.
 On used stuff, you can usually find AMD X-series dual-core CPUs or the Sempron 145 REAL cheap for an AM3/AM3+ motherboard - they're plenty to run a dedicated mining rig on.

 DDR4 pricing is getting down to similar range as DDR3, and everything else would be the same identical parts.

 Phil is going way overkill for a pure-mining rig on that I5 - but I used to go overkill on my APU-based rigs so the GPU side of them could work the Distributed.Net project via BOINC's MooWrapper project.

 I prefer the Seasonic X-850 or EVGA G2 850 for a power supply over Phil's Rosewill unit - and I generally can wait to get them on sale from NewEgg at $129 or less (I've got a couple bigger Seasonic/EVGA units as "floaters" I can use to run a rig on temporarily while it waits on it's REAL PS to arrive, and sometimes I'll buy a spare or two ahead of time on the better sales).

 X-850 handles 3 x 1080 OK on a rig where the cards are at 100% TDP (that's the one with the Zotac shorty, it also has a pair of Gigabyte winforce cards with a 200 watt TDP).
 A dual 1080ti single short 1080 rig would probably want a little more PS though for reliability, probably a X-1050 or G2 1000.

 True without question for the 1080ti and 1080.

 NOT true for the 1070 all of the time, though usually valid if you're mining a small-cap coin that's noticeably more profitable than ZEC.

 Not sure on the 1060, but I suspect it's in the same boat with the 1070.

 You forgot the Innosilicon A4 option, get it in 2 months for around $1500.

The Sapphire cards are available - in fairly small quantities.

 I managed to sneak in one order on Newegg, card arrived last night (didn't have time to work with it yet).

 IMO though they should have dropped the DVI connector and kept one of the HDMI connectors, then opened up the mounting plate a lot more since they DO have the find pointed the right way it would actually have HELPED cooling on non-riser rigs.


 Up side - no bloody backplate (unlike the Nitro cards these seem to be based on).




 Too many folks and many newbies have gotten spoiled - between the Litecoin/X11 crash and the massive price jump starting about 3 months back for most altcoins, 5-6 months to achieve 100% ROI was quite GOOD.

 The sub-3 month ROI seen if you got in at just the right point recently was a MAJOR abberation in cryptocoin mining, and has only been seen 2 or perhaps 3 times for a few months at a time.

Staking is not mining.

 "POS earned" or "POS earnings" would be a MUCH better option.

 "PoW mined" IMO would be better as "PoW earned" or "PoW earnings" or even "PoW compensation" since it's NOT mining.


 I'd also prefer to see "PoF" (Proof of Folded) instead of "PoW" but I don't really feel strongly about that as Folding IS a form of work done.

 Scrypt (Litecoin) only sees significant difficulty jumps the last few months when Bitmain starts shipping a new batch of the L3+

 Innosilicon is still selling the A4 (and they just had to order chips for a new batch) but they're still WAY high on the pricing for the performance so I suspect their A4 sales are a LOT lower.


 The reason difficulty was FLAT for ballpark a year was that NOBODY was making new Scrypt miners at all for a long time - Innosilicon had closed out it's last stock of A2 chips and had a long gestation period on the A4, and Bitmain apparently wasn't interested 'till Litecoin price started climbing noticeably due to the Segwit adoption threshold getting very close for a while.

 Litecoin price is proving quite a bit more resiliant than most altcoins have been the last 2 weeks - it's even gained a little vs Bitcoin over that period. If it SAYS in the $40+ range, it might end up being the most profitable coin to mine pretty soon now, despite L3+ deployment in bulk batches.

How do you get your ASIC miners to switch pools based on profitability?

 Is that SHA256 specific, or does it apply to all of their ASIC-based pools (I seem to have missed it in the Scrypt instructions).

 When I clicked the link right before my reply asking about WHERE it was available, it showed the board as "OUT OF STOCK".

 That's WHY I replied as I did.

 When I clicked the link JUST NOW, it showed the board at $129.

 And you call ME clueless.

Between the price drop (on pretty much ALL alt-coins not just CURE and FLDC) and the massive increase in folks folding for Team Curecoin (not quite double the PPD each of the last 2 months, but easily 4x over the last 3) the profitability of CURE and FLDC has dropped a TON the last couple weeks.

 It appears to have dropped enough to have FINALLY stopped the rapid deployment of new folding rigs, the last 3 days has been pretty close to flat....

 Thank goodness my Scrypt ASICs are making enough to pay my bills for now, or I'd have to start redeploying back OUT of folding into mining....



 BTW Yey - by current standards you'd be a mid-range folder at best, I pull in more PPD a month than you have total (to be fair, I probably DO count as a heavy hitter, though I don't have 2% of Team Curecoin production any more I'm still in shouting range).

 9-)

 That is NOT true at all, unless you're working with the EXPERIMENTAL branch Linux kernels - then it's sometimes pretty close.

 I'll also point out that NVidia and even more AMD put a TON more effort into their Windows drivers than they do into their LINUX drivers, which SHOULD make them more stable.

 nvOC is Ubuntu based, I believe PIMP is as well.

 Card doesn't use 800 watts. Even an entire system with one FE card in it doesn't use anywhere near 800 watts - more like 400 for a single-card system at a guess.

 THAT is what you're missing.


 It's not helped by your rather HIGH electric rate at 13 cents/KWH, which is going to kill a lot or all of your profitability on ALL mining options.

 Curecoin has a component that is ASIC mined, for blockchain security - the rest of it IS NOT A CRYPTOCURRENCY at all, the rest of it is a reward for doing Folding@Home work.

 Foldingcoin is not a cryptocurrency at all.

 Bad examples there.


 Better examples would be Ethereum, ZCash, DGB, and such that actually ARE cryptocurrencies.