The "performance crown" for MOST folks is gaming, not mining - that's the market NVidia and AMD are going to be primarily looking at when they decide on pricing for their cards.

 There's another kicker in the deck though, the rumours about a "GTX 2xxx" refresh of the 1xxx line, but that apparently isn't happening real soon.

 The only GPU mineable DGB algos are Skein and Groetsl - SHA256 has tons of ASIC options, Scrypt has quite a few, and Qubit is mined by the Baikal ASIC.

 I doubt this is a significant factor - more likely folks shifting from DGB to other coins entirely as the profitability bounces around.

The other thing to keep in mind is that DGB is a VERY SMALL coin, with small network hashrate.

 There have been times I could hit 1% of TOTAL NETWORK HASHRATE with my small farm on skein or on groetsl - and I could manage 2% or a bit over on skein AND on scrypt for pool hashrate if I moved just my NVidia cards and A2 rigs over right now.

 A lot of folks "chase the profit" - and that tends to have network hashrate / difficulty bounce around a LOT on small coins like DGB.

 Price has nothing to do with diff.

 PROFITABILITY however is largely a function of price and diff (and electric cost).


 I could picture a 20% jump happen, if a combination of
(1) Bitmain ships a new batch of S9/T9/R4 units
(2) Bitfury ships a couple of their big mining containers, or a large batch of chips that quickly get turned into miners by major farms
(3) some of the smaller folks ship new batches of miners

 all happened at the same time.


 Upon reflection though, wasn't Bitmain supposed to ship out a batch of S9s on or before the 10'th?

I have not seen any information anywhere on a Sapphire 470D based mining card.
They DO have at least 4 cards listed on their website (and a couple of them have shown up on Newegg) for 470 NOT D based cards.

 Interesting theory, but I NEVER saw them listed THAT low.

 Lowest 1070 on SALE they ever had was $359 or some such for the Zotac Mini, and I don't remember any 1080 under $459 even on sale.



 (edit) never mind, eBay - I don't DO eBay since they started pretty much forcing you to use RipoffPal for payments.

 Again, NOT apples to apples comparison, I was talking about the actual Newegg.com site (though I probably should have clarified that since I was aware Newegg sells on eBay).

 1) Seasonic X-1250 or EVGA G2 1300 should handle your rig without issues as long as you don't push TDP way up.

 3) EVGA, like *most* companies that sell power supplies, outsource the actual manufacturer.
     Their G2 line is Superflower Leadex platform, which is quite good, at least one of their other lines is Seasonic built (GQ series I think?) and are good, don't have enough data on their other stuff to be sure.
     Seasonic, on the other hand, is one of the perhaps dozen actual manufacturers of ATX-type power supplies in the world.

 4) It depends - if you go with 1080 ti models that use 1 x 8-pin and 1 x 6-pin, pretty much any 1200+ watt unit should have enough connectors - the X-1250 and G2 1300 are definitely good for that.
     *HOWEVER* if your risers are PCI-E neither PS will have enough spare connections for 4 of those on top of the cards themselves - but they have plenty of Molex connectors.

     If you go with all 1080 ti that have 2 x 8 pin connectors (Gigabyte Aorus for example), then it gets to be an issue and you might want to consider the dual 750 PS option or a slightly higher capacity single supply that DOES have enough connections - and you might want the extra headroom anyway as 2 x 8 PCI-E cards will likely have a higher TDP than 250 watts (though my Aorus doesn't despite the dual 8-pin connectors).

Thermaltake V34 (or the V35 if you prefer top-mounted control panel) is my go-to case on the rare occasions I USE a case any more.

 No case is going to solve your "room too hot" issue though, only getting airflow THROUGH the room will cure that (or put an A/C unit in the window of the room).

 All of the HD trays are moveable, and you can fit a 38mm thick fan in the front WITHOUT modding the case if you move a HD tray for space.

As far as I know, BURST SIA and MAID are the entire list of "hard drive mining" coins at this time.

BURST is the higher-profit of the three, but none of them are BIG money makers.

I've never figured out how that "reported hashate" stuff works, so I just ignore it.

 Febuary of this year IIRC is when the last of my 2GB cards stopped being able to mine ETH - they were NVidia GTX 950/960 though not AMD.
 I'd already moved all of my 2GB AMD cards over to ZEC months before that point as it was a lot more profitable for them.

 The RX 550 is going to be a fairly low performer - same core count as my HD 7750s but higher clock - I'd estimate 80 sol/s ballpark on ZEC, perhaps as high as 90, depending on overclock.

 NOT worth the money IMO, even at current GOUGE pricing on most higher-end cards.

 Philma had some of the Katana's mentioned in his 4'th thread - is that the ones you're looking for?

Scrypt has been ASIC-based miner territory for YEARS now.

 Don't bother trying to mine it with GPUs.

My "big rig" ETH miner - 3 x R9 290 - has been running a Sempron 145 (SINGLE core bottom end of the AM3 cpu line) for a long time without issues.
DAG file generation time was a bit on the long side, but not a significant issue when it's working on it "on the fly" while mining the hour or two on the previous DAG file.

For ETH mining, you want to OC the memory and can probably reduce the core clock a bit AND reduce TDP some.

Increasing core clock on ETH doesn't give much if better results.


 Also, WHICH GTX 1070 model do you have? The "base" TDP is only 150 watts on the 1070, though a few aftermarket cards get as high as 230.

 

As I recall, the 470 "D" series was a China-sales-only thing.

 Card should do OK on ETH, though probably a hair under a "normal" RX 470.

 Card might be a bit iffy on other coins, due to the lower shader count - depends on what price they bring it to market if it will be worth looking at.

 I don't see a point to them leaving all the video connectors on the card for a "mining" card though - have to wonder about that part.

There are digital thermometer "AC line switches" that will handle 15 amps - you could set one of these up on the input of your power supply.

 I don't recommend it though - IMO you'd be better off just reducing the clock on your miner to keep it cool as needed.

 Also, doesn't the L3+ have auto-adjust software like the S9 or the Spondoolies SP20 that auto-tunes it for you based on temp and stuff?

Block Erupters have been out of production for YEARS now.

 Not sure why you would want them anyway, they're very poor performance by current standards - check into the Sidehack USB miners for something reasonably current.

 Slightly out of spec as PCI-E allows for a 75 watt draw from the bus.
 Seems odd that they would prioritise draw out of the bus and not the plug-in connector though.


 "Target Temp" settings in both Afterburner and PrecisionX have never worked well for me, it's WHY I insist on being able to set fan curves (they work MUCH more reliably).


 I suspect that the reason Afterburner will sometimes "lose control of the card" is due to the driver resetting - that DEFINITELY can confuse NVIDIA-SMI and I don't see why it would not confuse 3'd party solutions as well.

 Keep in mind that video cards are aimed at GAMING as their primary market, not mining.

 The 5xx series moved to a slightly different process on the same node, that gave the ability to clock them higher at a minor cost in efficiency.


 I don't see the VEGA being a killer card for ETH/ETC and such mining, as it's still HBM and like the Fury line HBM has a lot of latency that hammers ETH hashrates.

 It SHOULD be a highly effective card on other mining though, like ZEC where the Fury line IS a good at mining.

 I can also see a high probability of it taking AMD 2 or 3 driver iterations to get a "good for mining" VEGA driver available.


 Don't compare the Vega Frontier Edition for $ - it's a workstation-targeted card (like the AMD WX line) and those are ALWAYS overpriced compared to consumer cards.
 (compare the WX 7100 to the RX 480 and RX 580 - slower clocks, single-slot, but it's higher priced than even the current GOUGE pricing on the RX equivalent cards).

 Also, AMD has already specified that there will be at least one "gaming" card with higher performance - and that will probably cost a fair bit less then the Frontier Edition.

 The consumer "Vega" cards are widely reported to be due for "release" as SIGGRAPH at the end of this month/early August - but no firm word YET on if it's going to be a "paper" release or if the cards will actually be available for sale at that time.
 I suspect it comes down to "has Hynix gotten the production issues with HBM2 fixed yet".