I had one of the mining cards ON ORDER - and the order was cancelled "as the cards had not come in yet".

 It would be nice if the RX series cards and the GTX 1070s are starting to drop back down towards MSRP - but I've not SEEN that to date, and the availability is still nearly nothing.

As I recall, the "official" TDP for the Hawaii cards was commonly 300 watts.

 My R9 290 cards have been pulling that much on a 24/7 basis (occasional outages for power failures or moving) for well over a year now.


 *TEMP* is the killer, though higher power tends to lead to higher temp if all other factors are equal.

 Only if Bitmain is out of chips at the start of the cycle - AND nobody else is shipping product.

 Ed posted a comment somewhere about "having to add rig(s) to answer a challenge".

 I'm not exactly shocked.

 Gotta wonder where this insanity is originating from.

 Why would ANY site offer this sort of thing instead of keeping the coin for themselves?



 Yes, there are "faucets" - but you're not going to pull in $1/day from THOSE.

Wattman is junk.
Ignore it.
In fact, don't even INSTALL the worthless bloatware piece of garbage if you can avoid doing so.


 If you insist on checking the cards in Windows, use Afterburner or GPU-Z.

980 ti isn't a real good ETH card anyway, it's a lot happier on stuff like Lbry, LyraR2, and probably ZEC.

 Not sure about groetsl or skein, it SHOULD do well on those too.

 If you insist on mining ETH, try genoil's miner, as it was CUDA specific in it's origins.

If you are having an electrician do the work, all they need to know is that you need "10 standard 15 amp NEMA 5-15 outlets, each on a separate circuit" and where to put the outlets.

There is no "wiring diagram" needed.

 You MAY have to upgrade your main panel and the power feed to it, or get a separate panel with it's own feed installed though, depending on the available capacity of your current main panel and main feed circuit.

 If you're planning future expansion, you should probably go ahead and upgrade your main feed NOW.

 "adding bigger breakers" is NOT how you expand power capacity.

If there is a "S10" this year, it won't be noticeably IF AT ALL more efficient than the S9.

 The days of "new miner generation every 6 months to a year" ended with the S9/T9/R4/Avalon 721/741/etc generation, as that is the FIRST generation of ASIC cryptocoin miner that is being made on SEMICONDUCTOR STATE OF THE ART process.

 There is a lot of question about when the "next" major process upgrade will become available, but right now based on my reading it looks like late 2018 for "initial dies" and 2019 for actual "available to small companies like Bitmain, Bitfury, Caanan, Innosilicon, etc" earliest possible availability of a "next gen" significantly more efficient process - and I won't be shocked if it takes another year past THAT.

 The 14/16nm generation took almost 2 years longer than "early estimates" to achieve production level usage, though part of that was TSMC getting hit by an earthquake JUST as they were starting to seriously ramp up production and losing a few months for repairs.

 Nobody is selling the RX 470 mining cards for $250 - the NewEgg postings were mistakes, they don't even have the cards yet - and the rep I talked to was pretty sure they were NOT going to actually sell the things at MSRP or even close when they DO get them.

 If you can get GTX 1070 at $400, GRAB THEM - that's bloody cheap at current pricing, and is the same ballpark they were in a month ago before the started getting impacted by the "mining caused GPU shortage".

 Last time I checked NewEgg (yesterday), for example, the LOWEST they had a "in stock" GTX 1070 listed at was well over $500, and most were $600-$800 of the VERY FEW IN STOCK options they had at all.


 BTW - they didn't have ANYTHING in an RX 470/480/570/580 for under $500 at all, and only 1 or 2 options under $600 - at current pricing the RX line has ZERO advantage in reaching ROI over the GTX 1070.

 Trying to call those cards "$250 cards" is not valid and hasn't been for a month or two now.

Intel iGPU are not worth even TRYING to mine on - the performance even compared to AMD iGPU is a joke (and for almost all coins AMD iGPU aren't worth using).

 It's also a PAIN to get the Intel OpenCL stuff to work with anyone else's OpenCL drivers, too many conflicts.
 In THEORY if you install the Intel drivers then HAND INSTALL the NVidia drivers using the "no-opengl-files" option it SHOULD let you use both, but I've had so many issues trying to get that to work on drivers new enough to support Pascal cards that I finally gave up on the idea.

 For skein, you want the alexis78 version of ccminer - I was seeing ballpark 500ish mhash/s on GTX 1070s as I recall (might have been on a 1080 though) - the ti should be a fair bit faster.

 83c is VERY HIGH for a 24/7 mining GPU (The old R9 Hawaii GPUs could handle that high a temp reliably, little else can), and your fan setting is very low - 50% on a MINING card is going to overheat and cause issues unless you're in a VERY COLD environment.
 Kick that fan up to at least 80%, or better yet put a fan profile into Afterburner that's all-in by 80C.

 $10/day for one card is probably dead, too many folks have jumped in over the last couple months with WAY too many cards + coins have had a drop the last week and change.
 It might come back, it might not, but it would take a large price jump on one of the major GPU mineable coins to bounce it back up to that level for more than a day or two.

And the final result was -0.43 per bitcoinwisdom.

 I'm really supprised at the drop, though I suppose summer heat and dying miners might account for it.

 Just goes to show that RBC Capital is clueless.
 The announced NVidia options for mining-only cards are NOT as good as the announced AMD mining-only cards overall - if they'd put a GTX 1070 or a GDDR 5 (not 5x) 1080 in as an option it would be another story though.

 They're also wrong about the "much faster" part of that blurb.
 The REAL advantage for mining-specific cards will be better efficiency.

Between EWBF and Nicehash, ZEC support for NVidia is pretty well covered already.

 2013-2014 would have been the GPU days of Litecoin mining, then when Litecoin ASICs started showing up move to X11 (DASH) for a short while.

 Difficulty was a TON lower at the time - my HD 7750s were pulling in over $1 NET a day each for part of that timeframe, the R9 280x would have been pulling in ballpark 6 TIMES as much (4x cores and quite a bit higher core clock).


 Trading is a crapshoot. Way too many periods there was NO profit to be made, only varying amounts of loss unless you got LUCKY on timing a small spike.
 Mining is a lot less of a crapshoot, if you don't go overboard at the wrong time and keep your overhead low.

 There are over 2 Million GPUs mining ETH - not all ETH mining GPUs manage 30 Mh/s after all.
 ZEC has ballpark 1 million, might be somewhat less depending on how much of ZEC mining is high-end NVidia driven (GTX 1080/1080ti are GOOD on ZEC, so-so to poor on ETH).
 THEN you get to the small fry that might manage a half million between them all combined.

 ETH going POS will hammer profitability - but not 100x and it won't be all-at-once, given the current plan to "phase in" PoS in multiple steps.
 The "Ice Age" driven longer time between blocks is also going to start seriously impacting profitability sometime in the next month, it's ALREADY had a noticeable impact though not a big one.
 That will ALSO tend to make the "get out of ETH" transition a more gradual thing.

 Getting into mining NOW, due to insanely inflated GPU pricing and the serious profitability DROP on almost all coins the last week and some, is a major risk - one of the hedges of mining is that you can get MOST of the value of your rig back (as long as it doesn't die) by selling it when profitability dies - though as many rigs as are involved this time around, that might take quite a while to get a SIGNIFICANT percentage back - and the inflated sale prices on GPUs currently make it a LOT tougher as the GPUs are the large majority of the cost of most rigs.
 It's much less of a risk for those with VERY VERY LOW electric cost, as we'll retain profitability longer than anyone else - but there will come a time that 3c/KWH or less electric farms will be about the only folks showing a profit - and right now it's looking seriously like a race between that point and the "final" move to full PoS as to which is going to kill ETH mining first.

 On the other hand, this time around there is at least one OTHER coin with a fairly high market cap and a high network hashrate as part of the "profitable coins to mine" basket, and quite a few smaller ones, so it's not going to be nearly as much of a bloodbath as the end of Litecoin GPU days - and given ETH plans on POS I don't see any real probability of anyone building an ASIC for it to accelerate the collapse.
 ZEC on the other hand.....

At current profitability levels, the old Gridseed GC3355 based gear like their "80 blade" and Orb units are profitable - but not by a lot unless you have VERY cheap electric, and you better GET them super-cheap if you expect to pay one off.

 The Moonlander (Alcheminer-based USB stick) should be even more profitable, but payback is going to take a LONG time on it unless you get on VERY cheap.

 To be fair, thread title IS "be a miner as a dayjob".

 I don't have 120 rigs - but I find that 20ish well-designed and built rigs aren't a HUGE pain to keep up with, and once I finish my recently-started "rationalization" effort it should be quite a bit easier.
 I can see 120 taking a lot more than an hour/day though. 9-)

LW.com just announced the release of a Scrypt miner - but info is a bit short at this time, and they're talking MOQ of 100 of them.

One other factor to keep in mind - if profitability drops far enough, folks will stop buying L3+ units.

 Second factor to keep in mind - Bitmain can't get as many chips as it wants to make L3+ units WITH, which is going to slow difficulty growth to a lot less than it COULD be - this is why you see a lot of "big jumps" then followed by a flat period.

 There is no way to be profitable on SHA256 based coins like Bitcoin/Namecoin/etc, or on Scrypt-based coins like Litecoin/Doge, or on X11/X13/X15/Qubit/Quark based coins like DASH with anything but an ASIC-based miner - and in the first 2 cases, they better be fairly RECENT ASIC-based miners.

 ASIC are just that much more efficient at those algos.

 Cost of electric isn't a huge factor RIGHT NOW if you have recent equipment, but it's still a major factor on paying off your miners long-term even with the most current gear - unless the current price jumps survive for quite a few more months.


 AWS is NOT profitable to mine on, Amazon charges WAY too much. Ditto the Google equivalent or Azure.