They can - but Ethereum isn't a scrypt-based coin.


 Don't need to flash a R9 290 to R9 290x (which doesn't work very often, seems like the only ones it ever worked on were some VERY EARLY R9 290s - but can't hurt to try) to get good ETH hashrate.

 Flash with one of the modded bios by TheStilt, should be able to run at 1100/1250 at that point as long as the ambient isn't way high, good for about 28 Mh/s right now.
 I'm pretty sure that those modded bios only work on reference-board models, but that's a lot of the R9 290s out there.
 He also made versions for the R9 290x - could try one of those first, nice thing about the R9 290 is that I'm pretty sure they're all "dual bios" so if you brick one bios you can use the other to get the card back.

 I have no clue what they would do on dual mining, never bothered trying it.

I vaguely remember seeing a "cube-derived" miner on the Baikal website somewhere, but thought it was 1800 Mh/s not 2000.

IMO don't bother if you're on Windows, Afterburner does an infinitely better job at fan control.

 I have never seen an adapter that will allow a PCI-E card of ANY type to be plugged into a PCI slot.

 VERY VERY different standards, and PCI-E is VERY MUCH higher performance than PCI ever was.


 There are a very few cards made for PCI that can mine - but they are very low performance by current standards, don't think any of them have more than about 128 "cores" and not sure if they go THAT high (48 is actually comming to mind as the top in a PCI GPU, but I might thinking of AGP).

 You live in Indiana?

 *ROFLMAO*

 You will want a CPU with more horsepower if you want to mine BURST on it. I'd recomment a quad-core as a minimum, perhaps the bottom-end i3.

 SSD is going to be a total waste, since you NEED a sizeable HD on the rig anyway to make it WORTH mining BURST on it.
 I wouldn't bother trying to mine BURST on anything less than a 1TB unless I already HAVE the drive - and my recent rig builds have been going with 3TB drives (except for one that has a Seagate Archive 8TB).

They announced it when they were ready - and 2 of those cards are also now listed on NewEgg as "out of stock".

Sapphire has 4 "mining-specific" RX 470 based cards on their website now, 2 of them are listed on NewEgg as "out of stock" but I suspect they haven't actually had any stock of the cards yet.

Sapphire has 4 different cards listed on their website in this line - matrix of "4GB" vs "8GB" and "Samsung RAM" vs "non-Samsung RAM".

 2 of them are listed on Newegg as "out of stock" but I suspect they haven't actually HAD any in stock yet.


 The crash will probably see a ton of "cheap used" cards show up - but I don't see the crash happening for several months yet, unless ETH and ZEC both have a price crash well under $100 before that.

 ASIC-based miners took over Bitcoin mining years ago.
 Don't bother even thinking about it on any non-ASIC device unless you like to generate lots of heat and wasted electricity for pretty much ZERO return.

 400 actually is quite good for a 1070 - it's folks paying 400+ for any RX series card or 600+ for a 1070 that are at some serious risk.

 Even BEFORE the price jump, you pretty much had to get "sales" to get under 400 on the 1070 - and a lot of them were normally 430-480 range.

 AS I SAID, "I would say it's not a big factor as the LARGE majority of ETH GPUs are probably Polaris".

 Upon reflection though, network hashrate has approximately DOUBLED just in the last month - during which time all RX 470/480/570/580 cards have been in VERY short supply.
 Given there was still a lot of stock in the channel of NVidia 1060/1070 cards a month ago, but since those cards are now in just as short of supply as the RX cards coupled with the existing shortage of AMD cards, I believe that the amount of ETH hashrate added by NVidia cards exceeds 30% and likely is an outright majority of the hashrate added in the past month - which would put Nvidia share of TOTAL hashrate at a minimum of 15% and likely over 25%.
 I believe the NVidia share of total hashrate that was in place PRIOR to a month ago is very small, likely 2% or LESS.

 What farms were building with a year ago - or even 6 months ago - isn't a significant part of the CURRENT ETH network hashrate.

 Never heard of "PTOY", can't be all THAT successful (unless it's an acronym I'm not parsing correctly).

 Some of the Sapphire mining-specific cards are listed on NewEgg - but "out of stock".
 What I don't get about the MSI card listings I've seen is that they don't have the fins running horizontal - what's the point of expanding the holes in the bracket when the air doesn't GO that way.
 Sapphire and Asus have the cooling fins going the right way.

Why didn't MSI turn the bloody fins around so the bigger holes in the bracket actually DO something to help cooling?

 Sapphire seems to have gotten THAT part right on their RX-based mining-specific cards (but I think they had them pointed the right way in the first place).

 VERY bad assumption on Polaris-based cards the last month, and turning into a VERY bad assumption as well on the GTX 1060 and 1070 this past week or so.

 On the other hand, profitability RIGHT NOW is still very high compared to 3+ months ago, even with the major slide this week - but there is no certainty that it will STAY high or for how long if it DOES do so.

I prefer Afterburner to Trixx, but Trixx and PrecisionX are ALSO light years better than Wattman.

Which is damning with ZERO praise at all - in hours of trying to get Wattman to work, I was never able to get it to do something BASIC like GET MY FANSPEED ABOVE MID-60 PERCENT WHEN THE CARD IS OVERHEATING.

 The interface is junk, the controls are anti-intuitive and flat out don't seem to WORK on some parts, the size of the bloody thing is insanely bloated, and it just don't WORK for crap.

 I don't understand why anyone bothers using that pathetic junk.

I don't see any real reason for a diff drop, other than the possibility of Bitmain pulling a bunch of "semi-new" production miners out of their own farm and selling them, triggering a 1-2 week short-term drop while those miners are in transit.

 Given they are sold out on their "next batch" and that's not due to ship for a while, I figured diff would be driven by the competition selling miners that AREN'T sold out as regularly.

Even with the price drops over the last week, GPU mining is STILL a lot more profitable now than it was 3 months or more back.


 Good to see that NewEgg WILL be carrying at least some of the "mining specific" cards - even if they're going to have stock runout fast issues like on the consumer cards.
 Sapphire was also smart about it, unlike ASUS - they give you a CHOICE on the memory options.

 I would bet that a significant part of the hashrate climb THIS WEEK has been from NVidia 1060 and 1070 cards.

 Prior to that, though, probably mostly Polaris.


 Also, keep in mind a lot of folks are using other stuff, like my own R9 290 cards....


 On the other hand, I would say it's not a big factor as the LARGE majority of ETH GPUs are probably Polaris and it will even out for those.


 I'd be more worried about the Ice Age "block time gets a LOT higher" stuff dropping rewards quite a bit.