ZEC uses less power, *AND* you will definitely see better return on the 7970 (and probably the 7950) on ZEC.
 Also, not sure if your 7950 CAN mine ETH any more - is it 2GB or 3GB?
 2 GB cards CAN'T mine ETH as the DAG file is too large.

 I don't have a 7970 - but I do have R9 280x which was the same GPU paired with a little faster (by default) ram and has pretty much the same performance on mining.

 What is the TDP displayed in nvidia-smi when you set the card to 100% in Afterburner (or whatever you use)?

 I don't see the point of 2 power connections on a 150 watt card - I bet the REAL figure is at least 180 and possibly 200.

ed is also getting challenged the last couple weeks by 2 other Team Curecoin members, and longtime folder "war".

 NONE of his challengers are going to pass his total production anytime soon though.

 
 Also, it looks like Team Curecoin is going to pass Team EVGA sometime late THIS year, if the current trends continue.

 In personal news, I finally have gotten settled into the new place enough to get all but one of my folding rigs back up (the one rig is a single-card rig that I'll probably get up and running again tomorrow, though I'm *thinking* about consoladating that card into another multi-card rig instead) - got the "bought parts a week and a half ago" rig put together, only to find that it's Intel CPU couldn't handle the load (moved those cards to a spare AM3+ motherboard, where the AMD CPU is also overloaded but not QUITE as badly and will be a LOT cheaper to upgrade to one that WILL handle the load), and have put parts on order for my next 3-card rig.

 One quarter of an Ed I have achieved, now time to aim at a third. 9-)

 The problem is that 9 cents / kwh is very iffy for making ROI on - and that solar power investment will probably take longer than you're thinking to recoup it's investment.
 Keep in mind that you are competing with HUGE farms with power costs of under 3 cents/kwh (one specific well-known example, MegaBigPower aka GigaWatt in East Wenatchee, WA) - they're going to be profitable with the S9 for quite a while after the "next gen semi tech" makes it into miners, while you'd be struggling to break even WITH the new tech.

 If you're serious about mining, you move into Cheap Hydropower areas - central Washington state, most or all of Quebec, part or all of Labrador being the "hot spots" in North America due to large hydropower projects that subsidise low local rates through selling off excess production to HIGH cost power areas - though there are a few other places you might get to 5c/kwh on "industrial" scale mining, usually ALSO close to large hydropower projects.

 Funny note - the Grand Coulee Dam output almost all gets shipped quite a long ways from the dam itself, as the "local" county PUDs own their own Columbia River power dams with lots of excess capacity and doesn't NEED power from the Grand Coulee.

 *IF* Bitcoin resumes a price climb, and that price climb stays ahead of or stays very close to network hashrate increases, then you should make good money even with your "high cost by mining standard" power.
 Keep in mind though that sometimes "IF" is the biggest word in the English language.

 Very doubtful, or NVidia would have been having card shortages like AMD has been having LONG before now.


If you can get 1070s at non-gouge pricing, grab them while you can - the 1080 doesn't seem to be getting anywhere near as much attention *yet*.

 My 290s are mixed right now - got one rig of them still pointed to ETH mining, but the other 2 have moved over to GRC via BOINC and the MooWrapper project (that rig is very close to hitting #1 on the "top host" list).
 My R9 280x moved to GRC / BOINC / Milkyway though they spent a short time on MooWrapper before that.
 My HD 7870s and HD 7850 also moved to GRC / BOINC / MooWrapper.

 These were not moves due to greater profitability, they were moves due to "I can AFFORD to do this now".

 8-)

 I might move my RX 470s over to MooWrapper as well at some point, they have almost the same performance on that particular project as the R9 290s do.

If your electric was cheap enough, GPU mining was quite profitable all of last year - just not at the crazy-good levels of the last 2-3 months.
It was profitable enough I could afford to move TO the land of "Very Low Cost Electric" and go professional as a miner.

 If you had an electric cost above the US average, it was barely profitable if at all (which is WHY I moved, my rates in the 3 months of "summer" were 14+ cents/kwh where I was at in Iowa, despite "Time of Day" rate savings).

 I would say that last month and early this month are probably the highest-profit times for GPU mining since before the first Bitcoin ASICs arrived, somewhat more so than the peak of Litecoin profitability on a GPU - and even right now that profitability level is STILL very close to it's all-time peak.

 Even if ETH and ZEC and XMR prices stagnate for the next 6 months, profitability will remain elevated due to the inability of miners to get as many GPUs as they want which will restrict network hashrate growth quite a bit and hold profitability up into the current "insanely short ROI return" levels that have spurred massive investment into GPU farms - and for at least the next couple of those months new rigs will easily pay back their investment before profitability drops enough to bring profitability back down to the "better have fairly low cost electric if you expect to pay for this investment in less than a year" range.

 Unless there is a lot more price rise on the "big" coins, I still believe that the major shakeout will happen when ETH goes mostly PoS - but I figure there will start to be some low-level attrition before that given their plans to "gradually" move to PoS from PoW.

 IF there IS a lot more price rise, especially if the price manages to stay ahead of network hashrate growth in the non-ETH big coins, the profitability drop when millions of ETH mining cards start looking for new homes *might* not reach the level that was seen last summer - and the growth rate will slow but not die.

 I'm planning for the former scenario, but hoping for the latter.

I'm not understanding something here.

 Neural net shows me as being around 630 magnatude - why is the wallet showing me at 0?

 Yes, I read that cryptocurrencytalk link - still have no clue why the current wallet version seems to be broken.

 Is there an ETA on when this issue will be fixed?



 On the plus side, I DO like the move to make the wallet less cluttered, though it STILL wastes too much screen space, and STILL seems to be assuming everyone uses a widescreen monitor (I strongly dislike the whole concept, and have never understood why they became popular much less seem to be turning into the bloody default).

You need to lose the attitude.

I gave you serious feedback, and you chose to be rude and insulting and accuse me of "being funny".

 Why no, I am not an "expert on UX design" - whatever that is supposed to mean - and the WAY you posted that was a deliberate slap in the face to EVERYONE GIVING YOU FEEDBACK.
 What I am is someone that has used a ton of websites over the decades the Internet has existed, and has a strong preference on support-type sites LIKE YOUR SITE IS SUPPOSED TO BE for "functional" over "pretty" and "fancy".

 Your ATTITUDE has me about to the point of pulling all of my remaining miners out of Nicehash and never bothering to look at OR POSITIVELY TALK about your site ever again.

 If you are not willing to listen when folks tell you WHY they dislike your new site design, and you insist on being rude and insulting when you BLOW OFF that feedback, then you don't DESERVE to have us using your site and feeding you fees to do so.

 For Equihash coins like ZEC, sol IS = hash for all practical purposes.



 Afterburner works nicely on all of the EVGA cards I own - and I prefer the "classic" interface (the current default interface is too "pretty" and HARD TO READ and less functional imo) and lower "overhead" to PrecisionX, plus PrecisionX in my experience with it crashes a lot more often.


 Mining speed for a lot of algos depends on memory speed to a significant degree - ETH in particular is hard memory limited after a point and VERY sensitive to memory latancy - not just on raw clock rate.

 Also keep in mind that you can't set a "boost" clock, you can only set the "base" clock.

 Most cards will run the GPU at a lower voltage when the TDP is dropped, but often can maintain their boost clock for a little ways into the undervolting - how far depends on the specific chip, as manufacturing variations will affect each chip differently - this is a large part of what the "silicon lottery" is about, getting LUCKY and ending up with a card that has a GPU that undervolts well and memory/GPU that overclocks better.

 Difficulty rise as more S9s (and other units) get sold is what you're missing.

 Most calculators don't even allow you to ESTIMATE that and factor it in - that's why I stick with BitCoinWisdom even though they haven't fully updated it for a while.

 The only serious limit to how fast the difficulty went up for most of the last year is how fast Bitmain could get the chips to make more miners with - but it looks like Bitfury is FINALLY getting into the game on the current node generation, and at least 2 other companies have publically entered the field with their own chip designs (and who knows how many miners BW.COM has been pumping out for their internal usage after they decided to NOT sell their current-node-gen miners to the public after all, along with at least one other large private farm I'm aware of that's working on their own chip for internal use, and what the heck is MegaBigPower AKA GigaWatt planning to fill THEIR new mining halls with?).

 The question isn't "is difficulty going to double", the question is "how long will it take for difficulty to double".


 While "many" and possibly even "most" commercial spaces have 200 amp 220V service in the US, I've been in quite a few that did NOT - retail shops and warehouses in particular are known for sliding by with lower power service since they're intended mostly for storing stuff.

 Automatic is fine if you set up a CUSTOM fan profile - stock fan profiles are way too much about "quiet" and not enough about "keep the bloody card COOL".

 I generally use a profile as follows:

 80C       fan 100%
 70C       fan 80%
 60C       fan 60%
 50C       fan 40%
 40C       fan 20%

 This profile works well on any video card made in the last 6 years or so that I've had access to (which is a pretty wide range on AMD but only the last 2 gens on NVidia).


 The GTX 1070 Gigabyte ITX doesn't run all that hot, if you keep the airflow path to the fan clear AND have enough airflow.
 I've got a few of those....


 One thing that might help - remove the slot metal piece from the "empty" slot between the ITX card and the power supply.
 Also, that back fan is sucking cooling air AWAY from the video cards - it would be better to have it in the front pushing more air INTO the case.

 Too many cases spend too much time and effort on keeping the CPU area airflow high, and neglect the GPU area VERY BADLY - wasn't a bad concept 10 years ago but in this day and age of a single GPU often pulling a lot more power than the GPU, it's BAD DESIGN that you have to work around by smart setup of your fans to push more air through the GPU area, AND leave an "exit" path FOR that air.

Driver efficiency in mining has been spotty since 15.12 - some of the 16 series specifically including 16.9.1 and 16.10.1 had the same efficiency as 15.12, but a lot of the versions between 15.12 and 16.9.1 were low-throughput trash, and 16.11 introduced "don't allow modded BIOS" and also dropped the efficiency again.

 I have not, and WILL not, even bother looking at any ReLive (16.12-current) drivers again as I have no cards that need them, and they are so badly bloated I don't even want to THINK about the waste level - I made the mistake of testing 16.12, and GHODS it was way oversized and offered NOTHING to me and was a ROYAL PAIN IN THE REAR to try to navigate and find anything on - then you end up having to go to the "advanced" menu a lot which is nothing more than their PREVIOUS, FAR MORE USABLE interface.

 For those with RX 5xx series cards, of course, you have no option - for which I feel some sorrow for you.

 Don't even get me started on that total waste of time AMD calls "Wattman" - Afterburner makes it look pathetic and was a BETTER tool 5+ years ago.
 For that matter, TriX and PrecisionX are both far better tools - but TriX in recent versions seems to be following AMD's lead into a user-UNfriendly interface that concentrates too much on "pretty" and not enough on usability or being able to FIND where you make certain adjustments.


 Contrary to Micro$loth Marketing's pronouncements for the last couple of decades, change often is NOT better, "fancier" interfaces are often a PAIN to use, and "pretty" does not beat "functional" when you have to use a piece of software more than once a month or so especially when it's so bloated as to take half an hour even at CURRENT Internet speeds just to download all the bloody lard.

The December 2017 reference is to the "current" planned timeframe for ETH to *start* transitioning to PoS from PoW.

I have a simple suggestion, as I also dislike the new website.

 Roll it back to the old one as a "failed experiment".

 The new one seems to have spent too much time on being "pretty" but not enough time on "functional and informative".

 I concede in advance that your site is going to have to be more complicated due to the multi-algorythm factor, but you might want to look carefully at ethermine.org as an example of a better way to display the information.

It will work, but it's a fairly low-end card - half the cores of a RX 470/570 and clocks a little lower.

 Given current pricing on the RX line though, it's actually NOT out of line on price any more....

 1080 is NOT a good ETH mining card, the GDDR 5x latency kills it's hashrate to where it's worse than a 1070 and IIRC a hair worse in some cases than a 1060 3GB.

 ZEC and offshoots like ZTC/ZEN/HUSH, the Skein and Groetsl coins, are all much more profitable options for the 1080.

 For ETH, the 1070 is definitely a better option - 28+ Mhs with even a mild memory overclock and if you have good low-latency memory or can overclock your memory a LOT you can get over 30 Mh/s.
 It's been pretty close for the last couple weeks between ZEC and ETH on profitability for a 1070, though there have been more profitable options most of that time (see the 1080 list).

 Down side - current pricing of the 1070 is starting to push hard into lower-end 1080 territory, and availability is getting VERY marginal.
 It seems like the 1070 is what the big-farm ETH miners are starting to go to when they can't get the good RX cards at a reasonable price.

I'm pretty sure the WX 8200 (which that card should be a version of) should have come with applicable drivers.
 I'm not certain but think it's likely that it would work with standard AMD drivers since it's the same chipset as their consumer cards - but AMD and NVidia do some wierd stuff sometimes on drivers for their "professional" card lines.

 Not dead but gonna be bad.

 I did a calculation a few days back - and came up with a ballpark estimate of something like 10 MILLION AMD cards having been added to the ETH mining rolls over the last 3 months alone, and a total of ballpark 17 Million total - this was a conservative estimate as I assumed 30 Mh/card (which is marginal-high for a RX 480/580 with bios mods and high overclock, close to a hair high for the R9 290/290x/390/390x with bios mods and high overclocks, right ballpark for the GTX 1070 with high memory overclock, and quite a bit high for the RX 470/570 even with BIOS mods and high overclock - almost all other cards that CAN mine ETH have significanly lower hashrates, or almost no presence like the GTX 1080ti).

 Did the same calculation on ZEC - and came up with more like *1* million cards total.
 Nothing else came even close.


 ETH mining dies, everything else is going to get SWAMPED by ex-ETH miners looking for new homes for their rigs - and profitability will crash bigtime 'till folks just start shutting down rigs in quantity, and even THEN it's going to be the folks in Very Low Cost Electric areas being the ONLY ones making a profit.

 Continued price rise on non-ETH coins will mitigate this somewhat - but it's gonna take a LOT of climb to avoid the crash destroying profitability entirely for most small miners and even SOME mid-to-large farms.


 THAT is when I predict the next "mining crash" will happen - but it's still months off at the soonest, shouldn't happen overnight given the plans for ETH to phase in POS gradually, and SOME of us have made provisions to survive when it does happen.


 I strongly suspect that a lot of the folks "unloading RX cards on eBay" are more about taking advantage of the current GOUGE pricing as opposed to dumping still-profitable mining cards 'cause they're worried about a crash that's several months away at the soonest.
 I've been strongly tempted to put my pair of RX 470s up on cragslist and see if they'll sell at some crazy-high price.


 BTW - anyone else noticed that GTX 1070 pricing is climbing a LOT and AVAILABILITY IS CRASHING HARD?
 I wonder how much of that is ETH miners going for the "at current AMD crazy pricing GTX 1070 is NOW THE HASH/$ CHAMP for ETH mining" cards, and how much is NVidia using available foundry capacity to stock up on whatever the new stuff is they mentioned at their last Earnings Call (a couple-three weeks back or so).

 Keep in mind that a foundry has a lead time measured in WEEKS even for customers the size of AMD and Nvidia, between "put the order in" and "deliver chips".



 Nice thing from my point of view - my R9 290s are all paid off long since on ETH mining, my R9 280Xs are working on other stuff (that's not as profitable but pretty close, and more satisfying), and my lower-end AMD stuff is mostly also working on other stuff with higher satisfaction value but lower profitability (those cards though have never been big profit makers).

 Moo!

Cases limit airflow.

 Cases that CAN mount 4x GPU are kinda expensive, adding to the length of time needed to ROI a rig. I've not seen any $50 case (except VERY RARELY on sales) that can do so, but I have seen some on sale in the $60 range.
 You also NEED to add high-flow fans to get enough cooling into them - which adds more cost *AND EATS MORE POWER* than an open-air rig with the same components.

 RACK mount cases are even MORE expensive AND you have to customise them, or they are QUITE A BIT MORE expensive - *AND* there is no point to them unless you have or buy the rack they're designed to mount it.


 You CAN use fan-type cards in a case - but you better have VERY good airflow through that case and plenty of places for the hot air to exhaust from close to the GPUs.