They are going to need to get the price down a fair bit under $200 if they want any real interest in such a LOW END (by mining standards) card.

 There are those rumours about a GTX 1080-based card for $350 though - THAT should sell well.

 If NVidia was paying attention though, they'd put together a 1080 GPU and GDDR 5 (NOT 5x) based card - or at least a 1070 based card - for mining.


 $2500 for the "mining system" is way too much to be competative for what it offers. $1500-$1800 would be a competative price.

300+ for a 1060 based mining card is a joke.

 Get it under $150 and they might get some interest.

AMD are actually a near tossup (at the pre-shortage card pricing) on Equihash for hash/$ and very close on hash/watt.

Nvidia cards don't have the OPTION of bios changes to optimise them - that's actually a MINUS vs AMD.

If you have a VPS with high-end NVidia graphics, it would work - but you'll be paying a lot more than you earn.

 50% faster clock HD 7750 with more RAM - so their mining performance is going to be quite low, but as "workstation" cards their price will be Way Too High.

 I would guestimate 100 sol/s at MOST on ZEC, and the 2GB won't do ETH at all while the 4GB is going to be deathly slow with that 128 bit memory bus narrowness.

 You can track "by rig" on the individual algo pages, but not by card in Nicehash.

The RX 470/480/570/580 are all in VERY VERY short supply at this time, AMD discontinued production on the 4xx models when they brought out the 5xx (or perhaps a bit before), but they haven't gotten the 570/580 production ramped up enough to handle the demand.

 The current cryptocoin mining boom isn't helping any - it's reminding us older-timers of the Litecoin "boom" of 2014 more or less and the shortage of AMD cards we saw happen THEN.


 ETH is considered to be an AMD coin because when the RX 470/480 was in the ballpark $200 range they could match the GTX 1070 on hashrate closely (the 1080 did NOT do better, GDDR 5x latency is higher and ETH is very sensitive to memory) and VERY close on efficiency while costing about half the price. At CURRENT AMD card pricing, Nvidia is now probably a BETTER choice, unless you manage to sneak in a AMD 470/480/570/580 purchase at a lot lower than most current pricing.

 ZEC was actually somewhat of a tossup - the NVidia cards can get to be a little more efficient with proper tuning, and the higher-end cards DO mine a lot faster than anything AMD in current production (the Pro Duo has been out of production for a while, but it and the Fury line are pretty competative on efficiency and the Pro Duo argues well vs anything NVidia on sol/s), but it wasn't a huge difference that made AMD totally uncompetative - 'till the recent AMD shortage and resultant price gouging.

 Most coins that show a MAJOR preference one way or the other tend to be small - DGB for example is very nice to NVidia running skein OR groetsl algos but a mid-size miner like ME can move the profitability noticeably by swinging all of my rigs in or out of that. There was a point for a couple hours that I was almost 5% of the total NETWORK hashrate on DGB-Groetsl, 2-3 weeks back.

 Also, when you compare hash/$ and hash/watt you really need to compare it at the "total system" level, sometimes the power and cost of the system make what appears to be a "better" card more of a "about the same" or even a "worse" card when ALL power usage and costs are added in. This is why most miners don't use the GTX 1060 unless they already have some, it's a nice card on a "raw card stats" basis but when you factor in productivity of a 3+ card rig running 1060s vs the same rig running 1070s or 1080s or in some cases 1080tis, it doesn't come out quite so well....

 EVGA G2 1300 is pretty close to plat efficiency level, but availability is getting spotty since EVGA decided to move to their new G3 model (which IMO is a severe downgrade).

 I've got some GTX 1070 models that have a TDP at 180 watts - "reference" is 155 not 150.

 If you keep the TDP turned down to where the cards are pulling 150 watts or less, though, your 1200 should be plenty - the rest of the system isn't going to pull 300 watts.

Find the cables, or try contacting Antec and see it they'll sell you spare cabling.

 Power supplies from different manufacturers do NOT normally use the same cables, so don't try mix-and-match.

You have to mod the BIOS (or flash a pre-modded BIOS like the many put together by TheStilt back in Litecoin mining days) to undervolt a R9 280/280x/290/290x

 Not sure on ZEC, but I have a triple R9 290 rig (Sapphire reference design cards) running ETH that soaks a bit over 300 watts/card at 1100/1250 with one of the bios from TheStilt on the cards (they used to thermal limit to around 900 Mhz, less when it was HOT, before I flashed the BIOS on each card, now they do 1100 and STILL run about 10 degrees C cooler and it has to get VERY hot for them to start thermal limiting).

 My guess is that ZEC would probably run more like 220-250 watts per card at the same clocks with the same BIOS - but ZEC doesn't seem to need as much CPU on those to max sol/s so you can probably downclock them some for less power draw.

 He used it a few places, but I think Moon was probably the first.

 It's so addictive I moved to "the land of VERY low cost electric" and went pro last summer.

 9-)

 Ryzen is a good choice for efficient XMR (Monero) mining.
 Not worth getting the cpu JUST for that IMO, but if you already have it....

 1) A lot of folks don't know about DGB and skein since skein does NOT show up on whattomine as part of the "comparison" page (I've brought that up, but the owner of the page declined to change it for reasons I disagree with).

 2) It's a MUCH smaller network hashrate, ONE big miner shifting over would swamp it to the point of having half the profitiability OR LESS of ZEC.

 3) It's not all THAT much more profitable, and the pools for it seem to all have issues (though theblocksfactory seems to do the best of them IME).

 4) There have been periods over the last 2-3 weeks since the DGB price explosion (and recent crash/correction) that it has NOT been more profitable than ZEC.


 There have also been times that the groetsl version of DGB has been more profitable than ZEC on NVidia cards - but points 2 3 and 4 apply to that as well - groetsl IS however on the whattomine compare page.

 It means that air conditioning can't keep up with the heat generated by their rigs.

 1000 watts of rig generates about 3400 BTU of heat - that's a level of power often exceeded by multi-card rigs PER RIG, only needs 8 rigs to generate more heat than a 25,000 BTU window A/C CAN remove (and 25k BTU is HUGE for a window unit, most are quite a bit smaller in capacity).

 Just to add insult to injury - that 25k A/C unit will probably need another 2700-2800 watts of power to run IT, at common 9.x SEER efficiency rating range of most window units - though on the positive side most of THAT heat gets exhausted to the outside and not into the room.

 Central A/C is commonly rated in "tons" of capacity for historical reasons - a "ton" equates to 6000 BTU, and a LOT of central units are in the "5 ton" or less range, which is still only 30k BTU or less.
 Large building central A/C units will be quite a bit larger - but they also have to provide A/C for a lot more space, and a lot more heat-generating humans and lights and computers and .....


 TANSTAAFL
 (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)


 Some "portable" dehumidifier units have a duct to exhaust the hot air they produce to an outside area. I want to say "most or all" but I've only worked with a few of those type units.

 41.

 On a "vs BTC" basis it's still not recovered to the ballpark 10000 satoshi it peaked at just before the delist - but on a $ basis it's been pretty close most of the last few days.

 

 You can still make money with HD 7850s - and 7870s and 7870XTs and 7950s and 7970s - and even 7750s in a pinch though those don't make a LOT.

 I do concede my R9 290s make more than any of the HD series (except possibly a HD 7990).



 ETH probably has more GPUs working on it than ALL other crypto combined - and while ZEC is a Nvidia stronghold a lot of AMD cards work well there too, especially the older 2GB and less cards that can't do ETH anymore.


 The recent modification to the AMD / GF agreement blows the cap off AMD's "can produce" max number, if they are willing to pay a bit of a premium to do so.

 ETH is still mineable on 3GB cards - but the 7970 is a lot better off mining ZEC at this time.

 1070 is also not a good choice for ETH mining, does better on ZEC - but it's been very close at times the last couple weeks.
 There are other altcoins that the 1070 does better at, look into the skein and groetsl coins, or try Nicehash to see other options.

HD 7970 is basically a pre-rebadge R9 280x with slower memory, will do perhaps 14 Mh/s at most on ETH with a serious overclock.

 MUCH better choice for ZEC, where it's at least somewhat competative with current cards.

 For a pure mining rig, get the cheapest low-power CPU that fits in the socket.
 More ram CAN sometimes be usefull, some miners like Claymore seem to want more ram for multi-GPU setups. 8 or 16 should be plenty though.

 The only real difference from a miner standpoint on any RX 570 is the memory - some brands of memory seem to clock better, which can be quite important to ETH/ETC/other ETH spinoffs and helpfull on everything else.

ZEC, or join the dark side and come to GRC via the Milkyway BOINC project (Tahiti chips are VERY good for DP Floating Point work which Milkyway needs).

 Tahiti was never a good ETH choice except when you didn't have any other profitable alternatives.


 R9 280x hasn't been capable of ETH mining at more than about 15-16 Mh/s for well over a year now.