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It is unlikely that a new generation of mining gear (probably will be called the S11 for Bitmain) will arrive before late 2018 and more likely 2019 sometime.
Unlike previous generations of Bitcoin mining ASIC where the process used by the ASIC was NOT the "most recent state of the art process" available for semiconductors as a whole, the CURRENT generation (including the Bitmain S9/T9/R4, the Avalon 721/741, the most recent BitFury-based gear, and a few other "lesser known" folks) is based on "current generation latest state of the art" for semiconductor making - which means any MAJOR improvement in efficiency need to wait for the NEXT generation of the "state of the art" to show up - and then some months or perhaps even a year as that "state of the art" is going to be tied up by MAJOR manufactures for use in smartphones, AMD and NVidia GPUs, AMD and Intel CPUs, and other such LARGE SCALE usage.
For perspective - NVidia likely has sold more GTX 1070 cards than all ASIC mining makers have made of all ASIC mining machines COMBINED.
Then you get to the high-volume stuff like AMD RX series cards, Ryzen, Intel CPUs, and OMG Smartphones that are made on the current process nodes.....
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1) Is it possible to build a GPU machine capable of reaching ASIC levels with the same energy costs? So what I am saying is it possible to convert a GPU into an ASIC miner with software? I don't understand the concept of ASIC miners and don't understand why an energy efficient GPU modified with software can't do the same job. The cost of a couple high end video cards is much higher or the same as a good ASIC miner, but if I lost interest in the hobby I would still have a high end GPU to show for it. If thats not possible and someone can explain that would be interesting as it is my profession.
2) Bitcoin is out of the reach of most single users. Even if I joined a pool the money generated would be low. I don't really want to buy an ASIC machine because it serves only one function. Which are the best alternatives to bitcoin?
3) Are the alternatives to bitcoin going to go to ASIC miners?
I would really enjoy setting up a system that could be used for gaming and bitcoin mining. I have so much spare equipment including old video cards from old Nvidia GTX cards from 2008 to an R270 in a spare computer that might function mining coins though I think they are closer to fire hazards with PCI express expander/add on cards. So if anyone can help me out on where to get started and answer my questions. I would jump right in, but an ASIC miner is going to end up as a doorstop once the 21 millionth bitcoin is mined so I would like to hear about alternatives if there are any.
1) No. ASIC are specifically designed to do one thing well, with NO excess circuitry for doing anything else (except perhaps chip temp and power usage monitoring). GPUs are designed to be a lot more flexable, which needs a lot more circuitry to do the same thing and limits their performance on that "one thing" compared to an ASIC. The only reason GPUs are viable on most altcoins is that nobody thinks those particular altcoins have enough of a market to support an ASIC (or in the case of ETH the question of "when it will go POS and no longer be mineable at all" seems to have killed any interest in making an ASIC for that algo, expecially coupled with the rather high amount of RAM needed to mine it at all which would lead to an ASIC for it being somewhat less of a performance jump vs GPUs than on algos that currently DO have ASIC options). 2) Bitcoin isn't really out of the reach of most single users, but it IS somewhat less expensive to built a low-end GPU-based (or dual purpose) rig that can be effective at mining Altcoins at this time. 3) It depends on the altcoin - if one of them gets big enough long enough (ZEC looks like the best current candidate, then probably XMR) someone MIGHT build an ASIC for it eventually. I expect to see someone build a ZEC ASIC at some point, and I'll be a little supprised if one DOESN'T show up before the end of the year. |
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At your ambient temperatures, I'd use an Afterburner "fan profile" and NOT a fixed setting on the fans, for those days it gets hot - and I would avoid overclocking ANYTHING.
Make sure the fan profile hits 100% at no higher than 80 degrees C when you set it up, then I'd say have it drop 20% for every 10 degrees C below 80.
Where the heck are you that you see temps in the 50 C range (122 F for those that don't grok Centigrade)....
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What's your power cost?
I personally wouldn't go with Giga Watt - but I'm in the same county, so they wouldn't be saving me anything nor would any other hosting provider.
9-)
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You might be getting limited on drive read speed by the use of USB - if your drives or hub or connection is USB2 at ANY point, that is a significant limitation on drive read speed.
I'm currently CPU plotting one of those Seagate 8TB now - into the second day and a bit more than halfway done with a FX 8570, but I'm also doing other stuff on the machine which slows the plotter down.
I'm not plotting it in one chunk though - half TB at a time is close enough - and it seems to READ about as fast as any other non-SSD drive I've worked with, easily hitting 80 MB/sec on jminer running the CPU to mine with (when it's not plotting at the time).
I've never been able to get GPUplotter to run at all, but the CPU plotting had been "fast enough" up to now.
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We're not even INTO the summer yet - but had 2 heat waves last month that hit 90+ F.
My R9 290 cards were NOT happy - at least 2 of them were thermal throttling due to the fairly poor options for maintaining airflow and cooling in my current (old) place.
Thank goodness I have started to move into the current (new) place - I should have the "runs hot" rigs moved before the NEXT heat wave hits!
8-)
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Plenty of numbers posted in the Claymore ZEC miner thread.
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these cards - unlike its predecessors - have double ball bearing fans
Odd, I've never seen a Gigabyte card that didn't use a dual ball-bearing fan, though I concede I've only owned a few of their models. My Gigabyte 1070s ARE dual ball-bearing - both the full-length 2-fan cards and the single-fan "ITX" models. |
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Sounds like you have a MB with a borked BIOS.
On the other hand, the only reason you would NEED to boot UEFI on a LINUX machine is if your boot partition is bigger than 3 GB (I think that's where the limit is, might be 2GB).
Also, hard drives get REAL wierd at times if they are formatted as non-UEFI then try to use them in a UEFI setup.
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the gigabyte board will do 3 with no risers. 1080ti 1080 ti 1070 mini
here are two builds on the biostar z170
The spacing on your Biostar Z170 boards is such you could probably get away with an Aorus as the slot 1 card (or that MSI "2.5" slot 1080ti since you seem to prefer MSI as a general rule). cvsea - only way I'd consider adopting you is if you were a pretty gal. Sorry. 9-) |
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OK, now I am into SERIOUS disbelief.
Some of my 1070 cards are THAT SAME IDENTICAL EVGA SC model - and they do NOT achieve 31 Mh/s on ETH, they do 29 or a bit LESS at the highest memory overclock they can handle with stability (+500 in Afterburner) for more than a few minutes - I did try them early on at +600 but it was crash city consistantly in 2-10 minutes, and +550 was crash city in less than an hour every time.
I do concede they are low cost cards - EVGA's second-lowest cost 1070 per their own website pricing.
So tell me, just HOW are you supposedly getting YOUR cards of the SAME identical model to hash at 2Mh/sec faster while keeping them stable?
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As far as "most 1070 can do over 31Mh/s" - I call BULLSHIT on that one, NONE of mine have ever managed more than 30 no matter HOW HARD I pushed clocks, even at 180 watts much less 95.
ETH depends WAY too much on low memory latency, and that VARIES WIDELY depending on the brand and sometimes the specific chips of the memory in a card.
Ok so I dont mine ETH, but i switched and setup my cards just for you. Here is the screenshot of my 7x1070 rig. And please do not talk bullshit to people just because of your extremely low knowledge of the nvidia cards ( judging from your previous posts where you are lost tbh). Just for your knowledge rising TDP will not give you any more MH/s in eth. http://imgur.com/a/oX9Wl Oh and one more thing, calculating profitability of nvidia cards based on zcash or eth is wrong. Every day you mine zcash or eth or any other default coin on what to mine you are loosing your ROI to AMD cards. What model of cards are those, what settings, how LONG can you run them at those settings without crashing, and what brand of memory? If the memory is Samsung, THAT is why you're achieving those *BETTER THAN NORMAL* ETH hashrates - most 1070 cards do NOT have Samsung, they have lesser brands like Micron or Hynix which limits their potential STABLE memory overclock a lot and doesn't let them get as high of hashrate as a result. ONE MODEL does not qualify as "most", even if your cards CAN handle hours at the settings you were using. I never said ETH was the best option to mine on NVidia - try reading what I posted where I SPECIFICALLY STATED it is very profitable "just LESS so than other options." |
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I just signed up to theblocksfactory and I don't know how to proceed from there.
I have 2 AMD GPU's and I was wondering if it's possible to mine using these GPU's.
In any case, what should I do next to start mining for DIGIBYTE ?
DGB is using 5 algos = skein, groestl, scrypt, sha-256 and qubit ... for AMD i cant realy tell you, whichone is "best" but best answer you can get is: try diferent miners (like ccminer sp-mod 1.5.81 or ccminer trpuvot rc2 or sgminer v5.3.1 etc) to find best hashrate on same algo ... what i heard the best profit on AMD cards is Dual Mining ETH + anything what claymores miner support  qubit can be mined by the Baikal ASIC, so not likely to be profitable on any GPU. Not sure how good AMD cards are at skein or groestl - but I suspect they should likely stay with ETH/ETC since the profitability of those has gone way up in the last few days. |
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To get 690h/s you need 1.72 1070 GPUs
Now for power
1080 Ti = 250 * 24 = 6000w = 6kw
1070 = 140 * 24 = 3360w = 3.36kw
1070 Adj for 690h/s = 240.8 * 24 = 5779.2 = 5.77kw
ZEC Production
1080 Ti = 0.0571/day Approx(whattomine data)
1070 = 0.0348/day Approx(whattomine data)
1070 ADj = 0.0571/day Approx(whattomine data)
So in a day with ZEC @ $107/coin it is possible to make
1080 Ti = 6.1097- 0.84(power) = 5.2697
1070 = 3.7236 - 0.4032(power) = 3.3204
1070 Adj = 6.1097 - 0.6924(power) = 5.4173
To get 1080Ti's level of earning(20 cent more) you will be spending $688 instead of $699.99 for 1080Ti a difference of $11.99
Now this is based on the assumption that 1070 will do 400h/s for 140w if not then I don't think 1070 is that efficient.
Hope this helps, If I made any mistake please let me know.
Regards,
BLife
How are you able to get 690h/s out of a GTX 1070!? I'm seeing here and elsewhere ~400h/s average. He's not, he was comparing an "equal production" amount of 1070s to a single 1080Ti. Refer to the first line I quoted. |
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Thanks Phil.
Btw, have you ever found a mobo with 1 4 7 spacing between the PCIE 16x slots?
They don't exist on any board with only 3x PCI-E slots - I've been looking for a couple YEARS now. I think I remember seeing *ONE* 4-slot board that could achieve that spacing, but it has been out of production for a while - really old Intel chipset IIRC. Quite a few 5-slot boards can achieve that spacing, but they start at "expen$ive" and go up from there. The 3-slot layout like Phil's Gigabyte motherboard is COMMON in both AMD and Intel, and can be commonly found in the $100 range or under with some digging, though sometimes you have to go with a "on sale" board to get there. I prefer the Gigabyte "ITX" 1070 for the 3'd slot from having used a few of them, but Phil's MSI "super short" is the same length and should be just as good at letting the middle card stay cool - it didn't exist when I built my first pair of 3 card rigs with the Gigabyte, and by then I was in the habit of using it. At the 850 watt level my go-to power supply is the Seasonic X-850 but they appear to be out of production and availability is getting spotty. My second choice would be the EVGA G2 850 but it also is going or gone out of production.... |
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https://youtu.be/aAdW0wdUmosMy Fury rig on Claymore 12.5 with 15.12 drivers + (ASM activated) 846W for 6 cards. Let's round to 790W to remove CPU/Mobo/RAM Now remove PSU efficiency (8% for my platinium) 732W / 6 = 122W per card for 400-430 H/s That is almost as good as the nVidia 1080 cards. More like 1070 numbers - 1080 should be able to do somewhat more hashrate than 430. Still not bad for a generation-old card you can't hardly find any more since it's been out of production for quite a while. Makes me wonder what the Vega cards are going to manage. |
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I use the alexis78 version and my nubers are pretty much the same
alexis78 for me in my short testing was giving noticeably more hashrate (I want to say 15% or so but I don't remember the exact numbers) on my 1080, and a little more on a couple of my 1070s, for Skein vs the trpv 2.0 fork of ccminer or the KlausT fork of ccminer (which later pair seemed to give identical performance on skein). Definitely worth checking out for skein mining, though it can be a royal PAIN to locate a working copy if you don't have the tools on Windows to compile it from the github source code. |
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]Home mining rarely allows expansion - household activity are normally limited by the available volume of electricity power. Typically it'd look like 3-5 Asic miners at the most.
More like 10 for most homes, but having suffered though the power limitations of a home for a while I'd have to say it's a definite limit to growth. Douglas County (where East Wenatchee is located) owns 2 major dams on the Columbia river - either one of which could easily power everything in the county 2-3 times over. |
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Most mining software is aimed at Ubuntu and it's close varients like Xubuntu.
LINUX in my decades of experience with it is almost always a LOT more stable than Windows.
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Actually, it's not a new idea - "computation-only" stuff already exists at the high end where Tesla lives, and AMD has had their Firepro-S series around (abet WAY overpriced like all "workstation" cards) for quite a while now.
The trick for a "mining-specific" card would be to just not charge workstation-specific type OVERPRICING on them.
The resale market would be a lot more limited than on standard consumer-type GPUs, but it's there.
I could see EVGA in particular pushing such a card to their "Folding Bucks" participants.
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