Way too much "fancy expensive" for a mining rig, unless you already had all this fancy stuff on hand, especially for a SINGLE GPU based system.

 Or save a few more $ by going LINUX - once you get the first machine up and running, it's TRIVIAL to "clone" a working setup using DD to copy the working HD setup to another one, or if you make it small enough clone it to a USB flash drive.



 There are a few smaller cases that can handle 4x dual slot boards - but the lowest cost ones I've been able to find were $60 and up on Newegg, and tend to not have really great cooling setups, or were quite a bit MORE expensive to get one with a good cooling setup - and you NEED to add better fans even on the "good cooling setup" cases to get adaquate airflow for a 4xGPU machine which drives the price up a good bit more.



 2 x 6 card rigs usually end up taking MORE total space than 3 x 4 card rigs CAN take, as the risers and their cables soak quite a bit of space.
 They also tend to be a bigger pain to set up, and reliability isn't as good a lot of the time.

 The difficulty drop is over - the last 2 weeks has seen enough gain to wipe out that short-term drop.

 Every miner I've ever seen advertised on it's original web site included some sort of "power consumption" spec.
 THAT is where to look for that information.

 3 and 4 aren't about mining, that's investing.

R9 280X is an exception, it DOES mine noticeably more hashrate than the R9 280.
Ditto the R9 380X vs R9 380

RX 4xx series doesn't have any "x versions" yet, as such.

For Scrypt, as of RIGHT NOW the KNC Titan (if you can find a WORKING one), Innosilicon A2 Terminator, and Alcheminer are the best - but Innosilicon should be shipping their new A4 Dominator units shortly, which are more efficient than even the Titans.

 For X11 you have 3 options of which the Balikal seems to be the most efficient.

 Otherwise, it's still GPUs and CPUs depending on the specific coin.

Catalyst 15.12 is better for mining on for the R9 series cards and older.

 15.7 will work though.

 No, and such a chart would become outdated VERY quickly at best, and to be of any use AT ALL it would have to make ASSUMPTIONS about difficulty increase and future Bitcoin price that would certainly turn out to be incorrect in the long run.



 BTW - if your electric is cheap enough, an S7 IS in fact still profitable - but for how LONG is a very good question.

 If your electric is free, ANY miner is still profitable (though GPU or CPU based mining is not going to achieve any noticeable amount of income and will never ROI on any SHA256 based coin even with free electric).

 Not if you run Win7 - all of my 950 and 960 cards work fine in Windows under 7.

 They're NOT trying to run the "latest" drivers though, since those drivers are all about being able to use GTX 1xxx series cards.


 I had a 7850 mining ETH for a while, but it was partly damaged and I was never able to run it even at STOCK clocks, so it's MH was kinda low.

 Even FREE equipment doesn't matter if your electric cost is too high.

 Equipment cost affects TIME to ROI though, and if it's too high you'll never ROI even with VERY VERY CHEAP electric.



 The OP had no clue what they're talking about though, as there are quite a few miners that HAVE in fact made money via mining - NOT just the "big farms" but some of us HOME miners have made substantial overall net profits.

Based on previous recent Avalon, the 6 will cost a little more/MH than the S9 but will be a more robust (in most ways, their CONTROL stuff always left me very uncomfortable) and possibly more configurable design.

 I wouldn't count on them being actual competition in a way that would push S9 pricing down.

 8-(

 Straw man argument - Ethereum mining isn't going to last a few years.

 Also, the price of the 970 has ALREADY dropped quite a bit, and will probably be fairly stable for a while now, it won't be hard to sell as it's STILL a quite powerfull card.


 Mostly, it comes down to the 970 being LOWER COST than the 1060 vs more power usage as to which you want to get.

 The real argument though if you insist on efficient cards is the RX 470/480 vs the GTX 1060.

 110 MH/s generates about 1 litecoin/day over most of the last year - $3-$5 a day depending on Litecoin price that day, usually close to $4 in recent months.
 Cost FOR ME where I'm at now to run that A2 (1250 watts appx.) is a little over $1/day - and if I managed to get moved into one of the 2 "counties next door" that I'm PLANNING to eventually relocate into, that would drop to a bit UNDER $1/day.
 
 ROI isn't difficult if price and difficulty stay stable - it's just a matter of months - but the introduction of the A4 is going to kick difficulty up quite a bit over time, making it quite a bit less likely that an A2 unit purchased NOW will ever achieve ROI unless the purchase price is very low.

 I do NOT have a "massive" mining farm - if I DID have one, I could get into a much electric rate and wouldn't be inclined to move.
 I ran my existing farm in a MOBILE HOME for most of a year before I moved to where I'm at now.


 Do note that there are very very few places in the US that have a lower YEAR-ROUND NO GIMMICKS electric rate for small farms than where I am currently at - both of them are "next door" to the county I'm in.



 Not sure where you're comming up with your numbers at - the electric isn't unreasonably *IF* you're paying 10-15 CENTS/KWH, but that mining amount hasn't been in the right ballpark for something like 2 years.



 Trading to make more than $3/day on the amount that an A2 has commonly cost in recent months is VERY VERY iffy - and you have a significant chance of LOSING money. There is NO "safely" when trying to trade for profit.

 Doubt it - R9 380s tend to run in the 70C-80C range OR HIGHER when mining from everything I've seen.
 No bloody WAY they're running at 40c WHEN MINING.


 If you have software that's claiming they're running that cool, I'd BET it's either broken or it was older software for the HD 7xxx / R9 2xx series that wasn't updated correctly for the R9 3xx series.

Based on everything I've seen to date, if you're serious about DX 12 you need to go AMD RX4xx series not NVidia 10xx series.

Or you need to go mixed, per a COUPLE reports I've seen.

Cold isn't critical, low electric cost IS.

 Cold can HELP though.

 Best place to mine in the US is NOT a particularly cold area - but it's DRY around here making low-cost Evaporative cooling reasonable most of the time it DOES get hot.

The problem is that figure is a snapshot of RIGHT NOW - as a general rule, with occasional rare exceptions, difficulty tends to climb over time reducing the profitability of ANY mining setup.

 This will probably slow some over the next few years compared to the past, since the S9 and it's announced in-the-works competiton have finally caught up with Semiconductor state-of-the art so major efficiency gains won't be happening on a "every few months to a year" basis any more, instead we're going to be moving to a "few years" cycle of major efficiency gains like the semiconductor industry as a whole.


 The other kicker is Bitcoin price variability - it does NOT always go up, in fact the all-time peak was a few years back. Any significant bad news (like the recent Bitfinex "hack/theft") can cause it to DROP quite a bit quite rapidly, though sometimes significant bad news that DOESN'T directly impact bitcoin can help it (like the ongoing Chinese economic meltdown that appears to have driven quite a few Chinese investors INTO Bitcoin over the last several months).

 390x isn't a good choice for Ethereum mining anyway - uses more power but delivers the same hashrate as the 390 NON-X varients, since it has more cores but both cards are limited by their memory setup.

 Same issue as on the 290x vs 290 NON-X.

 It's also why the Nano/Fury weren't all that great of Ethereum miners, despite their MUCH higher core count than any R9 2xx / R9 3xx series card - they were memory-limited as well AND cost a ton more, though they WERE quite a bit more power efficient.

 1500 is NOT stock clock on any HD 7870 - they predate memory that COULD run that fast "stock" by 2-3 years.
 1050 though is an oddly excessive underclock, perhaps that was misreported and was the CORE clock.
 1500 didn't become stock clock on any AMD card I am aware of prior to the R9 3xx series.

 18-19Mhs out of a 7870 is NOT a reasonable expectation, don't think they mined THAT fast even the first couple weeks Ethereum existed and had much smaller DAG file sizing.


 11 Mh/s is what I'm getting out of my currently-running 7870 (I forgot I had *2* of those cards), running 950/1350 (ANY other mem clock speed gives slower hashrate on this particular card, higher core clocks give NO hashrate improvement and make the card run hotter).
 That's on a Sapphire "reference" design card that has a MAXIMUM memory OVERCLOCK of 1450, and stock 1250.
 That IS running qtminer - genoil or claymore would probably add a couple percent from what I've seen on comparable testing, if I could ever get one of those two downloaded AT ALL.