Most of the cards in my riser rigs run at 60% OR LESS fan.
I think the lowest one right now is at 40%, but I'm still in the process of rebuilding my old "folding" rigs into riser rigs.

You DO realize that mining luck can "spike" apparent hashrate a lot in a short period?

I never got the actual wallet to work, though I managed to get the "wallet server" working SOMEHOW at some point, and just access it with Chrome.

I THINK their wallet is coded specifically for Internet Explorer, from what I remember of the issues I had with TRYING to get it to work.


Pools - have been an issue for several months, lots of DDOSing going around, so I ended up reverting to solo mining the last few months.
Have any pools gotten STABLE in the last couple months?

The Seagate Expansion is typically one of their standard "compute" drives, the Archive external uses one of their standard Archive drives - BOTH work fine with BURST mining and tend to be the lowest price per GB most of the time.


Not all CPU plotters also optimize - I found that out the HARD way early on.
I'm not sure if ANY of the GPU plotters also optimize as I never got one to work.

Which pool do you use?

I'm a bit suprised you don't just break down and put together a couple Backblaze boxes.

8-O

Supermicro makes good gear but they tend to be pri$$$$$ey - not so bad if you can find them used sometimes though.

Most of my drives got plotted on my Ryzen 1700 gaming machine - usually while doing other stuff but NOT high end gaming on it.

Nope - I "retired" quite a few PCs 2 years back when I moved that would NOT mine at all - but they were running AMD K5 series CPUs, did NOT have PCI (much less AGP or PCI-E) slots on most of the motherboards, and were pushing close to 20 years old at the time.

I JUST retired another pair of machines - AMD Palomino-series Athlons, 32 bit systems with no PCI-E at all though they DID have AGP - in THEORY one could mine on those, but AGP and PCI (not-E) cards were at best VERY VERY limited on CUDA cores or AMD Stream units and ALL of them were very old versions that probably nothing current supports or would work with.

You PROBABLY can mine with any 64-bit CPU based system, but some of the very oldest of those may not have PCI-E slots and the CPU will be very poor performance even on CPU-only coins or on Monero.

Anything from the last 12 years or so though should be usable - some of the Sempron Socket 754 systems I bought back in late 2006/early 2007 timeframe have been used to mine on and have A PCI-E slot.

Not supported under LINUX any more unless it's an AMD iGPU and AMD cards.
Nvidia disabled the "no-openGL-files" installation option some time back, so their drivers WON'T coexist with AMD drivers or Intel drivers under Linux any more.

Even using AMD iGPU with AMD cards can be an issue, as it sometimes will interfere with clock speed and fan speed control for the discrete cards.


Under Windows, it's trivial - mixing GPUs is one of the very few things Windows handles BETTER than LINUX, and possibly the ONLY thing it handles a LOT better.

As you are probably LOSING efficiency going that low, I'd not bother trying any lower - and there's a pretty good chance the cards won't let you go below 50% of their factory TDP, I've yet to see any Nvidia Pascal-based card that would (unless the factory TDP was WAY higher than "stock" for that GPU).

2 is often TOO MANY, depending on the wiring and the specific PS model.

I NEVER put more than one riser on a Molex chain, and I don't use SATA chains at all.

Palit is not available in some parts of the world, apparently including ALL of North America (and definitely the US) through normal distribution channels.
Makes it hard to compare 2 cards when I've never seen either (all of my Aorus are the "standard" 1080 ti model, NOT the Extreme).

The REAL issue on the Nvidia side is getting blatantly obvious (and it's NOT "miners", we're not buying enough NVidia cards except PERHAPS the 1060 to matter).

Back in October 2017, TSMC announced they would be shifting Pascal production to Volta production "around the end of the year".
Then it turns out that 4Q 2017 is the first time PC sales overall had an INCREASE in year-to-year sales (predictions were for a 1.5-2% drop, instead we saw almost 2% JUMP) - and "high end systems" saw major sales in the quarter per many reports, AKA gamers buying new systems in much higher numbers than anytime in years.
As a result, Nvidia didn't have enough Pascal GPU stock on hand for the 1060 and up to last 'till Volta release - and we have the HUGH shortage on available GPUs squeezing pricing hard.

 This doesn't affect the 1050 or 1050 ti as those are Samsung made, and likely to be the last Pascal cards that Nvidia will replace with Volta offerings (just like they did the LAST time around, when the 1080 was the first "consumer" Pascal card released then the 1070 and 1080 ti, then on down the chain over the course of a few months).

Nvidia doesn't want to admit they messed up (even though the REASON they messed up wasn't really THEIR fault) so they keep pointing to "cryptocoin mining demand" that didn't really EXIST for Nvidia to any significant degree in 4Q.


 AMD is another story - Ethereum was expanding hashrate a TON in 4Q to a degree that they probably sold 2 million or so RX 570/580 cards to miners in that quarter ALONE (possibly as high as 3 million, a FEW of the cards sold would have been 1060s due to pricing) and that probably DID affect AMD stocks to a noticeable degree.


The key facts though are that AMD pricing did NOT get into high-end 1070 territory in the fall/winter timeframe, Nvidia-friendly "large GPU count" coins like ZCash were NOT expanding hashrate and in fact saw DIPS in that timeframe, yet Nvidia ran out of cards for sale RIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS where AMD still had significant stocks for about 10 days after that, THEN went into "no stock available" mode.

It's also noteable that since Ethereum hashrate has gone FLAT for a bit over a week, AMD card supply has noticeably started to recover and prices are dropping, while Nvidia card supplies are STILL "good luck finding ANYTHING that's not out of a gouger and crazy-high priced".

Don't buy the hype about "it's cryptocoin mining fault" on the Nvidia side - the numbers do NOT support that lie.


RAM pricing has also had some effect on pricing - easily noticeable on sites like EVGA that sell direct and are NOT gouging their customers.

This coin makes ZERO sense, why would they move BACKWARDS on algorithm?

You have just pointed out WHY some folks have issues with SATA power on risers and others don't - cards VARY a lot on how much power they draw from the PCI-E bus and there's no way to predict it without actually trying the card model at the specific settings you plan to use it.

Also, a USB-type riser ITSELF uses a little power for the "voltage conversion" circuitry needed to provide the voltages OTHER THAN +12VDC that are used on the PCI-E bus and it's interface, so the actual draw on the +12VDC line could exceed the PCI-E rating for 75 watts power draw from the bus WITHOUT the actual GPU card exceeding the spec (and a few cards HAVE been shown to exceed the spec at least on peaks).


MOLEX connectors don't have this issue - they're rated for 156 watts - the limit THERE is the wiring TO the connector, like on PCI-E power connectors, but the wiring is pretty much always good for at least 84 watts per "molex chain" and often 120.


 Also, while the SATA chain might use a 6-pin connector like PCI-E uses, that does NOT mean it's an actual PCI-E connection powering the chain - EVGA in particular specifies it's SATA/Peripheral ports on the G2/P2/T2 series to handle 75 watts per port.
 Adaquate to power ONE riser, but more than one riser = LIKELY problems.

 Then Bitmain came out with THEIR SIA miner.

4 GB of ram should be plenty for most mining usage on 2 cards - I've had systems that mined OK with *1 GB* of RAM, but they were single-card systems.

DEFINITELY need a power supply upgrade.
How big depends on specific usage - if you set the cards to run at efficient point around 60% TDP / 150 watts each (for most 1080 ti models) then you might be able to get away with a good 500 watt, but in general I'd recommend somewhat bigger than that.

You might want to SERIOUSLY consider downgrading to a lower-power-usage dual-core or even Sempron 145 single core CPU, that Phenom 6-core was a serious power hog IIRC.

 Nvidia 1080 to 1080 ti is a MAJOR difference in cards - it's more comparable to RX 560 to RX 570 (not QUITE as big a jump, but that's the right BALLPARK).

 RX 470/480/570/580 are VERY small variations to the point that ram SPEED often makes more difference than the actual GPU model in mining usage.

If you treat your mining operation as a business, the expenses can be treated just like for any other business.

I DO strongly recommend you keep ALL RECEIPTS and keep a full set of books on it though - the IRS will want to see all of that if they audit you.

Any AMD compatable Equihash miner *should* work with the iGPU on an AMD APU if it's recent enough

 *********************BUT *******************************

In my testing a while back on one of my A10-7890K APUs using EBWF the hashrate was really really bad, 10-12 sol/s or so (vs a HD 7750 with the SAME clock and SAME number of cores that pulled over 50) and my A10-5700 did all of about 8 sol/s IIRC.

It's POSSIBLE, just not worth the effort IMO and proabably not worth the power usage.

Most fans used in GPUs don't handle extended time at 100% - the BALL BEARING ones might last a while that way, but far too many GPU makers have moved to cheap sleeve bearing fans that won't last 6 months at 100% and might not last 6 months even at 80%.

Wear is NOT linear with speed, it's more of an exponential function - that last 20% generates MORE wear on the bearings AND SEALS than the first 80% in most cases.
Also, that last 20% generally only adds more like 10% or so to the airflow, normally not worth the wasted power much less the added wear.

CASE fans, especially non-PWM types and anything Rotron/Delta/YS Tech/NMB (couple more I'm forgetting at the moment) ARE normally designed to handle 100% fan speed for extended periods of time.

 Quite a bit earned via mining, lots earned via pool fees, and likely a couple hundred thousand or more of miners sold at probably $500-$1000 average profit EACH.

 Though I have to wonder if that "up to 4 billion" figure wasn't more of a gross sales/gross income figure.