Nor I, and I have a fair amount of RX470's where if it was 10-12% as you indicate I would have surely noticed by now. I have been running some of them since they were launched and I cannot recall every having an issue with either them or the 480's.

Can you PM me pricing as well? I would be interested in obtaining more of these boards since most major retailers seem to be sold out.

A warning to those who would use a air compressor as those shown of the first page, if you live in a humid environment they can also compress warm humid air and shoot moisture out onto your precious electronics. They do sell moisture removing devices you can put between the output from the compressor and your air line, but those add quite a bit to the cost. An electronics rated vacuum (to avoid static discharge) with canned air is the best option imho, but again this too can add up in cost over time.

Your example with the ZEC slow start may be a good use for nicehash, but it almost all other cases it is better to mine them at a 1% pool and exchange them yourself.

The decision probably comes down to how many rigs you are running and how soon you need the cash from your mining. I could see a strategy of allocating say 20% of your hash rate to a place like nicehash so you can consistently be paid in BTC which you then cash out to USD to pay your electric bill, but the rest would be better traded at your discretion to get the best price.

Of course if you just have one or two rigs the convenience of nicehash might outweigh the extra profit motivation.

What-to-mine and similar sites will always be overly optimistic in your earning estimates. As you mentioned you have pool fees, depending on the mining program you use you can also have miner fees.

On top of this the coin difficulty is always changing as more miners come online with increasing coin values and leave with decreasing values, and you also need to consider pool luck. The pool you use may have a good run and get more blocks than normal or a bad run of luck and find fewer.

Basically those income estimator type sites are showing you a "best guess" snapshot in a point of time that will change by the time you actually mine the coins and are credited for you efforts, usually this s about 20% lower after everything is considered.

There is some probably some truth to that. I have a few rigs mining and have contemplated adding more, but I have also been trading quite a bit lately and making a fair bit more that way.  Either method is risky, so sock away some profits when you can for when times get bad.

I would have to go with adaseb on this one and say that mining has been consistently profitable for the past 8 years. I mined most of that entire time and even in 2014-2015 there were always profitable coins to mine.

The key was to stay on top of current developments and hop from coin to coin during some of the slower periods, but I always made more than my costs. I will admit that if I hadn't already had the hardware during some of those periods, it would not have been viable to purchase new hardware at those specific points in time, but that was not what was implied.

I actually have old GPU rigs that were originally purchased when you could still mine BTC with them, that now run quite nice when mining Zcash. They have been paid for many times over as far as ROI and their only operating cost is the electricity they need to run.

As far as 6 months from now, hard to say. I know when I was buying rigs last March (2016) people said the same thing, "6 months from now you will not be making what you are now". Well guess what, they were correct. Six months ago Ethereum was less profitable than it was last March or even now, so the market goes in cycles, which if you been mining for any length of time you are quite familiar with already. If Ethereum keeps going up over time, even with dips in between, the price will keep up with the hash rate. Next year we may need to be at $80 or even $100, but who knows what will happen. The whole crypto game could collapse at any point as well so there are no guarantees one way or another.

I second that.

So for what the $450 the board you link costs, plus $50 for CPU and another $50 for memory, $550 total (low cost miner build components) you could build 3X the typical boards.

3X Biostar TB85 ($65 ea) $195
3x 1150 CPU Celeron ($50 ea) $150
3x DDR3 RAM ($50 ea) $150

For $495 you have 3 complete platforms for which to build three 6X gpu rigs for 18 GPUs total for less than the cost of one that will only support 7X. Resale value or not, you can see which option is the better value for trying to ROI on your rig.

With that said, I do like the idea of a list for cost efficient 1151 mobos that can be used for mining, as one day the supply of 1150 processors for sale will be drying up. It is already starting to get hard to find decent priced ones on New Egg.

The best way is to use the Windows System Resource Monitor: Task Manager ->Performance Tab -> Resource Monitor (on bottom left).

Then from either the Overview or Network tab select the miner process EthDcrMiner64.exe for Claymore and then you get just that processes bandwidth.

Notice in my example one of the two connections is to my monitoring rig "Miner02" so you can discard that bandwidth as it is internal to the LAN, so only the other connection is what the miner uses to communicate with the pool, which in this case is about 65 B/sec total.

Tweaked properly a 6x RX480 system could in theory work with a 900 Watt PSU, but that is a weird wattage anyway as most manufacturers go straight from 850 to 1000 watts in their lineups.

I would suggest a name brand Corsair or eVGA 1000 watt unit and tweak your VBIOS and voltages, and with proper miner setup this will put you right around a 800 Watt load, which is right at the 80% sweet spot for PSU utilization.

If you are mining there is no reason to not want to apply these power saving tweaks as even if you did have the mythical "Free Electricity" (the cost is being paid somehow), you do not have unlimited capacity on your electrical system. By tweaking the power draw you could add more rigs before overloading your electrical distribution system.

If you really want Litecoin, your best bet would be to mine Ethereum which is currently the highest profitable coin to GPU mine and then exchange your proceeds to Litecoin. As YIz mentioned, trying to GPU mine Litecoin at this stage is pointless.

There are several other coins are also much more profitable to GPU mine than LTC and you can find out here what would be the best for your GPU: https://whattomine.com/coins

It is getting the exact same speeds here for me on both RX470/480 cards as it was on 8.0, or even 7.4 for that matter.

I run several of these MSI Armor RX470's and have had great luck with them.

They do come in two variants though, a Samsung memory version and a Hynix version. I can get about 1 MH/s more on a modded Samsung version, but both are great as even the Hynix will do 27 MH/s at ~ 110 Watt draw.

I also have the MSI Gaming, and while they are ok they do not perform any better or worse than the Armor cards when it comes to mining performance, but they do run around $20-$25 more. So if you are looking for the quickest ROI, the armors will knock about a month off your payback period.

As everyone else pointed out that is plenty of bandwidth even for hundreds of rigs.

You may be better served by trying to acquire a second link from another vendor if at all possible. I would rather have two 100/100 links from two different ISP to provide some level of redundancy in case one would go down. Of course even this is usually minimal of your ISP is even the slightest bit reliable.

For most people running out of electrical capacity is the far greater concern than bandwidth, with the possible exception of people in remote areas still on dial-up plans.

I think currently it is still a bit overbought on the recent news and should see a fall back to $10-12, of course a lot of it depends on what happens with Bitcoin as alts do not live in isolation. So depending on the ETF outcome and what happens with BTC will play a lot into ETH's price in the short term. I think as announcements and more importantly actual implementations of tech around ETH are released the price will shoot past the current valuations and perhaps see $50 by year end.

I do not know what country you are in (for product availability) or what your budget is, but if you are going upwards of $80 you could start to look at a 750 Watt unit such as this eVGA: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438027  They also have a 650 watt of the same model line for $80 exactly.

A 750 watt PSU would give the possibility of adding even a 4th card at some point, assuming your motherboard has enough free PCIe slots. It is also a good idea to stick with a Gold rating or above, which I would recommend for the better power efficiency, which unless you have free power, would become an issue if not now at some point down the road when profitability start to decline again.

If this is a dedicated mining rig I do not think sleeved versus un-sleeved are much of an issue. More important is the wire gauge of the cable runs as well as the overall quality of both the PSU and the supplied cables. Sleeved cables look nicer in gaming PCs that are showing off their insides, and can be a bit easier to manage in a mining rig I suppose, but should not really be a consideration. Focus more on the gauge of wire, it should be 18 or 16 (better) and the overall quality of PSU.

Also, a longer warranty may be desired, some are going for 10 years now. Mining 24/7 puts a lot more strain on computer components especially the PSU, and 3-4 years in if you are still mining getting a replacement for the cost of shipping is nice piece of mind.

You will not need 250 watts per GPU even with a "safety" overhead. If you are serious about mining you will be tuning your rigs to draw the lowest amount of power possible while still producing the same hash rate. If it is a reputable brand name power supply, with 600 watts you can easily power 3 RX480's with an abundant safety overhead as real power draw will probably be closer to 450 watts.

I run many 6 x RX480 rigs and only use 1000 watt PSU's. This results in a 166 watt per GPU ratio, but the actual wattage drawn is only ~750-780 watts for the entire rig (134 watts/GPU) once the GPUs are tuned, and this is measured at the wall so it even includes the PSU, mobo, and CPU overhead. I could get by with 850 watt PSU's, but I do like the extra cable connections that the 1000 watt units offer and I also like sticking to the 80% capacity rule.

So using same this ratio for scaling down to 3 RX480's, you would be safe with your 600 watt PSU which go as high as 480 watt continuous draw while still staying at a 80% load. Now if it is some off-name PSU, that is another story as many of them will not deliver all the watts that the label claims. Check out review sites such as http://www.jonnyguru.com/ to get an idea of the better PSUs and what to look for.

This thread now has me thinking. A nearby store has a few Corsair AX1200i on sale (well they are actually refurbished) for around $150 each. I was going to take a chance and pick a couple up, but my first concern was they only carry a 90 day warranty. Now I am also concerned if they might be a fire hazard, as what was the reason they were refurbished.  Anyone have luck with refurbished PSU units? The store does have a 30 day policy, so if anything is immediately wrong I am ok, but I am think of once past the 90 day mark.

Myself, I hope it does go to $30 and even lower for the near future. It is still too early in its life-cycle to make and maintain any significant price rise. Except for a brief launch high, Ethereum traded under $1 for the first several months before starting to climb. Bitcoin traded for years under $1, and for only a few pennies at first.

I believe we have at least until the fall before we see any big moves up, and maybe even into early 2018. This is still the very early accumulation phase and the only reason it is considered gloom and doom now was the crazy high launch prices. That those prices were absurdly high should have been obviously to anyone and I think even today's ~$40 price is a bit high for where it is at developmentally.

I got a couple of miners pointed toward Zcash for now, and figure I am mining them for about a third of the going market price. So I am in profit unless they drop to under $10 for a significant period of time.

Anyway, I believe Zcash has a future, but like most coins only four months into their existence it is currently in accumulation stage. We will probably not see a big breakout until closer to 2018.