What is to get into trouble for overclocking? If it doesn't work revert, it not like the overclocking police are going to come to your house, lol.

Also, it is not the overclocking that will lower a devices lifespan, it is the heat and/or too much voltage. If you can overclock a little, and in many cases with the BIOS mods, under-volt at the same time, you will not only lower the voltages going through your card, you will significantly lower the heat being generated thus prolonging the lifespan of your card.

As with all things moderation is the key, but for me I can pull a fresh RX 470 out of the box and get 22-23 MHash/s out of it with it reading about 70-80 Watts on GPUz and ~120 W at the wall. I can apply a simple BIOS mod, lower the default GPU clock, increase the memory clock, and reduce voltages a bit and up my hashrate to ~27-28 MHash/s while at the same time reducing my GPUz reading to around 50-60W and at the wall to under 100 W.

There is nothing wrong, illegal, or immoral about this. It is simply re-tuning the GPU for a different purpose (mining) than what it was tuned for at the factory (gaming). Considering these cards have the lowest common denominator for settings so that the absolute worst binned part will perform ok, in most cases there are significant improvements to be made over factory defaults.

Yes, you should be looking into Ethereum or one of its variants, ETC (Ethereum Classic) or EXP (Expanse) to mine with those cards. Unless you have very low or free electricity, I don't think you are even making money mining LTC with a GPU anymore. Even with mining ETH, 2 R9 270x's probably give you what, maybe 12-14 MH/s each? So with two cards you are looking at a total of ~28 MH/s which will yield close to 0.14 ETH/day or around $1.70 before electricity.

As far as pools there are many. Ethermine.org, Dwarfpool.com, Nanopool.org, are just a few of the many available that you can mine Ethereum at. I think if you search the forum someone has put together a list of them all, but one of these three will get you started.

Your best bet when starting off is to join a pool to see how things work. Most of what you have described so far should be left until after you have mastered the basics and have a bit more understanding in how it all works.

Mining boiled down to its simplest is your computer is guessing to come up with a magic number, or hash. This number needs to meet certain requirements to be accepted by the network and if it passes you are credited with mining a new block and get the block reward and any mining fees. Only on dead or very low interest coins will you have much of a chance at solo mining. This is because as more miners join in, the network difficulty increase to keep up with the increasing hash-rate. This process is automatic and is intended to keep block generation on a steady pace as set out in the coins specifications.

With most popular coins, and all coins that net more profit than their cost in electricity to mine, you will need to join a pool with only one GPU in order to be profitable. You can mine as long as you want solo if you are simply curious, but if you want to earn any income you will need to increase your chances of finding a block. To do this you will need to join a mining pool.

A mining pool is simply what it sounds like. You "pool" your mining resources with other users to increase the chance you will find a block in a more reasonable time frame. Of course this means you also share in the profits and will receive less than a whole block reward, usually proportional to your hash-rate versus the pools. While this may sound bad, most pools typically find enough blocks in a day that you will receive a steady income.

Shares are simply a way to track your progress while you mine on a pool. The pool will assign you work at less than the actual difficulty of the network so that you can earn credit toward the reward. There is a very slim chance you might actually be the discoverer of the next block, but even so since you are now part of the pool, the reward will be split proportionally according to your hash rate. In the past some pools did offer a blockfinder bonus, but most of them now are straight up proportional payouts in one form or another.

If you switch to an Ethereum  pool, you should earn around 0.15 ETH per day with your card. This will equate to around $1.50 per day in income after subtracting your electricity costs. The actual amount may be higher or lower depending on your electrical rates, but I am trying to keep these examples simple.

You can never tell for sure, but a multi-vendor site such as https://virustotal.com/ at least can give you more than one opinion. It is common for one or two products to detect mining software as a virus, since some malware uses the same software to mine on infected computers. If say more than 5 of the sites on virus total flags it, I would be wary. Of course, if even one flags it you should be using caution, but as you already seen there are also a lot of false positives on this type of software.

With all of this being said, it is safest to assume all software your download is infected and to never download mining (or other) programs on the same computer that you keep any wallets. I know this may be easier said than done if you only have one PC and use it for everything, but it the end it is the best practice to keep your coins safe.

What type of resolution does this present when using VNC connections? That is the main reason I use the headless dummy plugs, to get away from the almost unusable default of 640x480.

I do not know if ZCash will succeed or fail, I have taken a look at it and I am neutral on its chances either way.

There does seem to be a lot of interest in it though, and your post here tells me you feel threatened by it in one form or another. Considering it has not even launched yet and people feel they need to preemptively troll it, it must be doing something right...

As has been said, a computer will for the most part act the same as a heating element.

You can use the formula 1W = 3.412141633 BTU/hr to get a good idea of the amount of BTUs you will produce, i.e. a 1000 watt draw (measured at-the-wall) will generate ~3412 BTU/hr.

The actual heat will be generated by the various pathways and components in the chain, which in a typical miner rig include: power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, HDD or SDD, and of course the GPUs.

It look's like that Version 006C board is now available from more vendors and a bit lower priced. I ordered in a dozen, looks like it is wired the same and can take a 6-pin PCIe connector directly.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/401195513882?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

No, it is still stealing. The question is not who is the owner of the address, but who is the owner of the BTC. As many, many people have already said, the BTC was put into that address  by someone and that person is the owner until they decide to transfer the funds to someone else either by sending them on or transferring ownership of the address containing them.

All of you crooks who think otherwise, the same thing could be said of a house, car etc. If I go to the locksmith and have him make some random keys, and I try them on some random cars and houses and one of them matches (which has a lot better odds than the bitcoin example btw), does that make me the owner of said car/house? No, of course not. You may own the key but not to the contents or object it unlocks.

Well said. I have to agree that once you invest in 4-5 cards and a dedicated mining rig, you need to move past the beginner pools and onto a more solid one. There are several larger and more stable pools for Ethereum that you can choose from and most of them provide example configurations for the more popular mining software such as Claymore, so even if you are new you should be up and going in no time. You can also ask on this forum if you run into any difficulty switching to a new pool.

I have this issue with a new build every once in awhile as well and what fixes it 80% of the time is to totally uninstall and reinstall the AMD drivers. Seems sometimes even though the drivers look like they are installed 1 or 2 cards may not quite get to 100% of the way there. This is especially true if you are adding new cards 1 at a time and letting Windows auto-install the drivers for each new card.

The other 20% of the time the issue has been resolved via re-arranging the cards in different slots as Bakery mentioned, simply re-seating the card and power connections (on both ends if modular PS), replacing riser, USB, power cables, or in rare cases the card simply is not capable of running with its peers and needs to have its clocks and voltage brought closer back to default settings..

I agree with flikflak in that your PSU should be able to support 3 RX470's comfortably even at stock settings. With BIOS mods you could possibly get 4, but you would really be pushing it. My personal comfort zone is to only run a PSU at ~80% of its rating for 24/7 use, so using this guideline would net you about 500 usable watts.

At stock settings you would be using about 450-475 watts with 3 x RX470's. BIOS mods could drop this down to about 380 watts giving you just about enough headroom to add a 4th card, which would bring the total to around 520 watts or so. A bit higher than I would like to see, but considering you already own the PSU you could do some tests with three cards at first to see where you are at.

Get a Kill-a-watt or similar meter that can measure the peak wattage over say a 24 hour period "at the wall" to get a good idea of what you real wattage usage is. This will vary over the course of the day as heat and fans ramp up and down, so you just don't want to base all your math with a low reading you might get when your first start-up.

I suppose with enough potatoes one could (theoretically) power a small rig for a brief period of time.

One potato, two potato, three potato, more...

Yes, a kit quote including everything I need would be appreciated. Thanks!

Yes, setting your Ethernet connection as Metered is supposedly one way to do it.

You can also try to disable the Windows Update service (run services.msc snap in) and set it to not run at startup.

Finally you can edit group policy (this is what I do) to turn it off. Run gpedit.msc and navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. Look for the Configure Automatic Updates option and choose which action you want. I use 2: “Notify for download and notify for install”.

If you use Claymore's mining software he has a EthMan program located in the Remote Manager folder you can use as a crude multi-rig monitor that does some basic management as well. This tool will run a web-server where you can monitor your rigs from a webpage, unfortunately any management must be still done from the EthMan GUI.

I have been reading through this thread and I am interested in trying out a few of these server power supplies, but I am unsure as to exactly what I would need.

I am looking to power a GPU rig, so it sounds like the 1200, 1500, or even 2000 watt server PSU's would work, but I need to know exactly what parts I need to be able to power all 6 cards, the motherboard, SDD, and risers from the same PSU.

My builds would require:
GPUs - single 8-pin PCIe connector each (total 6)
Motherboard - 24-pin & 8-pin power connections, 2 Molex connectors (depending on MB)
Sata SDD - (I suppose I could use a Molex to SATA adapter here)
USB Risers - 6 more Molex  (9 total including MB and SDD)

So far I gather that I will need the server PSU, a compatible break-out board which I believe takes care of the PCIe connections. I will then need something to take care of the Motherboard and Molex connections. Can someone fill in the missing pieces for me?

Thanks

Windows 10 is pretty rock solid IMHO when it comes to mining. Like the the other posters suggested, your biggest headache is Windows itself. Disabling the power saving features, especially sleep, and also disabling (or setting to deferred) Windows updates are the two biggies.

I also disable the hibernate feature to free up some SDD space which I use to increase the swap file size. Claymore recommends 16 GB with his miner, which I have never witness this much being used, but for the most part once your rig is setup and running there is not a lot of need for the extra SDD space anyway.

I have had Windows 10 rigs running constantly for well over 2 or 3 months at a time with no issues. I believe they would easily go much longer, but I find myself rebooting them once in awhile, mainly due to updating mining software or drivers. You probably don't need to reboot them as often as I do, but this also gives me a chance to give them a quick once over for cleaning. As my rig count becomes greater I find myself obsessing over things such as dust build-up and heat.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, 12 hours, or even 6 hours might be more to my liking. I used to run private pools back in earlier days (Doge and others) where myself and a few like-minded friends would point our miners, so I know all about the good connectivity issues.

This is why I am looking for a good hash-rate benchmark. So at 12 hours, we would need to be looking at 2 GHash/sec which would move me past solo mining and looking more to a private pool with some friends. I would probably host the pool at an online hosting provider to get the good connection you speak of, so this extra cost would need to be accounted for in profitability as well. Still would like to hear from anyone actually solo or private pool mining on hashrates, luck, etc.

Ahh, ok thanks for clarifying. I figured it was something I was overlooking and that makes more sense. Still, only 40 watts over the PCIe slot seems quite reasonable and should be easily handled via the Molex connectors. This is good information to know as I have never been able to independently measure the different power draws (slot versus the 6 or 8-pin connectors) myself. I assume these readings are typical for most cards?

While it is true all hardware will have some type of "life expectancy" or MTBF, I think your estimates are rather on the low end.

I agree with others that GPU cooling fans are probably the number one thing to go, but replacing these are fairly easy and economical with many exact-fit replacements available on eBay. The GPU's themselves keep running as long as they are cooled properly.

Risers, should last indefinitely, if there are issues with these it would be because of either physical damage or running too much current through them.

I have dedicated mining motherboards running since March 2013, and even have a few recycled ones (from personal builds) I am using from even earlier.

Of course, I like to perform routine maintenance on all of my rigs at least twice per year. This means taking the rig out of production, disassembling it and perform a thorough cleaning of all the components. This involves vacuuming and using canned air to clean heat-sinks and other hard to reach areas, re-seating all cables and components (except for CPU), and oiling and/or replacing any fans that are in need of more serious attention.

I don't mess with the CPU itself as risk of damaging pins is greater than any benefit. I might reapply some heat-sink compound between the CPU and the cooler, but once a CPU is socketed in a MB and running properly it is best to leave it alone. These two components are "Married forever" so to speak.

I think the other secret is to use some sort of quality surge suppression before the power supply to help  minimize surges (especially in the Summer with T-Storms) and to ensure there is adequate ventilation around each rig. Except for physical damage, the other two leading causes of component failure is from heat and or electrical surges/shorts. By using quality risers, keeping rigs well ventilated and ensuring clean power goes a long way to getting long life out of your equipment.

For me this strategy paid off well, as while I sold off most of my GPUs from the Scrypt mining days, i had kept all the motherboards and most of my power supplies. So when Eth started to take off, I only had to pull my old components out of storage and buy new more efficient GPUs. For the most part, I only had to ROI on the GPUs as everything else had already been paid off from before. \

One last thing in keeping with this is spend the few extra $$ on a quality power supply. I read so many threads of people using these cheap power supplies and cringe. I have several 1000 watt Corsair units that again are 3-4 years old and in many cases still under warranty. Buying quality here not only leads to a more reliable and longer lasting PS, but also ensures the rest of your system lasts longer as well since clean stable power is key to everything else. Also, when buying a PS, size it appropriately, don't run 840 watts 24/7 out of a unit rated at 850 watts. While the better brands will handle it, I usually go with the 80% rule, which is the same as NEC for power circuits, and size my Power Supplies accordingly. So a 1000 watt unit I would only pull 800 watts from it when mining.