I would recommend checking out their discord, Official Discord:  https://discord.gg/eUNRSgy , they seem very responsive there.  I have only browsed the Discord occasionally, but they seem to answer questions pretty quickly there as well as some community support.

Purk has been listed on its first exchange, Altex.

Great job bloc team.  Here's a quick list of why I'm excited about the coin.

1. Asic resistant algo - CN Heavy
2. Excellent wallet, one of the best I've seen
3. Mobile platform for wallets and mining
4. Fast transactions, almost instant
5. Private transactions
6. Successful launch
7. Good looking roadmap
8. Planned widespread application, even Apple TVs!!!!
9. Well designed website
10. This last one is a little greedy, but I love that the nethash is super low compared to other CN Heavy coins.  I'm mining quite a few coins per day compared to other CN-Heavy coins.

I'm mining and hodling this coin.  Keep up the great work.  Once this coin starts a big marketing campaign (twitter/crypto-bloggers/big exchanges) I think it's going to explode/moon.

I wholeheartedly disagree.  I want to see everyone mining, not just the fanatics.  The more people mining the more likely crypto becomes more widely accepted and used.  Also, if every idle GPU were mining that's a pretty big/secure network.  I say invite everyone to the party!

FYI - there will be a Raven Coin meetup in Salt Lake City, Utah on May 7th.  It is free to attend and will be livecast as well.  Lead developer for Raven Coin, Tron Black, will be doing a Q&A.  Also speaking will be Bruce Fenton and Overstock's Patrick Byrne. 

https://twitter.com/Ravencoin/status/991361386252062720

Should be a good source of information for those interested in the coin.

If it's used you may want to reset the bios settings, might be worth it even if it's a new mobo.  People will turn off a lot of ports and peripherals they aren't using on a mining rig.

There's a new AMD miner for x16r I'd love to see added to smos!

https://github.com/aceneun/sgminer-gm-x16r/releases

I agree that ETC will probably take off once ETH goes PoS.  The question is when ETH will go PoS, it has been pushed back many times already.  Myself, I'm staying on ETH for now. 

Same here.  I'm using 32GB USB drives for smos rigs and 120GB SSDs for Windows rigs.  I'd definitely recommend SSDs over HDDs for Windows systems.  The time saved in reboots alone is worth it imo.

I don't trust them, but I am still using them for my Nvidia rig.  I just cash out every day now that they have the free and instant transfer to Coinbase.

Hello miners,

I was just curious as to what some of you more veteran miners thought about the current status of the crypto market.  I have only been mining for about 6 months but to me it feels like we are about see another boom.  I'm basing this mostly on the projections of whattomine.com and the few coins I've invested in, Pirl and (M)IOTA.  Whattomine is showing very promising numbers, compared to a few months ago, and the coins I've invested in have spiked considerably. 

I'm so tempted to go out and purchase a bunch of hardware to get ready for the boom, but I'm nervous because I'm still a newbie when it comes to crypto.  Did I just get super lucky picking the coins I chose and am seeing a cyclical rise in mining profitability from whattomine.com or are things on the rise and about to get better, based on previous booms?

Should I bet the farm or sit tight and enjoy the profits while they last?

Thanks in advance for your opinions and advice.

I have the same motherboard and I'm running 5 RX570s.  You will need to go into the motherboard bios and enable 4G decoding then I bet it'll recognize your 4th GPU.

Thanks for the insights, warnings, and suggestions all.  I'm a little disapointed that nobody here seems as excited about Pirl as I was.  Maybe it's just me wanting something other than BTC and ETH to blow up and not yet knowing enough about new crypto.  I'll keep watching the forums and whattomine. 

Hello miners,

I recently started mining a new coin that I'm excited about, Pirl, and I was wondering what the community thought about this coin and how you guys do your coin research on newer coins.  I've been mining for about 5 months now, mostly ETH, and this is the first new coin I've decided I want to take a chance on.  With this being a new coin I haven't been able to find a lot about them, but going by their website and community I thought it sounded like a really good coin to mine.  Pirl has been showing up on whattomine's most profitable coin to mine list a lot this past week, which is how I heard about it, so I was wondering if anyone else here on the boards has been watching it.

So here is a list of the reasons I decided to mine this coin and I was hoping the community could tell me if I'm on the right track or wasting my time/miners.

Pros
1. I like that it uses the Dagger Hashimoto algo and is asic resistant.
2. It will never go PoS.
3. There will be MasterNodes implemented by the end of the year which allow the community to run a masternode, if you have 20k Pirl coins, and make some coin while supporting the network.
4. The devs seem active and involved in the community.
5. No ICO or pre-mine
6. Currently low difficulty, so I'm getting a lot of coins early.
7. Future plans for a marketplace
8. The community votes on changes
9. A polished website with useful tools and information
10. It's relatively cheap at the moment at 40 cents a coin

Cons
1. Currently it is only listed on Cryptopia
2. I haven't been able to find a lot of sources for information, so the bulk of my knowledge has come from their website and community which I'm guessing is a bit biased.
3. Blocks have 12 coins, 10 go to the miner and 2 to the devs (everyone says this is too high?).  Once Masternodes are live 10 will go to the miner, 1 to the devs, and 1 to masternodes.

Any insight on this coin or how to research new coins will be greatly appreciated.

Before I list out what I'd recommend let me say this, treat that $900 like you are spending it on a hobby.  Don't expect to get rich from it and enjoy the ride.  That will make your experience a lot more fun. 

For your first rig I'd suggest the build below.  This is strictly based on what is on sale at Microcenter right now so you can spend most of your money on GPUs.

CPU -- http://www.microcenter.com/product/486115/FX_8320E_Black_Edition_Vishera_32_GHz_8_Core_AM3_Boxed_Processor -- $80 with a $40 rebate and save $30 when bundled with a motherboard.
Mobo -- http://www.microcenter.com/product/484530/GA-970A-DS3P_FX_AM3_ATX_AMD_Motherboard -- $70-$30 for bundling with CPU.  Could support 5 GPUs later
RAM -- http://www.microcenter.com/product/460070/4GB_DDR3-1866_PC3-14900_CL13_Single_Channel_Desktop_Memory_Module -- $40
PSU -- http://www.microcenter.com/product/467824/750_BQ_750_Watt_80_Plus_Bronze_Semi-Modular_ATX_Power_Supply  -- $80, $65 after rebate.  This will be one of the first parts to replace once you are making your money back.  This is just a decent brand power supply to get started with.  Should at least support 3 GPUs.
Storage -- http://www.microcenter.com/product/485586/32GB_SuperSpeed_USB_30_Flash_Drive -- $11 flash drive to put your OS on.  I'm a big fan of simple mining OS, it's $2/month and offers a free trial of 7 or 14 days I think.

This should leave you with around $650 for GPUs.  I'd recomend throwing in a few more bucks and buying 3 of these --  http://www.microcenter.com/product/478365/Radeon_RX_570_ARMOR_Overclocked_4GB_GDDR5_Video_Card  --

Cryptonight is an algorithm used by a few different coins, like ethash is the algorithm used by ETH.  900 watts isn't too bad for ETH mining on 6 x RX570s.  I'm not mining ETH on my rigs right now, so I forgot how much more power it draws.

Wow, 900 watts for 6 GPUs seems super high.  Make sure your SMOS is updated and running the latest version.  My 3 card RX570 rig is pulling 309 watts at the wall and my 4 card RX570 rig is pulling 397 watts at the wall.  Although I just thought of another reason my power usage is so low, I switched to cryptonight instead of Ethash recently.  I noticed nearly 50% less power usage with the cryptonight algo compared to ethash.  So I guess if I were running Ethash again I probably would be closer to 120 watts per card.

You can go into your motherboard's bios and force the onboard GPU to be the primary.  By default most motherboards disable the onboard gpu when you install a GPU.

I personally do not hook up any displays to my rigs.  I monitor them through a SSH session using PuTTY.  Also, I'm also mining using simple mining OS, which uses Linux.  It's $2/month per rig but has some really nice overclocking and undervolting features as well as a single web gui to monitor all my rigs.

I have not run into any issues with Nicehash not paying out.  I've been mining cryptonight with them for about a week and have been getting payouts each morning to my Nicehash wallet.  I've cashed out once to my own btc wallet from Nicehash, again without any issues.  I will say that whattomine has always projected my earnings to be slightly higher than what they end up being, but this has been true with most coins I've mined and checked my projected profit through whattomine.  I'm guessing this could be from me not having my cards running at optimum levels or whattomine calculating slightly high.

Here are my settings for my 570, I don't have any 580s, but it might be a good starting point for you.  I'm getting 28+ mh/s @ ~80w per card.

Core - 1175
Mem - 1975
Core Undervolting - 850
Powerstage - 3