Noob question. When quoting hashrates ie ETHs are people going off their miner or their dashboard?

Ie with my MSI GTX 1060 Gaming x 6gb
Mining Pool Hub dashboard gives me 23.29 MH/s, looking at my miner it seems to be showing in the low 18 MH/s
I've slightly overclocked it at through afterburner Power limit 108, +140 Core clock +760

Thanks for the speedy response guys!

The FLDC is interesting and would be great to crunch although I suspect if I'm going to donate (ie not have a financial incentive) I'd be leaning toward SETI (search for aliens) at the moment as they seem to be getting swamped with the data the telescopes are producing: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/25/listening-to-starlight-our-ongoing-search-for-alien-intelligenc/

Interesting comment on the AMD graphics cards, I might give the shop a ring, they are listing lots of models on their website.

Hi, I have solar panels on my roof and for the half the day I'm feeding electricity back into the grid and being paid 5 cents kw/h (so you could say that is the cost). Otherwise it is 20 cents. I have donated to distributed computing (SETI, Folding@Home, World Community Grid etc.) for over 10 years but only from my CPU and onboard Intel graphics. An energy efficient GPU (and not too noisy) could sit in there during peak daylight hours and mine for me (about 6 hours every day).

I have my desktop with PSU: 650W 80PLUS Gold and currently no graphics card.
My computer is under the desk in a Fractal Designs Define R5 case (so some sound insulation built into the design)

Locally I can buy:
Radeon 480 RX 4gb Asus Dual OC  $250
Radeon 580 RX 4gb Gigabyte or Sapphire $290
Radeon 580 RX 8gb Gigabyte, MSI, Asus or Sapphire $335


or
nVidia 1050Ti 4gb Gigabyte, Galax, Asus or MSI $180
nVidia 1060 6gb Gigabyte, Galax, Asus or MSI $300
nVidia 1070 8gb Gigabyte, Galax, Asus or MSI $450
nVidia 1080 8gb Gigabyte, Galax, Asus or MSI $550

So not a super serious rig but something that would be a good start that would give me some flexibility moving forward. All prices are is USD

My preference would be for nVidia with a CUDA so at a later date I can use it for distributed computing (donating for scientific research) again if I wanted (seems AMD only has a couple of models that you can use the GPU) https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing