It's been almost 3 weeks with 0.00229291 stuck in auto exchange ETH->BTC.  I think this pool is dying if not dead.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004263195778.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.0.0.7d6c18028WYfAM



The caps are there to smooth the voltage and are generally connected directly across the 12 volt line to ground.  If a cap goes bad, it's not uncommon for it to short which would be disastrous, though a modern power supply might shutdown fast enough to avoid serious damage.

I'm not really keen on all this LED bling and wonder how many extra watts it will consume but the voltage and temperature displays might be useful.  They are pretty cheap so I'm going to test them out and if I find out anything remarkable will update this thread.

For years I have been using 24 x ver008c risers without issues - never had one go bad.  But there's been numerous new versions come out since then and the latest seems to be the ver016 which has two LED displays (voltage and temperature).  It also has 10 capacitors!  I've ordered some to try out but I'm a bit skeptical that 10 capacitors will make any difference whatsoever compared to 4 capacitors.  If anything, there's more chance of failure considering a single shorted capacitor can kill the board.  Sounds like a marketing gimmick like those 10 bladed razors.  More isn't necessarily better.

I also wonder if having a metal shielded slot makes a difference.  Has anyone found improved stability with the newer risers?  Like ver010 and up?

After 5 years of stirling service and a lot of modifications I'm retiring my rig of 8 x 1070's.  My remaining 2 rigs, each with 8 x 1070ti's are running at around break even so will keep them spinning a few more months, at least until the Australian winter is over.

The question now is what to do with them?  The 1070's are old cards now and I can't imagine there is much of a market for them especially considering their mining history.  (Though one could argue they are thoroughly tested!).  I doubt it would be worth the hassle of listing them on ebay.  But I can't yet bring myself to throw away perfectly good cards.  So I will probably store them for 10 years and then throw them away!

What do you do with old mining cards that are no longer profitable and unlikely to ever be profitable again?

1. Nvidia do not want miners buying their cards!  Why do you think they started making cards only LHR?
2. There is nothing Nvidia or AMD can do to stop POW even if they wanted to (but actually they don't.  See point 1)

I designed the rig to:

1. Maximum air space between cards.
2. Have a taller narrower form factor.  (Makes it easier to pick up and move not having to bend down so much.)
3. So I can comfortably fit 8 cards in an area where normally you would only have 6.

...and finally because personally, I think it looks more bad-ass!

...was a classic 70's scifi flick (which most of you probably haven't seen) but that's not what this thread is about 

A few months ago, I decided to replace all the fans in my rigs with noctuas with the goal of reducing the noise level.  72 fans later, I am impressed with the result. 



My cards are Gigabyte 1070s and 1070tis, 3 rigs, 8 per rig.

They now run so quiet to be virtually inaudible unless it's a very quiet room.  In fact the main remaining noise was from the Silverstone 1500ti power supply so I went a step further and replaced that fan with a noctua NF14 industrial, connected to a motherboard header for control and monitoring.  My rigs are now so quiet that I can use them in a bedroom (which is ideal during winter.)  Another advantage is noctuas are rated for 150,000 hours which is like 20 years and laugh at dusty hot environments.  The stock fans began to seize up after 6 months and over the years I have replaced all the original sleeve bearings with ball bearings which stopped them seizing up but didn't help with the noise.

Cooling seems to be slightly improved too as temperatures with the fans running at maximum speed are slightly less than the originals running at their maximum speed.  The only downsides are losing the pretty lights (meh) and the fan calibration monitoring is completely wrong now as the bios thinks 4200rpm is 100% (original fan), so when the noctuas are running at maximum (2200 rpm) monitoring indicates 54%  This makes absolutely no difference to the cooling; it's just I need to do some mental gymnastics to determine the real percent.

And finally, the noctuas use less power.  Around 5 to 7 watts per card which adds up when you multiply it by 24 cards running 24/7.  Around 3kw less per day.  Which adds up over time.

So in summary:

PROS

Very quiet!
Way less prone to failure.
Slightly better cooling.
Slightly less power used.

CONS

Expensive x 24
Displayed fan percent incorrect.
Losing the pretty lights.


The result while costly, means that even when mining barely covers the cost of the electricity, I can happily run my rigs during during winter, using them as heaters.  Each rig draws around 1100 watts which provides the same heat as an 1100 watt heater.  BUT they are actually quieter than an equivalently powered heater!

I carefull sanded the crater out of the heatsink and VERY carefully sanded the GPU heatspreader using very fine sandpaper.  Completely removed the heatsink crater but left a much smaller pit in the heatspreader as I wasn't game to go too deep.  Then I had to deal with cleaning the microscopically fine metal powder that was undoubtedly left on the card.  Put it all back together and... well definitely an improvement.  Instead of running 10 degrees hotter it's now only about 4 degress hotter.  

Definitely nothing wrong with the fans and I can't see anything amiss with any of the components.  The other 7 cards in the rig are fine so it's not the power supply.  The reported watts is normal and the total power drawn by the rig from the socket is normal and the card had been running 24/7 for a month or two before I got around to cracking it open to see why it was 10 degrees hotter, so I expect it will continue to run fine especially as it's now only 4 degrees hotter.  Appears to be solely a heating issue caused by a defect in the heatsink or heatspreader, maybe an airpocket, who knows.  Up until a few months ago, it had been running pretty much non-stop for 4 years at a normal temperature.  Interestingly, it's winter here so temperature-wise, it actually occurred when it less stressed than 6 months ago.

All of a sudden.  Just suddenly started running 10 degrees hotter with the fan going 100%.  Fans are fine, I replaced the original sleeve bearings with sealed ball bearings years ago and they been fine ever since.  For sure, the crater wasn't there when I changed the fans so it has happened while it's been running.  It's like a teeny weeny explosion, damaging the GPU and heatsink.  But it still runs fine.  I will get some fine emery paper and see if I can smooth it down a bit.

One of my cards was running hot so I took it apart to see what was going on and discovered a crater maybe 2mm wide and maybe 50-100 microns deep in both the heatsink and the GPU.  It's like some tiny people let off a tiny stick of dynamite and made this not-so-tiny crater.

Card works totally fine except for getting hot.  How to fix?  Sandpaper?

I started mining back in 2017 and Eth POS was supposedly coming within 6 months, so yeah I understand.  It's like the boy who cried "wolf"  After a while nobody listens anymore.  But my point is that when and if it happens, it will be the end of gpu mining for 99% of people.  Of this there can be no doubt.  The gravy train will reach it's final terminus the day Eth goes POS.  So don't expect the salad days to go on forever.

I find it perplexing that so many (especially newbies) don't seem to be concerned about the pending Eth POS.  I believe the following to be facts but if anyone can rationally argue any of these points, I would be very interested to hear it.  It's quite possible I'm the stupid one but so far I haven't heard any reasonable rationale to counter the following logical chain.

1. Eth goes POS
2. Immediately, all the gpus currently mining Eth, switch to mining much smaller coins.
3. The enormous amount of hash power causes an enormous increase in difficulty for these smaller coins, resulting in:
4. Smaller coins mining profitability crashing through the floor, way below the electric cost for most miners.

At the moment, other coins are profitable.  Not as profitable as Eth but nonetheless still can generate more revenue than the electricity costs.  But consider a 100x increase in hash power that will result when erstwhile Eth miners switch over.  100 x hash power = 1/100 revenue per hash  (This is a very rough approximation).  Therefore if a card is currently earning $1 a day in revenue, it will drop to 1 cent a day.  Obviously no profit at all here.

Of course very quickly people will start turning off their rigs when they see they can no longer make money.  After a short period of time (weeks maybe), difficulty will drop and an equilibrium will be reached whereby the few miners with the lowest electric cost and the most efficient cards will be left mining with some degree of profitability.  But the majority of current miners will be out of the game.

This is not my opinion, it is factual.  Unless someone can fault my logic. (Please, please do!)

The Eth POS is not like a bear market.  It's a game changer for gpu mining.  There is no other POW coin that is anywhere near Eth's dominance.  The best you can hope for is that EIP1559 continues to be delayed because when it happens, it will be the end of gpu mining for most people.

Probably the worst time ever to be buying overpriced cards and starting mining.

Yeah... maybe be prepared for $0.02 for 30MH/s.  Nothing like Eth going POS has happened before.  It is unprecedented and it can't be compared to previous bear markets.  Other cryptos are minnows compared to ETh and the amount of hash power currently mining Eth, when turned to mine other cryptos will put a rocket under their difficulty resulting in a lead weight on profitability.

Crypto bull and bear markets come and go, rise and fall.  But we are talking about the biggest gpu mineable crypto ceasing to be gpu mineable.  Nothing like this has happened before.  There's a massive amount of hash power currently burning watts, mining Eth.  Imagine what will happen when that tidal wave of hash power turns to other much smaller cryptos.  Difficulties WILL skyrocket and profitability WILL plummet.  That is not opinion, it's factual.  And it aint gonna be a small dip!

It's very simple actually.  The massive influx of hash power applied to lesser coins that will result from Eth going POS, will result in a massive increase in difficulty.  Higher difficulty = lower earnings.  These are simply inarguable facts.  Or to put it very simplistically, the same size pie will be cut into a thousand times more pieces so each hash will generate 1/1000 the earnings than before.

I find the blind optimism that the Eth POS will be a mere blip in mining profitability to be somewhat bewildering.  Only the strong will survive the aftermath.  "Strong" in this case meaning those with the latest gpus and/or the cheapest electricity.

The Eth POS will happen sooner or later.  It's been many years "pending" but one day it will happen.  And when it does, the shakeup wrt GPU mining will be huge.  Eth is the 2nd biggest crypto and the 3rd is a long way behind.  It's hard to imagine a scenario whereby all the hash power currently mining Eth turns to other much smaller cryptos, that doesn't result in a massive reduction in mining profits.

Crypto prices rise and fall, bull and bear markets come and go.  But the Eth POS will be an unprecedented event that will smash crypto mining profitability.  I just can't see any plausible alternative.  I would dearly love to be wrong and if anyone can logically and rationally detail a reasonable scenario whereby crypto mining continues to be at least half as profitable as it is now after the Eth POS, I would be very interested to read it.

I hope I'm wrong but I believe if and when eth goes POS, gpu mining will stop being profitable for most people.  Right now most gpus are hashing eth and when that huge hash power is turned to other coins, their difficulty will shoot up and profitability will plummet.  I can't see any other alternative to this happening.  I doubt we will ever see a bull run like this again for gpus.  But it's been a wild ride 

Cheers for that

It's exactly what I would love to get!  If it wasn't out of stock.

There are plenty of low power cpu/motherboard combos that draw less than 30 watts under full load, some under 20 watts, including ram and drive.

see https://www.techspot.com/review/1188-asrock-deskmini-110/page7.html

The problem is finding one that can support above 4g decoding.

In an effort to save watts and have fun, I would like to try to make an 8 gpu rig using one of those cpu/motherboard combos that typically have a tdp less than 20 watts.  To run 8 cards, I just need 2 slots feeding 4 way pcie splitter cards.  But I also need the "Above 4g decoding" bios option.  Is anyone aware of any combos that include such?

Very doubtful.  The card has been running reliably for 4 years like this including 4 Australian summers where ambient exceeds 40 degrees C.  Also both the GPU and hotspot reported temperatures are 10 degrees lower than usual.  And if there was a measuring error then the backplate would be noticeably hotter but if anything it's cooler than the other cards.