It depends on what you're willing to do. Minergate and alikes are the easiest one, you just have to turn on smart mining and it will select automatically the best currency. The drawback is that Minergate is not very transparent in how much money you're making and the choice of best currency is questionable. I tried with my rig and XMR was always the recommended currency while it's far from being the most profitable one.

You can go for a dual miner like claymore and there you'll mine two currencies at the same time. If you want something more custom made, you'll probably have to develop a script. I have seen mining pools proposing automatic switching but I haven't tried them.

I never tried but from what i read, it should be possible without affecting ETH hashrate

Yes indeed, XMR and ZEC use less power than ETH.
As for ordering you are right, in what country are you located?

dual mine on gtx 1060 3gb means reducing hash rate for ETH, it's not such a good deal.

Not in 1 month no but within one year, it still is profitable and without taking value increase into account.
With a 2.5k rig, I would need to make 1 ETH / month with an average value of 250$. Today ETH is at 300+ and is expected to grow. Difficulty will rise but big bumps are out of the way for one year now.

I have 10 GTX 1060

The configuration I gave you in the beginning of this thread goes below 900W for everything together (GPU, motherboards, SSD, ...). If you mine ZEC, it will even go lower (below 800).

do you use linux or windows? If you can use nvidia-smi, you should be able to see if your changes are taken into account

I'll probably give it a try too, ETH is still interesting for me today, I make 11-12$/day with no electricity cost and sometimes I switch to ZEC but I haven't found any alternative coin yet where I could make more profit with GPU mining.

it's always a bit of a gamble and it all depends if you're looking at the long run or not. If you want short term results, you should speculate on current value, buy/sell whenever you feel like it's appropriate. You can earn much more like this but BTC and ETH are very volatile, you can earn a lot or lose a lot too. With mining, you won't be break even before a couple of months (if not more) but you won't lose money. Of course there is the hardware you buy but it's never going to be of no value.

that might explain your temperatures, open air with or without additional fans is better for temperatures. Today I have opened the window in the room where the mining rig is sitting and I get all cards below 50°C.

Zarados: with the cards I mentioned in my initial post I can reduce power to 75W, the whole rig is below 900w. AMD cards can produce more hashrate but they are more expensive and use more power.

lezanch:
Do you use an open rig? Those temps seems really high. I'm between 45 and 55°C with an open air rig. Try to lower your clock, I'm using -200, it's more stable.

you're still one year away from POS so yes you can still make money with ETH

In the ones I tried, Nanopool is the one I kept using. I had good performances with Dwarfpool as well but for some reason, my rig crashes once a day when I use dwarfpool while I don't have that problem with nanopool. I'm sure there are other reliable pool, I would suggest to add them here if you have any interesting experience to share.

zarados: it was for practical reasons. I could get my hands on a cheap server psu with only pcie cables, if you want to find a normal psu with the same power you're usually above 200$ for a single psu

abvhiael: indeed but at the time I bought my GTX 1060 there were no 480 on the market. Are they back now?

Shnikes101: buy ETH is indeed much easier but doesn't bring more certainty, I suppose people find some comfort in having hardware at home. My choice was based on the fact that my solar panel were producing more juice than I can use and this electricity was sent back to the network without earning anything.

I'm making around 12$/day with GPU and no paying electricity, it's not such a bad deal. GTX 1080 are not good cards for mining if you compare price vs ROI.

Anyway, is there a reliable calculator for asic?

thanks

Coinfoundry: the problem with mining is that it's time driven as profitability it bound to decrease so people what to get money as fast as possible. With smaller pool you don't get paid as often as with bigger pools. I suppose some psychological factors are playing their part too.

How long does it take to find a block on your pool? Outside the fact that you're not taking the usual 1% fee, is there anything else that makes a miner earn more?

Hello Woodser,

Yes, I'm sure, I have 10 GTX 1060 3gb and they are working fine and will be working fine for at least one year with ETH and once POS will be there, no GPU will be able to mine so I'll switch to another currency. Those cards work well on ZEC too. 6Gb deliver a little bit more performance but they are much more expensive. The most important criteria is Samsung memory.

Thanks
Laurent