If they make a power-efficient (I'm thinking 45W) APU that can put out 80-120mhash/s with 400-600 Radeon 7xxx series shaders, CPU mining will be worth it.
Granted it's not much in daily BTC, but it will pay to keep the processor mining, unlike now.
Agreed. For new mining rigs, it might make sense once they have some 3-4-5 pci-e slot boards. You'd get the same GPU production with a bonus 50-80mhs from your cpu. |
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I and several others predicted that this was going to happen: - The SRAs (i.e. the folks who found out about and bought into Bitcoin in June as a result of the Silk Road Articles) are getting bored with Bitcoin.
- The SRAs would have cashed out a few weeks ago if it wasn't for the MGH (the Mount Gox hack) which had them licking their chops at the thought of a possible "reset" of the market which would allow them to buy in at pre-June prices.
- As that didn't happen, the SRAs' boredom and inability to make profits on large margins because of the relatively stable $17 price since the MGH is now finally resulting in a slow but steady cash out.
- The price is now dropping to the point where even the faithful are losing their nerve and cashing out.
- Bitcoin will continue to drop, with possible plateaus at $10 and then steadily drop from there to around $3 or $4, if not lower.
- Throughout the drop media articles will detail the drop of Bitcoin, while Bitcoin zealots like TraderTimm, Evorhees, and Atlas will continue to post about the "great opportunity to buy" as they watch their anti-establishment dream disappear along with their significant investments.
Thoughts? There's always a zillion factors going on. Right now there's more sellers then buyers. A lot of miners are selling coins as fast as they get them to help recover their hardware investments. Some are getting out of mining. The last difficulty adjustment pushed a lot of people out of the mining business. Not because it's no longer profitable, but because people don't like seeing their income drop 40% overnight so they're getting out while they can still sell the hardware at great prices. But people will always mine. I know people who 10+ folding rigs and not only run them for free, they lose money on the electricity costs. Even if Bitcoins were $3 people would still runt their mining rigs. Difficulty adjusts, people adapt, Bitcoin keeps going. The majority of people who buy and spend Bitcoins are for drugs. No one is going through the trouble of loading up money on some iffy exchange, buy bitcoins then go buy something they could have purchased with a debit/creditcard. The only reason you'd use Bitcoins instead of debit/credit is because it's harder to track (legal stuff like a bong you might want to hide) or it's illegal. Thankfully for Bitcoin the illicit drug market is huge. Global video game market is around 50 billion. Illicit drugs is easily over 500 billion. The fact is very few people are buying AND using Bitcoins beyond illicit drugs. If I want to buy a used video card there's no way I'm going to send money to MtGox, buy bitcoins, then go pay for my video card. Almost everyone who accepts Bitcoins also accepts standard forums of payment. If they don't they're living in god knows where (i.e. not usa) and I'm not buying from them anyway. So the bad news is there's lots of people trying to use Bitcoin to make quick money, using it as an investment, which relies on OTHER people to want/spend Bitcoins. The good news is the amount of people who do buy and spend Bitcoins should slowly keep going up, those people aren't going away, so there's a lot of strength/security on the bottom. Bitcoins will more and more become an easier/better way to buy drugs (not as much locally, but it's huge internationally where your dealer might live 4000 miles away). Long term Bitcoin has a lot of strenght/upside but people trying to use it as an investment or get rich quick are going to be sorely disappointed. So people are always going to mine, people are always going to need Bitcoins for drugs, that's not changing. The problem right now is a lot of people were trying to make quick money off Bitcons and there simply isn't enough buyers to support it. The situation long term looks very strong to me but short term it's going to be a lot of growing pains. |
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Well, it seems I am another miner that has suffered a fan failure on one of my Sapphire 5850's  I have three of them, and one of them started becoming unstable while mining, and would intermittenly just stop hashing, so after troubleshooting, I realized the temps on one particular GPU would just shoot up right after starting a miner. Within few minutes I realized the fan was barely spinning, and causing the GPU to overheat. I cant get the fan to spin any faster by software means, so I am assuming its dying like the many others. So, I am RMA'ing back to Sapphire. Has anyone had to do this before? How long did it take before you got yours back? What kind of fan speeds were you guys running? Wondering if I should lower mine to hopefully avoid them dying. |
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Nah, not the memory clock.
I gave up a long time ago trying to get those hashrates you mentioned, due to temp. problems.. Room is maybe 20c, other core runs typically at 70-75. Core 0 simply skyrockets in temperature even if it has a massive 500cfm/h fan pointed at it.
Tried various stress tests like Furmark, only bitcoin and phoenixminer practically kill gpu#0.
Still, nice guide.
I'd RMA it if it's still under warranty. Tell them it crashes 15-20 minutes after you start gaming. That's not normal there's clearly something wrong with that chip. Those types of issues usually get worse over time. |
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Crossfire hurts when its enabled. Crossfire cables being plugged into the cards doesn't mean crossfire is enabled. I have the bridge plugged in on my main pc but have crossfire disabled in the driver control panel. Works just fine...
When I set it up with 4 cards Windows 7 wouldn't detect the other cards with crossfire disabled. Anyway people should use crossfire cables not dummy plugs I get it, lets move on. =) |
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here are mine  [image of 10 Antec DF-85s] Man that is just awesome. Please post more information. So far it's 4x5870s, MSI 890FXA-GD70 mobo, Antec DF-85? That all makes sense. But how exactly do you keep it cool? What are your cores/memory? MH/s? Temps? It looks like you added a 120m side fan, that case must have amazing cooling to just need 1 more fan to run 4 of those cards. They look amazing, thanks for posting! |
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You know that you don't need the crossfire bridge for mining right? Unless he's running Windows and doesn't have or want to use dummy plugs. Crossfire hurts your performance when mining. People use dummy plugs because they have no choice. When I had 4x crossfired it was constant problems. I had no issues with performance. I used it because its easier than using dummy plugs and works just fine. I do my testing under windows which forces me to use those cables. Plus it looks much nicer and allows the person to have a high end gaming pc along with a great miner. Plus the bridges dont cost me anything, i wa getting 400mhahes/s from each card at 900core. Was it suppose to be higher? My 4 dummy plugs cost me around $2. But yes crossfire is cheaper. =) Crossfire can cause problems, which is why it's suggested you disable it. People aren't making dummy plugs for the looks, it's out of necessity. But if you can crossfire and you don't have any problems more power to you. I went crossfire to start because I didn't want to make dummy plugs. Had a lot of issues and had no choice but to go the dummy plug route. Regardless very nice rig. =) |
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You know that you don't need the crossfire bridge for mining right? Unless he's running Windows and doesn't have or want to use dummy plugs. Crossfire hurts your performance when mining. People use dummy plugs because they have no choice. When I had 4x crossfired it was constant problems. |
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...show me a 6970 pulling 445MH/s at 1ghz core like the 5870 does.
Here: ...cut image out... I have it at only 950core/1375Memory doing an average of 460+MH/s (values fluctuate between 457.8, 460.5, 468.7). Still, a 5870 is far more efficient at mining since the GPU is smaller by half a billion transistors, it has half the ram clocked at a lower speed and at lower voltage plus the PCB is less complex (less layers). WTF. What SDK? Can you post all the flags you're using? That's insane. Besides using Vista, I've never been able to get that on my 6970s let alone on that clock. I have to push it to 1ghz to get even close and I'm still 20 mh/s short. Getting 460 with aggression at 7? I'm extremely confused. I've tried a zillion combos on win7 and linux I don't understand how you get that speed. Could Vista really boost it by that much? |
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Not sure if it's the right board or if it's been already discussed, apologies if so, but:
with all the talk about top ATI cards being sold out throughout the western world, do you guys think that the card manufacturers actually take notice of bitcoin phenomenon, or is it not even a blip on ATI's and NVidia's radar?
How about manufacturers, like MSI, Saphire and others?
Do you think they are working on custom chips?
Do they realize that they have a interest on helping to keep BTC alive?
They've noticed there is no question. It's not just the raw sales. As other people mentioned, it might be 1-3% boost. Just looking at some of the top online retailers, it's extremely hard to get quite a few of the ati models and nvidia from what I've seen doesn't have any stock issues. It might be 1-3% so it's not a game changer. But the bigger boost is people seeing ATI as badass and nvidia as "slow as hell". If you google around there's lots of people recommending ATI and tell people not to get nvidia. It might be or might not be obvious to people researching it's from a bitcoin perspective. There is no question a perception shift between the two brands and I'm sure the ATI folks are quite pleased with it. Will either company make any changes to help/hurt bitcoin? I doubt it. But the fact 10,000s of people are out there saying ATI is 5-10x faster, oh don't buy an nvidia card does have an effect. It's free advertising and when it's all about speed (gaming) people are probably going to lean more towards ATI next purchase then Nvidia's offering. Very few people even know why ATI is faster, they just know that they are. |
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I currently have about 15 spare PC's hanging around, in was just wondering would it be worth trying to cluster them with a live cd like clusterknoppix for CPU mining? Or would it be better to just miner on all of them separately?
As someone else posted, CPU mining probably costs you money. Since you don't pay for your power, it still doesn't make much sense. 15 old computers might get you 30-40 Mhashs. You can pickup a ATI Radeon 5770 for $90 and it will get you 200 Mhashs (and actually make you a little bit of money). So $90 card and you make money 15 old heaters running 24.7 costing someone else money and making you almost nothing. I'd sorta go with the first option. |
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500W is recommended for a single high-end graphics card. Putting two in a 500W and running 24/7 @ 100% = imminent failure.
On a unrelated side note, I learned the difference between immanent and imminent just now.
5770 isn't high end, it's 108 watts under full load. He'd never even hit 300 watts with 2x5770. The PSU would be running 55-60% load which is fine. I'm surprised at the number of people who replied without actually responding to his question or offering any options. Telling him 2x5770 on a 500w psu is "imminent failure" is laughable. |
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I agree with Mike, that PSU is horrible.
It's the only component beside the GPU that actually matters for 24/7 use.
Spend the extra for a quality one, skimp on the RAM and processor.
He said "cheapest hardware". That was not the cheapest PSU. That PSU is actually quite good, there were cheaper options. Those cards run 108 watts max load. With a 45 watt Sempron, two 5770s that's 261 watts (cpu is unlikely to be under full load). Add in the motherboard, ram, HD, 500w is plenty. He'd never even hit 300 watts. You could even run 3x5770 if you wanted to really push it. Since he said "minimum/cheapest" setup, I'm quite happy with my suggestions. =) |
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API/Website were having connection problems, which would be why your charts freaked out. UK cluster had an error in their sync code when they hit US East. It ended up flooding the server with MySQL connections which made it so the other servers could not get a response, making API/My Account not work for about 20 minutes.
The round time didn't reset after the last block it's currently up to 3hr 55min (should be around 50 minutes). Everything else looks good though. =) |
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Here is an interesting concept I was thinking about.
So we all know that the primary cost of the mining rig is the energy. For most, this is make or break. If the energy is too much you won't make any money. To solve this issue how about running the rig on renewable energy.
There are lots of places around the world that have awesome renewable energy resources that aren't tapped. Most of these resources aren't tapped because with renewable energy you need to build transmission lines so only the big renewable energy projects get developed. With running a rig there is no need for transmission line. Simply set up your renewable energy generators, connect to some transformers/power conditioning/battery then connect your rig to that. The ideal energy source would be a micro hydro setup that produces a couple KWs. If you are in a remote location then you can use satellite internet to connect to the internet.
Seems like a realistic idea if you live in a remote location.
If people could do it right now (regardless of bitcoin) they would. Who wouldn't want to save money and have their tv/computer run for free? Problem is it costs $1000s, you don't see the money for 5-10-15 years, and that's with huge tax breaks. Energy is cheap and until it's no longer cheap there's not a lot of motivation to change. |
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The guy who figured it out posted it in here 2 days ago.
Stop stealing other people's work and trying to get tips.
GTFO.
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It's not just the fact you can use GPUs to reach 6GH/s cheaper, it's the fact the ATI cards have other uses. If you bought 6k worth of 6990s (plus parts), they'd get you 5-6GH/s. Lets say Bitcoin crashes and it's over. You could still go sell those 6k worth of 6990s on eBay and probably get 3k at worst with upside of getting 4-5K back. So your mining setup you're only really risking 50% of your momey at most, maybe closer to 30%.
If Bitcoin crashes and it's over, your FPGA rig is worth $0. Factoring in any power savings over how many months? Sure if you figure Bitcoin mining goes strong for 5 years it might make sense. The ATI gpus are more powerful, have other uses, there's a huge consumer market for used cards which means there's not a whole lot of risk. Computer hardware holds it's value. A one trick pony fpga card you'd be hard pressed to give away if you wanted (or forced) to stop mining.
Well you caught the point, but not very precise. If you only toss costly FPGAs on the cheapest possible PCB, cou can sell the quipment for recycling and even FPGA then the FPGA will be bought by companies that reball such chips. If you invest some resources to create a proper FPGA-design with many high speed connections between the chips and put some memory on the boards, you could still sell them as low cost FPGA-clusters. Did you notice the COPACOBANA, its basically a BOX filled with FPGA, just for passwort cracking and such and from the engeneering point it is a rather poor design due to its simple interconnection scheme and no memory. And this was 10k EURO 4 years ago. So now building a Bitcoin mining rig means you're also selling FPGA cluster time on the side just in case things go tits up. It's painfully obvious from where I'm sitting it's a lot easier to sell your computer hardware then it would be for FPGA hardware. If there's such a great market for FPGA clustering, why not just do that and forget bitcoins? It's like telling someone to buy a car because they can also use it to deliver pizza's. But I don't wan to deliver pizzas. But you get great tips! If you're buying 6k-8k of hardware for mining, there's a million reasons to buy ATI gpus. The reasons in favor of FPGA for 6-8k? Might look sorta cool in your signature on the forum, that's about it. |
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The Spartan 6 FPGAs look compelling to me because of their relatively low cost, but it's not clear to me whether they compete against the Altera parts in terms of $/Mhash. If they are cost-competitive and achieve similar hash rates, then I'm tempted to try making low-cost boards optimized for low I/O pin count applications like this. I can envision a single-FPGA board with a USB-interfaced microcontroller to babysit it, as well as a larger form factor with an array of LX150 FPGAs (say, 16 of them) under the control of a supervisor (possibly an LX45T with an ethernet interface, running Linux on a Microblaze core, for a fully stand-alone mining appliance). I'd try to bring out as much of the I/O as I could get away with on a 4-6 layer board to make them more generically useful. ArtForz claims to get 190MH/s out of an XC6SLX150. While I haven't seen this with my own eyes I think he's trustworthy enough to rely on it. He also claimed to be currently prototyping a 2U rackmount rig with 32 of them, reaching 6GH/s and using like 300 watts of power. He said that he's planning to sell machines like this, estimating a time to market of about 2 months and a cost of $6K-$8K. We use a lot of FPGA platforms at work for hardware emulation (mostly Virtex-5 XC5VLX320 parts). I have one sitting on my desk that's not doing anything while I'm not at work, but I don't think it'd be wise for me to run miners at work over the closely-watched corporate network. Based on the FPGA mining hardware comparison, I'm guessing that one of them might fit two unrolled miners for a total speed of around 240 Mhash/s?
Yeah, I think 240MH/s should be doable with these, possibly even a bit more. What about trying to officially get permission to let them mine during the nights? 6GH/s for $6-$8k? Even if it did 10GH/s no one would buy it. If that's the end game for FPGA then it doesn't look very good. It's not just the fact you can use GPUs to reach 6GH/s cheaper, it's the fact the ATI cards have other uses. If you bought 6k worth of 6990s (plus parts), they'd get you 5-6GH/s. Lets say Bitcoin crashes and it's over. You could still go sell those 6k worth of 6990s on eBay and probably get 3k at worst with upside of getting 4-5K back. So your mining setup you're only really risking 50% of your momey at most, maybe closer to 30%. If Bitcoin crashes and it's over, your FPGA rig is worth $0. Factoring in any power savings over how many months? Sure if you figure Bitcoin mining goes strong for 5 years it might make sense. The ATI gpus are more powerful, have other uses, there's a huge consumer market for used cards which means there's not a whole lot of risk. Computer hardware holds it's value. A one trick pony fpga card you'd be hard pressed to give away if you wanted (or forced) to stop mining. |
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thanks! tried them, and with 128, i get 194.7 as my highest result what does this do exactly? edit: found another setting: -v -w128 -f0 gives me 198 max keeps getting better and better  two days ago i thought all i would get was 140Mhash/s edit2: *dances* using the phoenix miner now, and i broke the 200Mhash/s barrier, doing 208.2Mhash/s now wich is pretty damn good imo using: VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP=false AGGRESSION=12 -k phatk WORKSIZE=128 thanks for pushing me in this direction, 40~50Mhash/s for free thanks to you great job! =) |
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