Mining software does not provide you with coins.  The pool and wallet are the only things that deal with coins.  You will use mining software to contribute hashrate to a pool.  You will then withdraw coins that the hashrate contributes to from the pool to your own wallet.  There are thousands of coins, and no single wallet that will hold them all.  You are better off using the official wallet for the coin you are mining.  Depending on the pool, you also have the opportunity to mine directly to an exchange's wallet for that coin.  This keeps you from having to run dozens of wallets on your computer.  I say it depends on the pool, as exchanges don't like for you to mine directly to their wallet, but if the pool has a threshold to reach before it automatically pays out, then the "deposits" are not too frequent, and exchanges won't care about this.

If you are using one of the yiimp based pools, then you can keep the coin you are mining instead of having it convert to BTC by using the "c=XXX" parameter on the password of your batch file... where the XXX part is the short code for the coin... like c=GOA for mining and keeping Goacoin... or c=ALTCOM for AltCommunityCoin.

Since it appears you are new to mining... it doesn't matter which brand of 1080ti you get.  You want the cheapest one you can find.

Once you get more experienced, then brands may start to matter, only for certain features you are looking for... like better or specific cooling features for your rig and environment.  Or how many 8 pin power connectors you will need.

There is a huge difference in choices because there is no one single gold standard.  Everyone has different goals, GPU availability, electric costs, and many other factors.  The mining market changes every few months, with new GPUs, new motherboards, new algorithms, new coins, etc.

I think it would be better for you to state your goals, what you want to mine, and give us a bit more detail rather than such an open ended question.

I think the Baikals are the only ASICs which do X13, X14, X15, Qubit, and Quark.  They also do X11, but there are several other manufacturers who do X11 alone.

Baikal has moved on to other algorithms for it's ASICs, so whats available out on the market is probably all there ever will be unless something like Deep Onion surges and makes it worth the effort to create another X13 ASIC.

Patrike,

A question... when we upgrade the Awesome Miner application, we can use the GUI to update the remote agent.  Where is this agent located?  Are the agents pulling the updates from the web?  Or is there an MSI on the computer running AM that is buried somewhere?

The reason I ask, is that if I were to bring a new rig online, I'd like a convenient place to grab the current remote agent that matches the version of AM I'm running.  I don't always update to the latest version of AM, and while it's never been a problem using a newer version of the remote agent with an older version of AM... you never know.

No way!  They owe me a whole $5 worth of BTC!  They've ripped me off!
/sarcasm

The coinbase integration is a nice feature, though.

I guess the question should have been more qualified.  Why Ethereum specifically?  Are you going to be keeping the coins, or selling them?  If you are planning on keeping them, is it for price speculation?

What happens after 12 months?  Why not diversify your coins now?




That would be a bad assumption.  Difficulty will eat into your Eth rewards over time, especially if you aren't upgrading your equipment to keep up.  Also, when POS is finally given a date, expect a giant surge in network hashrate and difficulty on Ethereum to happen from that moment.  People will be scrambling to get the last bits of Eth that they can mine before POS hits.



Very nice!  It's best not to owe someone a cut of your proceeds.



10 rigs will test your patience with the amount of noise and heat they will generate.  I wish you good luck here.  You will have 60 RX 580s running at say 120 Watts each... that's a 7200 Watt heater.  It's certainly doable, but you will need some good ventilation, as air conditioning in a typical flat will struggle to keep up.  7200 Watts is like turning on your oven and leaving the door open.  Ventilation will need to take into account the incoming air and the outgoing air.  You don't want fans pulling in cool air from your air conditioned house just to ventilate it outside.



You definitely have to look at this.  After the efficiency loss on the PSUs, and the addition of watts from your motherboards and CPUs, you will probably be pulling more than 8000 Watts.  You'll be using 36+ amps.  Many apartments don't have that kind of power available to them, especially at 220V (depending on what country you are in.)



Yes, in a flat, you could do this, I was assuming you would be looking to build in a warehouse space or something.  Sometimes, it's hard to get internet, enough power, ventilation, and security at these locations.  Plus, you need to have some sort of control over the rigs, since they aren't just in the next room.  You will have problems, rigs crashing, etc.  You need a way to automate getting them back up and running... even if it's just a VPN connection, and RDP, or something like Simple Rig Resetter, or a Raspberry Pi and some relays.  You could even go with networked PDUs to reset rigs... though those are a bit more expensive.  Smart outlets might work too, like a Weemo.

But since this is going to be in your flat, then some of these problems aren't too bad.  But things always seem to happen when you are out of the flat, or out of town.  So it's important to think about these things.



Like I said... there are hundreds of coins.  Some are better than others, and I think there will be a market for miners for a very long time.



Vega 56 does Cryptonight at 1900+ hashes per second.  They make a ton of money on those coins right now.  An RX 580 only does about 700 hashes per second.  Huge difference.  Vega doesn't have that great a difference on Ethash, but it is significantly better.  But like you said, Vegas are expensive, and very difficult to find at decent prices right now.  But once they do start to come back on the market, you will see difficulties on the coins it does well erupt.



Don't just look at one coin.  There are coins that the 1070 mines very well, and will return a lot more money than an RX 580.

But, ultimately, it's your strategy, and you have to justify your purchases, and follow your plan.

Awesome Miner isn't crashing your rig.  The mining software you are using through Awesome Miner is crashing your rig.  A bit more detail here would help.  What mobo, CPU, GPUs do you have?  What PSU do you have?  Do you have any over/underclocks on your GPUs?  Are you using profit switching?  If so, what algo crashes your rig?  What mining software are you using for that algo?

Awesome Miner does this.  It shows you the estimation for revenue and profit for each rig, and shows you daily and monthly estimates... adds them up for you too. 

Nothing wrong with using a flash drive to install Windows.  Just make sure you are using a USB 2.0 port, as not all USB 3.0 chipset drivers are built into the mini-windows that runs the Windows installer.

There's plenty of that information and links in this thread...  read back a few pages.

You can only use PCIe slots for GPUs.  Your Gigabyte P55-US4L only has 4 PCIe slots, so that's as many GPUs as you can run on it.

6 card rigs are no more or less difficult to run than a 12 card rig.  You may even find smaller rigs easier to setup, as they don't require gigantic or multiple PSUs.  Plus, with a couple of smaller 6 card rigs, if you take one offline for maintenance then you aren't completely down like you would be with a 12 card rig.

You will have to check your local sources and any internet based sellers.  Prices vary wildly from country to country, and reseller to reseller.

My advice is to spend a couple of weeks here reading threads.  All the questions you are asking already have answers, and the experience you gain from mining is not easily transferred so easily in a single message to someone who doesn't appear to have mined before.

Good miners are able to read the "tea leaves"... seeing what other people are doing, experiment, and make your own plans.  There is no magic formula, and while I applaud your ability to sink $30K into mining rigs, you are taking on a responsibility that you may not be ready for.

I suggest you start with one rig.  Build it, tweak it, learn how it works, find the pain points, and then decide if you want to spend the rest.


What are your goals?  What are your expectations for capital expense recovery? (some people call it ROI erroneously)  What kind of expectations do your investors have?  Where are you going to be setting up the rigs?  Do they have appropriate power and ventilation?  Do you have proper internet, networking and other infrastructure available?  Do you have any plans for expansion?

Difficulty increases will decrease your earnings over time, and investing so much in RX 580s may not be the best use of capital.  They are good for Ethhash and Cryptonight algorithm based coins, but are already a generation behind the latest AMD cards.  There are hundreds of coins available to mine, some GPUs do better than others.  I would suggest you diversify the GPU types you use so you can react quickly to the changing scenarios that are out there.

There is no EULA involved for hardware.  If you install the Windows WQL drivers, then again, there is no EULA.  Nevertheless, this is shady practice from nVidia.

We ran into the same thing when we started using the M60 cards in our VMware Horizon VDI servers.  You now have to buy a license per desktop to run the cards, deploy a license server, etc.  You have a pay a license for the privilege of using a video card? WTF nVidia!?

The best one is the cheapest one.

If you go to the options, what services do you have enabled under Profit Switching?  If it's only Zpool, do you have C11 enabled in your Profit Switching Profile, in Algorithms, and as an entry for Zpool under Online Services?

If you were to only select one algo to benchmark, run it... can you save it to the profile?

You need to make the exceptions in your Antivirus for the mining software folder on your rigs.  Here's a guide for Windows Defender.  You just need to do the same for AVG on the same folder.

http://awesomeminer.com/help/defender.aspx

Seriously... not cool.  Patrike makes a free version available to test to see if it fits your needs.  I've reported the post to the moderator.