Don't get hung up on the cooler. It hurts resale a little bit but functionally those ref blowers are better than some aftermarket coolers. Everybody always looks at the core temp and thinks aftermarket cards are better but they neglect to look at memory and VRM temps which can go over 100C when overlocked. Blowers also are easier to set up for professional hot/cold isle mining.

You just made $150 in profit for a reseller... just like in the gold rush those selling the picks make the most money.

If you can't return them, then sell them now while the price is high and maybe even make a small profit.

But why did you buy the cards... because you wanted to mine!

Rip the boxes open, build the rig and enjoy the heat. Mining is a hedge against a drop in the crypto's price. If you spent that money on an exchange and bought something like Ripple right now you would be crying.

Only invest what you're willing to lose. If you can lose the value of those cards, then just have fun with the rig.

Also consider this, if you were mining with marginal electricity rates - then maybe upgrading to Volta cards might make sense. Now would be a great time to dump those old 280X, 390X and RX 470s. You will be missing out on 4 months of mining, but nothing is stopping you from buying the coins when they get dumped. It was easy to buy ETH below $210 in December (it stayed below that price on 2 different days). You could have scooped up almost 4 ETH for the price of a high end 1080Ti and you would have made enough profit if you sold at $1400 to build 1/2 a rig of 1080Tis (well, if you could find them now lol). Nobody knows when the market will launch other than whales who create waves.

If you're crazy you can even buy the proverbial shitcoin with money, but that's pretty much gambling to me. That's where I feel comfortable only mining - most I lose is electricity (I don't harp about what a could have mined instead).

Having some liquidity in some exchanges during times like this a great way to help diversify your income stream.

This has been a recurrent problem since 2011. It's now 2018. Perhaps searching old threads will provide answers.

Sometimes money is more easily made doing the contrarian thing. When everybody else was scrambling for cards last June I was dumping most of mine at insane prices. I took the proceeds to buy crypto I wanted at "crashed" prices and save 1/2 to rebuy new hardware.

End result, I have mulitplied my hashrate from last year by 1.4x, dropped about 7KWH in inefficiency, and I also got more "free" crypto than my rigs could mine in 5 months with a couple clicks.

I'm debating if I should sell my rigs on Craigslist right now lol.

It's funny, crypto is putting trust into math and I'm selling card/rigs to people who can't do basic math... a fool and his money....

This is why mining sometimes takes a backseat to buying coins. When the market is calm and cards are readily available people who mine have the safety hedge of having their hardware value.

I bought a boatload of ETH in December knowing full well my farm would never be able to mine that much even in 3 years of future mining, let alone ETH going POS soon.

When card prices become insane it's important to step back and look at things rationally instead of with exubarance. It's like getting into a bidding war for a house in a heated market - don't buy with emotion (greed in this case).

2018 could very easily repeat 2014 again. Sure everybody says "there's no way I would ever sell my crypto for a loss" - they said the same in 2014. Let a coin go down 80% and people panic and get out.

Not I. Look at my post history. When a noob ask a question which they've obviously tried to look for but is buried deep inside one of these threads then I will offer help just like many of other users here.

When a noob strolls in here after seeing a blurb on CNBC and asks where do I sign up for money - I want to correct their laziness in not doing their research or show them the door. Laziness has led to many of the pitfalls we have seen with crypto and many a stupid mistake (myself included). This site should celebrate crypto and all the work that goes along with it, not the moron who buys some 3 letter crypto and makes a million dollars and wonders why his coins are stolen when he gets malware.

TL:DR (lol) Don't encourage the lazy noobs.

If you're getting 20MH/s on ETH with Hynix consider yourself lucky at being able to even push that memory that hard. Mine only do 17-19.

You ordered forks but you ended up getting spoons. I suggest you eat a different food.

Mine a different algo like equihash - you make more than mining eth typically.

BTW, had you simply searched for the phrase "1060" and read the 2 threads about 1060s coming with Hynix or the 1060 superthread you would have seen that they all have Hynix now (maybe Micron if lucky). Samsung memory is diverted to the dedicated mining cards.

You can't help others if you can't even help yourself. Get a job and quit begging. It's sad, pathetic, and most importantly... against the rules of the forums.

So 2 random idiots (I'm going to call them that since you didn't specify their intelligence level or relationship) said something and you're here to get us to confirm or refute said statement. What you seek is confirmation bias.

If the next 10 posts tell you mining is dead will you believe them? If they tell you you make fistfuls of money would you believe them?

What if everybody in California told you mining is hopeless and everybody in Canada says it's easy money?

Best advice you'll get - stop being lazy and actually read the damn posts. Phillipma57's thread alone has enough information in it to make an informed decision - let alone all the  1050/1060/1070/1070Ti/1080/470/570/580/GPU Mining threads.

You kids entering mining these days are relatively spoiled when it comes to information.  It's everywhere now and even the grocery bagger knows about Bitcoin.  Reading the forums for hours on end will teach you a lot about crypto and you will learn things you couldn't not afford to test yourself.

To get up to speed quickly just hop on youtube and watch 2 hours of videos on how to mine. Since you were mining ETN you should be able to CPU mine - watch some youtube videos on that. They have videos in every language when I search.

Once your miner is running again, come back here and just start reading. If you can't do that you're better off buying coins and hodling.

Every response before your reply was helpful (although they were not all politely worded and covered with sugar).

I would recommend the Asrock H81 Pro with the caveat that the board has issues booting sometimes if no monitor is plugged in (it's a common problem posted on forums and I've experienced it myself). The board is usually easy to obtain and works without much fiddling unlike some of the others on the list.

Having said that, I would recommend you really spend 3-5 days reading through all the major threads here and in other subforums. Mining is work, and people who invest their time researching information often have light bulbs go off that can't be spoonfed. If you have lots of money just order a board and read while waiting for it to arrive. Otherwise research first and then order. Other people have posted their results and headaches. If you don't have to time to parse through their output then maybe mining isn't the best choice.

I have 55 days logged into these forums since 2011 and I wasn't even logged in half the time I was reading. I'm not an expert but I can tell you the time spent was worth every satoshi I've earned.

Back in the early days of BTC GPU mining the cards drew almost all their power through the PCIe connectors with exception of the low powered cards which drew their power from the PCIe bus. That bus is spec'd to provide up to 75W over all the slots. This is why you can run a 1050Ti without a PCIe connector - it typically shouldn't need more than 75W.

The problem comes from cards that now rely on the bus power. RX 470s, for example, were pulling a lot and were burning out some motherboards since just one card was pulling up to 60W sometimes.

Unless you're willing to clamp and measure the power pull of each card, just go with powered risers unless you want to RMA your motherboard.

Just a heads up for those selling on Amazon - they don't consider tracking as proof of delivery. They want an actual signature. If the item is worth $200 or more pony up the $5 because there are a lot of scammers that had their eBay accounts suspended so they move on to Amazon. I take pictures of the items before I ship but Amazon can always say you shipped something else - at that point you just cave in to the Bezos machine.

At best all you can do with Amazon is defend yourself against an A-Z claim - you never come out ahead. The place where you can really punish somebody is filing a criminal charge with the post office for mail theft. Also file a complaint at IC3.gov

Once a track record of 10+ crimes are connected the higher up agencies will get involved so you need to do your part to report the assholes.

I was at Newegg's HQ today since it's close to my house. They won't be getting much this week. They have a backorder of about 4k cards. Supposed to be getting a large shipment on the 22nd.

CA 10% sales tax is absolutely painful - but being able to do an RMA in 5 minutes is nice (video card companies have office right next to Newegg on Rowland Heights except MSI in Walnut and EVGA in Brea).

I don't have an Onda, but I assume it has a standard 12V input next to the CPU. Double check that connector and the PSU side if it's modular.

That's the number one thing that always gives me a black screen.

OP was involved with a HYIP/ponzi.

While it may be a legitimate pool, don't discount the possibility that you will mine on his/her pool and never receive payment. It has happened many times in the past and will continue if people don't bother to look at people's Trust/history.

I have not had any dealings with the OP nor this pool he may very well be an upstanding member, but Vod doesn't hand out negative Trust for no reason. I, personally, would not support this endeavor.

As with any coin/pool do you research before jumping.

Large farms have to mine something like ETH especially if they need to sell mined coins to cover operating expenses. You can't dump 1 million of PIRL on any exchange. Dumping 1 million of ETH is easy.

This gives the small time miner one advantage in that they can mine a coin that might be "overvalued" (as in worth more compared to difficulty) and dump it on an exchange in real time without causing much slippage.

ETH block times are too damn fast and give me a lot of wasted work even on the big pools like Ethermine and dwarfpool, so I prefer to solo mine the low difficulty coins or pool mine the long block time coins.

Whattomine is pretty much useless - it has been listing Eth difficulty at 120-130TH/s for the last week when it has been well over 160TH/s. Lazy people deserve lazy results.

R9 390 is a great card for people who have cheap power AND good cooling. The cards are beasts (I ran a bunch of 390 rigs). They are most efficient at 1100 or 1125 core and 1500 mem. You will get about 31.2 to 32 MH/s on Ethash at about 260watts using 110V and a decent undervolt. Don't expect 35MH/s unless you have insane cooling and the card to live a short life. It's also hard to mix the R9 series with the RX series and have stability so plan for a dedicated rig.

R9 380 was never really impressive for Ethash. It might do the same 24MH/s on Ethash alts like Ubiq that the R9 280X used to do on Ethereum. As Quintleo stated, it would probably be better served tasking to run Equihash where it competes with a GTX 1060.

I would only get a R9 390 over a 1060 if you happen to have very cheap power and can dump the heat. The reason I sold off all my R9 390s for over $400 each was to convert to 1070s - almost the same speed, new warranty and less than 1/2 the power use.

Latest Anand article says DDR6 has qualified and should be on the next platform for both teams. Looking at the stock checkers none of the 1070s, 1080s or 1080Tis have been coming into stock on the big retailers. I would assume the supply is trickling in and that Volta may just hit the streets sooner than I expected.  I still have old hardware that's been going since 2013 that I need to flip over so I'm waiting on the sidelines.

I don't expect Volta do much for decreased wattage but I expect decent gains from the compute side.

1 BIG CAVEAT about "powerless" cards - they obviously draw their power from the motherboard and 1 will run fine playing games and mining on a motherboard. If you fill up a motherboard with 2 or more of these cards and really load up the card while mining you can easily burn out your motherboard and possibly your card with it as well. You need powered risers if you're doing multiples of a card.

Put 6 1050Tis onto a board with unpowered ribbon risers and the board cannot support 6 x 75 = 450 Watts through the PCIe lanes.


The reason I bring this up is every year we have people who post pics of their burned boards who were trying to do a "powerless" build. Search the forms.

You mean it preys on people who have a low budget and are too naive to know what a pitfall cloud mining is.

If you want to be part of blockchain/crypto revolution buy the coin or mine it and support the network. Don't feed middlemen.