and won't keep a single S9 powered up through a winter, early spring, or late fall night, even if you can manage 100% conversion efficiency from that storage to the AC line to power an S9.

 Solar is a generally BAD idea for a miner, the up-front costs amortise out to a rather HIGH rate per KWH actually generated - it's OK if you already HAVE the solar stuff in place, but buying solar with the idea of just using it to mine on will NOT pay off.

 GTX 980 can mine quite a few coins profitably - just that none of them are Bitcoin, and it's old enough it's not going to make a LOT at mining.

 Nicehash is a pretty good option on older cards 'till you can get better informed on what's what and what tools are available for mining altcoins.

I happen to have my GTX 1080 on a single-card rig right now - paired with a Semperon 3000+ (I think, might be a 2800+) on an old Socket 754 motherboard.

It's a bit slow getting started, but the hashrate is fine once the miner is fully running.

Actual income will vary, but $4 USD sounds like a good estimate right now on Nicehash for a single 1080.

More likely they are responding to the "finally" appearance of some BitFury-based mining hardware, and the growing NUMBER of competiton miners and competition in CHIP design/manufacturers.

 There are more "verified" companies making Bitcoin mining chips right now than anytime in the last 2 years or so - possibly 3.

 Also, given the slowdown in overall network hashrate growth, I suspect they're finally managing to get chips faster than they can sell miners (the release of the L3/L3+ also made this look pretty obvious) so they can't justify as high of a markup any more.

 I've no clue what a USB-B is, certainly don't have anything that plugs into one.

 I'm also wary about the whole concept of running 75 watts through a 2.5mm barrel - gridseed "80" blades at 40-50 watts were marginal enough - but I still have a couple of 10A 12V bricks from those days.

 6 pin should be definite.

 Even on a single-card rig I've never managed over 450ish with a 1070, and at 80% think I've yet to see over 430 or so. Your G1 Gaming cards stock clock a hair higher than my 2-fan models though.

 To go6ooo1212 - TDP VARIES - my Gigabyte full-length 1070s have a 180 watt TDP, while my EVGA SC 1070s and my ITX Gigabyte 1070s are TDP 154 or 155 watts - stating "80% TDP" doesn't mean anything if you don't state the specific card model or specify the watts.

 Those numbers look like 1080 numbers - that's almost IDENTICAL to what I see on my Gigabyte 1080 at +150 core, stock memory, and 70% power limit with EBWF on Win7.
 (489/141/3.48 when I just looked at it but it does bounce around a bit).

 I've not seen any of my 1070s manage more than about 450 sol/s even with power limit and overclock BOTH set quite high and the cards running over 80C temps.

 I never saw 28Mh out of my 1070s at anywhere near that low of power usage - but in fairness I never really tried to optimise them for power usage on ETH, and they certainly hit 28.5 (or a bit more on the Gigabyte full-length cards) easily enough.

 I see a hair over 50 on stock clock HD 7750 cards with Claymore 9.2 (later versions are no faster on that low-end card) - the 750ti has 128 more cores, clocks higher, has faster memory.
 I'd expect the 750ti to be capable of more like 70-90 sol/sec ballpark.

 A very irritating minus this software shares with Claymore but is even WORSE - the DARK colors on a BLACK background make it almost impossible to READ anything on this miner.
 miner --help doesn't do any good when you can't READ it due to no contrast between the text and the background.


 On the plus side, performance on the 10xx series betters Claymore and Nicehash in my limited testing so far, and that's a lot more important than any other factor.

 GPE only exists in PRO and "higher" versions of WIN10 as I recall.

 I did some digging and found a regedit method (which for home is the ONLY method that exists), but it bloody sucks to have to go to THAT level of extreme to work around an issue folks have been COMPLAINING TO MICROSOFT ABOUT FOR WAY PAST A DECADE NOW.

 Back in Litecoin GPU mining days, the Gigabyte -UD7 models were THE go-to motherboard for riser-rig folks.

 Very good price while it's on sale - my favorite Thermaltake V34 (or the V35 if you prefer top controls) with 8 card slots is usually less than that one.

It is NOT possible with current cards - however, AMD is talking about the capability of accessing offboard memory being part of their new VEGA cards, though all of the issues about "very slow access" mentioned by others will apply.

 For a mining card, this is NOT an ability you should care about as it would KILL hashrate to try to use external memory while mining - the external memory IN ANY FORM is going to be quite a bit slower than the GDDR on the card itself.


 M.2 is NOT faster than a RAM disk running from main memory.
 M.2 is a form of SSD - it's speed depends on the interface used compared to a non-M.2 SSD.
 M.2 fastest drives use one or more PCI-E lane(s) to talk to the CPU, they are NOT faster than PCI-E based SSD but are commonly the SAME speed - depends on how many lanes each drive in a comparison uses.
 M.2 slower drives use SATA to talk to the CPU, those are SLOWER than PCI-E based SSD drives and the same speed as non-M.2 SATA SSD drives.



 For a directly applicable comparison - AMD A10-7890K (or 70K or 60K, referred to after this as the A10-78x0K since the GPU side on all 3 is the same) has 512 cores that can be clocked at 800 Mhz.
 AMD HD 7750 also has 512 cores that clock at 800 Mhz, but is a discrete card with (usually) 1 GB of GDDR5 on the card (a few early models used GDDR 3 instead).

 The HD 7750 is commonly 1.5-3 times faster on most usage than the GPU side of the A10-78x0K - there are a very few VERY narrow exceptions, like D.net R5-72 work where the memory is very little used and they perform almost identically, but in most cases the APU using system-board memory is quite a bit slower than the dedicated card using much faster GDDR on the card.

 The A10-78x0Ks are newer by a few years and are still in current production (though not for a lot longer), but are built on the same process node and are a hair newer GCN version than the HD 7750.

 My A10-7890K running DDR3 2133 system ram that I tried once on ZEC mining worked - but pulled something like 11 or 12 sol/sec - my HD 7750 on the SAME machine pulled a bit over 50 sol/sec running the SAME version of Claymore at the SAME settings and core clock.

My rigs are mostly 3-card rigs with no risers - it would be nice if MB makers would make 3 x 16x slot motherboards with the 16x slots at a 1-4-7 spacing instead of the 2-5-7 COMMON spacing as that limits cooling to the middle card, but it can be worked around using a "short" card in the #7 slot position like Gigabyte's "ITX" 1070 model.

 There are motherboards that allow for 1-4-7 spacing on cards but ALL of them are 4+ 16x slot (most are 5+ 16x slot) and VERY VERY expen$ive and many of them are no longer being made.

Given the track record of EXTREME UNRELIABILITY of past KnC designs, at least some of them due to VERY STUPID design choices, I wouldn't trust a new KnC design under any circumstance.

 *IF* they are not in fact a scam.



 Dunno why anyone would be stupid enough to buy out the KnC name, given the very long VERY VERY BAD track record of that company.

 Sounds like you have a drivers or card issue, or didn't set up the BIOS on the MB correctly for multi-card.

 I've got multiple NVidia cards working on a pair of 970FX boards - the 990FX is a higher-end chipset that should work at least as well.

65 C is nothing to worry about on a modern GPU - they're designed to run in the 70s or even in some cases low 80s with good long-term reliability - though cooler WILL generally increase lifespan.

I can't speak to mergemining.com, but for Scrypt the pool www.litecoinpool.org merge-mines several coins, then keeps them and uses the profits to pay pool fees - AND SOME ADDITIONAL back to you over that.
 They were paying 103% of the value of you shares (aka a -3% pool fee) 'till a few days ago, when they dropped to 102%.

 Other pools will vary - LiteGuardian had some merge mining set up, but gave YOU the merge-mined coins (DOGE and something else I'm forgetting offhand) and still charged a fee, for another example.

 For a riser rig, that board should support up to 5 cards.

 As a general rule for ALL cryptocoins (specifically including BURST), if you are mining to a pool you don't need a wallet to mine with.
 You only need a wallet if you are going to solo mine
 *OR* if you are going to set up your own pool
 *OR* if you want to spend the coins you have earned and have not pointed your pool mining at an exchange address.