GTX 950 vs GTX 960 (on actual cards) show almost identical hashrates for ZEC and ETH - it's the memory system that's the limit, and they both have the same memory system.

 There is stuff the 960 is noticeably better on vs. the 950, but ZEC and ETH were specifically designed as "ASIC resistant" through heavy usage of large amounts of memory on the GPU itself.

 The really sad part - my (last year purchase) $200 R9 290s despite being about 3 generations older and a LOT lower clocks do better ETH hashrate than my $400 GTX 1070s, and by report a LOT better ZEC sol/s.

 There's a serious advantage sometimes to a wider memory bus.

Curecoin drop to 1 cent = not much interest in it hanging around, as it's iffy if it can be profitable at ALL at that point.

 It bottomed out at a bit under 3 cents for a long time, that was profitable with VERY low cost electric and a well-optimised rig but not hugely so - but foldingcoin was earning MORE than curecoin in that timeframe once you could get foldingcoin working.


 EVGA is seeing some drop this week, though some folks seems to have not bothered moving to "other stuff" after the Time Zone Challenge so they're a bit higher than they were at the month before that challenge. We're back down quite a bit from our peak, but still a good bit higher than 2 months ago when Curecoin was under 3 cents - and both ZCash and ETH are dropping in profitability so we'll probably start seeing a few folks migrating back over here (I'm starting to shift rigs, and have parts on the way from NewEgg for a new rig build that will go straight to folding).

 I was having generally no issues with flypool when I was running Zcash - they had a couple of stat dropouts but the actual earnings were still there, after the first couple days when ALL of the pools seemed to be having "teething pain" issues.


 I'm not "rushing to mine ZCash" any more though, since for *my* setup at this point Ethereum is more profitable (and I'm starting to shift some rigs out of ETH as profitiability on IT is starting to drop again).

 I do keep crunching the numbers though, just in case.


 I suspect some folks expect ZCash to have at least one more spike fairly soon, and are trying to mine to have lots on hand if that happens - or they expect the price to rise long-term.

 Very odd results given that the i7 6700t is near-identical clocks to the i5-6500t and has a LOT bigger on-chip cache, so should be punching out it's processing faster.

 Probably other factors at work too - have you considered swapping parts around in testing?

 Downclocking by itself has almost no effect on efficiency.

 Undervolting (where it works) is where the efficiency gains happen, but usually requires downclocking for the item to work at all when undervolted quite a bit.

 You do have to have an account to see the "shop" link.

 I'm really hoping these can be "dialed in" for better efficiency, might not be critical right now but as diff climbs it'll get important.

 I suppose that could be the function of the "741" if/when it actually shows up though, to be the "more efficient brother".

 We don't have gigabit, but the local PUD does have a fiber-optic network and we have 100Megabit access, runs more like $50.
 I suspect they COULD set up to do gigabit but just haven't bothered.

 The other two adjacent counties (with the under 3c rates) have similar setups - and all 3 counties are bug into hydropower so that the PUDs can subsidise local rates by sellling off the excess output at quite a bit higher rates to larger utilities elsewhere (like Sea/Tac and some even into California).

There are very few mining algorytmns where NVidia is competative with AMD - and the one ZCash uses isn't one of them, except perhaps on a hash/watt basis (like ETH/ETC).

 I have a bunch of 1070-based rigs but they're not intended long-term for ZEC or ETH mining, they're just doing it right now to help pay for their cost to build as those coins are a bit more profitable RIGHT NOW than what I built the rigs for.

 Low but not obscenely low. When I was in Iowa I was paying a bit less than that 9 months out of the year, 14ish the other 3 summer months, and I moved 1800ish miles cross-country because I classed the overall power rate as too high - I'm under 5c/kwh now and looking to move in the next few months to one of the adjacent counties where I can get under 3c


 Even now my power bill runs about $400/month - but that's a lot more than a few A4 units mining away (you're making more in LTC than I am, but I'm making a LOT more in other coins and overall).

As I recall, all of the fabs for the 14/16nm node at this point are either TSMC in Taiwan, or Global Founderies in New York State (ex-IBM fabs) or Taiwan.

 I am NOT sure where Intel is doing foundry work though, and I might have missed a couple somewhere or some may have come online I don't know about since the last time I checked.

 My "big rig" for ETH is a triple R9 290 rig - flashing them with a bios from "TheStilt" didn't help much on the power draw so much as it made them run a LOT cooler, while at the same time enamled them to overclock a lot for about the SAME power draw, which has helped a ton on their profitability.

 I'm also picky about power supplies - not going to knock the EVGA Supernova line as I've got a couple of the 1300 G2 models and they've been solid to date, but I've had a long-standing preference for SeaSonic (especially the X-line) due to proven long-term reliability, so most of my recent rigs have been built with the X-850 or some of the "left over" X-1250 units that used to power my S5s and SP20E (2 of the X1250s ended up in A2 110Mh units).


 Anti-virus isn't critical on a mining-specific rig as long as it's behind a REAL firewall (Windows-based firewalls need not apply, as Windows itself is so massively vulnerable) as you're not downloading from "unknown" sites or browsing on a mining rig.
 Just make sure to scan the initial download before the first install, then keep the scanned file on a protected machine and download it from THERE on further installations.

 Reverse engineered, not open sourced.

ETH isn't supposed to be PoW long enough for ANY sane ASIC maker to make an ASIC for ETH.

 Also, an ASIC would just ignite a hashrate war, with existing miners getting the shaft rapidly and only the EARLY "well heeled" folks that can afford to buy a bunch of the ASICs early being likely to even have a *PRAYER* of achieving ROI if one were TO appear.


 GPU mining on ETH (and now on ZEC too) is MORE profitable by any measure for pretty much everyone the last few months than any ASIC for ANY coin has been in that timeframe.


 Don't expect the "3-4 month ROI" of early cryptocoin days - way too many folks chasing way too few coin and way too widespread of knowlage that cryptocoin mining exists and can make money to ever see THAT again barring very short-term "early miner" stuff like the insane pricing on ZEC the first day.

At this time, Caanan is the only place to order the A721.

 That will probably change in a month or less as resellers start getting ahold of some to sell (for more of course).

 12 c / kwh is getting into *OUCH* range on electric cost.

 The entire reason I moved last summer was that I considered 7.5-8c/kwh 9 months 14plus the other 3 months was way too high.


 ETH is probably getting hammered because of the "2'nd and 3'd hard fork" issue, which are happening to cure the long-running issue with attacks overloading the network but some folks think any fork is a bad thing.

 Even with that, *for me* ETH has been more profitable the last few days, abet it's close.

 My electricity cost is basically "fixed" right now, but I'm in a rather odd situation for at least the next few months - but even if it wasn't, my electric cost is low enough I doubt that the power savings ZEC has would make up for the lower income *IN MY CASE*


 Don't take anyone's word for it, crunch the numbers yourself because they DO vary.

 Innosilicon stated that it would be - but no specific timeframe of when.

 Sooner would be better, and it would be nice if the A2 software got open-sourced at the same time.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B2XVfIhkHZlfcVR0QzhlQlhJYTA

 Not my work, I think this is the link I found last year to download them from.

My triple R9 290 rig soaks a little over 1000 watts, I figure 320 or a bit over per card, on ETH - that's with a mid-level BIOS flashed out of TheStilt's line, and at 1100/1250 settings.

 Haven't tried it on ZEC yet.

 All pools all miners will see variance due to luck in finding shares - I routinely see 20-30% variation on their ETH pool with rare bigger spikes up or down.

 If your LONG term average is close to your local numbers, nothing to worry about.


 I've never been impressed with PowerColor cards, the few I've had never were good at overclocking or long-term reliability even when NOT overclocked.
 I've gotten to the point of just ignoring the company entirely.

Stats are back up. Gonna be curious to see if EVGA drops back down again now that their 2016" Time Zone Challenge" is over, and I wonder how many Curecoin folks wandered over there to do that (I didn't hear about it 'till just now, unfortunately).