Not useless for mining, just too expensive - like pretty much ALL "workstation" video cards have always been.

I've had a LOT better luck with ASRock over ASUS on motherboards.

 MSI - my sample size is too small to figure, but I do NOT like the rather junky BIOSes on the boards I DO have - and have the same issue BIGTIME with ASUS recent stuff and crap BIOS limitations.
 Haven't worked with recent Gigabyte motherboards.

 Only works on SOME Sempron 145s, some the second core is in fact broken and disabled entirely in the chip.

 Worth trying though.


 There's plenty of cheap upgrade options for that socket.



 What killed the "value" of ZCash is that it's got pretty much ZERO adoption in place by the folks that matter - the REAL market - places like Newegg and such that take Bitcoin.
 ZCash, like almost all other altcoins, won't be worth SQUAT in the long run if it never gets adopted as a worthwhile coin OUTSIDE the cryptocoin mining industry itself.

 SLI does NOT help mining.

 No, I did not set it up on any of my 1070 rigs.

 Nor did I set up SLI on my new triple-1070 rig I built up last week (though you can only do SLI on 2 1070s anyway).

 It's easy - for a MINER, ETC profitability is almost identical to ETH - when one jumps up a bit on profitability, enough folks switch to even them out again.

 This *IS* a mining thread, after all, NOT an "investment" thread.



 ETH profitability is dropping again now that ZEC crazypricing has dropped a lot, we're now getting into the "basket balance" situation with ZEC added to the basket splitting hash making everything else in the basket a little more profitable, but ZEC dropping in it's share 'cause the profitability of it is dropping quite a bit as the price continues to skydive.

 Depends on your specific rigs and specific energy costs.

 For *ME* right now ETH is more profitable - but it's close enough that could change tomorrow.


 ETH last announcement I saw was middle of next year for POS - though 2 GB cards will get "DAG size killed" sometime sooner.

Avalon 721 actually (dunno why they changed their naming convention) - and it looks like it's not quite as efficient as the S9 or R4 anyway, though it's lower heat density and lower cost of entry by quite a bit and somewhat close on efficiency.

 I'm a bit shocked they got the chips designed as fast as they did - but they may have given up some potential efficiency to get it out the door soon enough to matter. Optimally there will be a "722" model with a more optimised chip middle of next year or so.

 Already dropped below that.

 I'm not betting on it being stable even at 0.1 - where's the "retailer acceptance" that is the ONLY thing that can support a price long-term?


 On the other hand, the block reward is still ramping up - I'm crunching the numbers at least once a day between ZEC, ETH, and the other option I originally BUILT most of my recent rigs for and switching as appropriate.


 Worst case, I've already had  a week of "double or more the profitability" out of my existing GPU rigs AND the new 3-card rig. 8-)

I bought parts for a new rig about the time ZCash went live - but it wasn't specifically built for ZCash.
Unfortunately, I didn't switch rigs over from ETH soon enough to catch the double-digit per BTC (much less the very short triple-digit per BTC) early adopter crazy pricing - but I did get enough switched over soon enough to catch some income when it WAS still over 1BTC, so no remorse at all.

 At this point it looks like ZEC is going to go into the "basket" including coins like ETH ETC and XMR in the "whichever one is more profitable folks will switch to 'till it changes again" group.

 Up side, it's split hashrate around enough to make ALL of the "basket" more profitable via lower difficulties, for a while at least - and will probably help some when ETH goes POS to soak up some of the "nothing to do, gotta find something else" hashrate available at that point.




 And yes, I still have most of my A2 farm mining LTC (and merge-mining stuff like DOGE), though I'm not pulling in 2K+ a month on that.

 It is an ASIC designed for the Scrypt algorythm as used by Litecoin, DOGE, and some other coins.
 The most common one is probably the Innosilicon A2 (they recently released their new A4 model but it seems like it's got some software bugs right now), there are also some KNC Titan units still alive and hashing, and possibly a few of the less common units like the Alcheminer, the various Gridseed versions, the Zeus models, and a few others.

 The A4 is the ONLY current-production ASIC for Scrypt, but there are plenty of used Scrypt miners around by various folks.

 Scrypt coins have not been profitable to mine on with a GPU for ballpark 3 YEARS now, even with VERY VERY cheap electric - even the Gridseed ASIC (the first that could do Scrypt) would be better efficiency than the best possible current GPU setup, and those Gridseeds are money LOSERS unless your electric is under 4c/KWH. Every Scrypt ASIC since the Gridseed has been quite a bit more efficient.


 There are NO ASIC that mine ZCash(ZEC), Monero(XMR), or Ethereum (ETH/ETC).

 Zcash is so new the programs to mine it with on a CPU or GPU are still buggy and crashy or very slow - and nobody has a clue if it's going to have any staying power yet when it's only been live for A WEEK so no ASIC company is likely to be even thinking about designing an ASIC for it yet. It also seems to need a lot of memory to run.

 Monero has been a very low value coin for most of it's existance, with a market cap that wouldn't even think about justifying ASIC development for it - it is also a high-memory-usage coin that would make an ASIC fairly expensive to mine it at all.

 Ethereum has the same high-memory-usage issues of Monero and ZCash only worse, *AND* is supposed to go Proof Of Stake (and therefore no more mining at ALL) sometime next year.
 Nobody sane would buy an ASIC for Ethereum at this point (and there are VERY FEW other coins using the same algorythm, none of which have a large market cap).

Has anyone tried an A4 on LiteGuardien yet?

 I remember a LOT of commentary when the Alcheminer (and it's OEM versions/clones) first showed up about it being VERY flaky on many pools but a couple (including LiteGuardian) let it run reliably even in the early software versions for it.

 Crackdown on a site for electricity theft is NOT a crackdown on bitcoin.

 1080 doesn't mine ETH well enough to be worth the money - it's hash rate is barely better than the 1070 for 50%+ more cost.
 1070 can't match the RX 480 overall - very similar on hash/Watt but hash/$ is about half as good.

 The only reasons I have ever run my 1070 rigs on ETH is that they were intended to do other stuff but ETH *right now* (or ZEC for that matter) is somewhat more profitable than the other stuff I built the rigs for.


 ZEC might prove to be a better long term option than ETH, as it's not intended to go POS like ETH is and doesn't have the "ever increasing DAG file size" issue.
 Mostly comes down to where ZEC pricing ends up at when the "initial startup hysterical crazyhigh pricing" finally dies down.


 When ETH moves to a POS (Proof of Stake) model, there will BE NO MINING for it at all.


 The RX480 doesn't mine quite as fast as the R9 390 or R9 290 (those are the speed kings for ETH due to their 384bit memory bus and reasonably fast RAM), but it uses a LOT LESS POWER which makes it more efficient on a hash/Watt basis.
 The RX480 probably loses on hash/$ pretty badly if you can find a good used R9 290 at all, and might lose vs the R9 390 'cause those are fairly cheap now as well.




 Payouts right now are VERY much in flux, as ZEC coin price is dropping pretty fast, the mining block reward for ZEC is still in it's "initial ramp up" phase that so far has been mostly compensating for the price drop (except the first day or so when the pricing was totally insane), and the move of massive numbers of rigs to mining ZEC had made it's difficulty much higher while reducing teh difficulty of the other coins (like ETH) that the rigs moved FROM quite a bit lower.

 This past week has been a VERY GOOD TIME for GPU/CPU based mining rigs, and looks like the next month should continue to be better than the last few have gotten to be.

DOGE is not new, it's been around for years - and pretty much died around the time they decided to make ti merge-mineable.

I believe that most of the mining on DOGE at the time is from folks merge-mining it from ASIC machines that are primarily mining Litecoin.

They can be done in parallel - but that "counterparty" junk Foldingcoin uses to distribute it's coin is a painfull piece of garbage to use and the mandatory fees are a ripoff.

 It's worth suffering through for the extra income if you have a significant amount of folding going on, but likely a waste if you don't average at least 100k PPD and the coin pricing on FLDC has dropped to the point it's riveling DOGE for "not worth anything" - then in about a month FLDC hits it's first halfing.

 It definitely does NOT generate "more income than CURE does" any more, though it used to be fairly close to a little more after you factored in how many MORE FLDC you would get for a certain amount of PPD generated in a month.

 Oh yeah, once a month distributions - at which point the folks that can get it out EARLY get to hammer the price to scrap.

It doesn't actually work - it just compresses the airflow making it flow faster (but less OF it), it DOES NOT CHANGE THE TEMPERATURE.

The only reason it might make people feel cooler is the faster airflow will help your skin evaporate the water from your sweat glands.


 If you want a REAL "third world" solution that works (in DRY environments like most of the Middle East, among other areas) go ANCIENT school and put a jar made of terra cotta in a room, then fill it with water and put it on something to collect the overflow.
 The water will tend to pass slowly through the terra cotta and evaporate on the outside of the jar - this concept is probably THE oldest form of evaporative cooling that ever achieved widespread usage.



 Terra Cotta is a somewhat porous form of clay that many jars used to be made out of - didn't work for storing water but it was good for stuff like grains.

 On my various 1070s, ZEC seems to be using 15-20% less power than ETH.
 I didn't notice what the figures were on the 950s and 960s.

If your area tends to be dry most of the time, check into evaporative cooling AKA "swamp coolers".

 Usually, they did have a few cases of not paying out for a bit early on (but your total was still climbing, so probably waiting for a block to hit to do the payout).

 Isn't 15.12 2:15.302 or something like that?
 Been too long since I got my linux machines built....