I've been seeing the Gigabyte cards for the same price as everybody else.

Hint - those CHEAP cards have a bad tendancy to have fans DIE a lot, killing the card in many cases.
BAD IDEA to try to save a couple bucks that way.

IME avoid any card that does NOT use ball bearing fans - the longevity of those fans is a sad pathetic JOKE in 24/7 heavy-duty usage like mining imposes on a card.


 I've never even heard OF "KFA2" "jetstream" or "gamerock" brands. I'd be VERY WORRIED about a brand that has so few sales it has no reputation at all.

 Gainward and palit I've barely heard OF, but never seen a review of anything out of them just their actual web sites.

 I doubt it, pretty sure that GPU doesn't support CUDA and likely doesn't have enough RAM to even think about mining most coins with it.

Why would you want to?
Or are you getting JUST the PCBs without their own HS/fan setup?

BTW, it's 40 chips per board for the "2.6 Mh/s" (appx) boards - 80 chips was for a 2-board 2-part HS full miner setup at 5+ MH/s

My miners of that type are still packed up, but estimating from known dimentioning and measuring from the box, the part of the board that needs to have the heatsink/BIG THERMAL PAD applied is roughly 4.5" by 10".


Note that these old miners are at best break-even if your electric cost is over about 4c/KWH.

I've got a HD 7850 2GB card, best I've ever seen out of it is about 10 MH/s mining ETH (which IS profitable, the repurposed low-end machine that card is in soaks a little less than 200 watts total or about $6/month at my electric rate vs a little over $20/month for the last couple months in earnings - I DO have a very low electric rate but the card would still be profitable at a fair bit over 10c/KWH electric rate).
 Card itself I'd estimate is eating 120-140 watts of that usage.

 My pair of 7870 machines do a HAIR better, but they have memory that handles higher memory clocks and seem to soak about 10 more watts.

 That published "16MHs" figure is from ETH early days when the DAG file was a TON smaller and everything hashed faster as a result.

 As another poster mentioned, you NEED to have a 2GB version of the card to mine ETH on it.


 Forget Scrypt - those cards never even got to 700KH/s while the first-gen ASIC gear (5 chip Gridseed Orbs) managed better than half that on about ONE TENTH of the power usage - and are no longer even break-even unless your power is super-cheap.
 I've never seen Scrypt numbers for the RX 480/470 but I seriously doubt even THOSE cards would be break-even on Scrypt - I'd guess they're probably 2-3 times the hashrate of a 7850 at a little lower power usage.

 DOGE isn't even really ASIC territory any more - most of the DOGE "hashrate" comes from folks doing merge-mining on Litecoin.

I would guess "fractional watt", as low power LEDs like those are still more efficient than anything used in "lighting" type LED bulbs/tubes.

I wasn't quite in that situation 3 months back - already had a substantial set of miners running - just before I moved to the Land Of Low Low Cost Electric.
 Pretty close though - my Bitcoin and cash holdings at the time were about $8000, and I ended up burning through about $2500 in move expenses + needed deposits on the new place, and managed to sell my old trailer off for a little less than $1000 "as is".

 Since then I've put a little less than $4000 into three "used to be ETH now running something else" rigs that have the potential to add one more mining-specific card each, and still have over $2000 in reserve.

Moo Wrapper is a BOINC project in conjunction with the long-running Distributed.Net project

 It's not really about mining, as even a well-optimised setup would be doing good to break even vs electric usage when collecting GridCoin.

 Only reasons I point my gaming machines at it during offtime is that it's got small work packets that handle being interrupted without issues, and I have been a VERY long time distributed.net participant.

And we're well on the way to catching HardOCP for 2'nd.

 EVGA, unfortunately, seems likely to hold on to #1 for the forseeable future - though if Curecoin price stays where it's at or climbs some more that might EVENTUALLY change.

My GTX 960s manage about 11 MH/s on ETH, with some mild overclock.
That's BARELY better than my GTX 950s at 10+, I suspect memory limitations at the 960 has a significantly higher core count.

 Up side, the 960s use barely more power than the 950s.


 The GTX 970 is said to be a 20MH/s or a bit more card on ETH but I don't have any of those.

The one major problem with "cloning" under LINUX is the xorg.conf file - if the cards don't end up on the same pci-E addresses, it messes up.

 Oddly enough, they do NOT have to be the same model card, or even all that close, as long as the card at each address can use the same driver - so any AMD card HD7750 and up if you're using recent enough drivers can replace any other in that group, and pretty much any NVidia GTX-series card (though if you're using drivers recent enough to support the 10xx series you ARE somewhat limited in HOW OLD you can go) form a group.


 Autostart is a lot easier to set up if you use the XFCE desktop instead of the Ubuntu-default "Trinity" thing - XFCE makes "autostart AFTER X has started up" a very easy thing to set up, which is critical for some software that needs the X drivers running before *IT* starts.

I ran my pair or 750 ti cards on Ethereum for a while right after I got them. 3-4 MH/s (usually a lot closer to 3) wasn't very impressive, so I ended up swapping them into a couple older XP systems I use for gaming on (NVidia offered XP support for YEARS after AMD stopped) and put other stuff into the mining machines.

For ethereum, it's a 3-4 MH/s card.

 Can't speak to much else, as my pair of 750Ti cards are in gaming machines and run moowrapper on their "downtime".

 Not true for the current generation, the issue there is "Nvidia card does same hashrate but COSTS twice as much" more or less.

 But again, it varies with the specific coin being targeted.

 Given that you're building essentially identical rigs, you get one Ubuntu setup working, clone it to a USB stick, the clone the rest FROM that stick - makes for a VERY fast system setup.

 Technically, you could do the same with Windows, but the "authentication" stuff makes that a cast iron PAIN to get working fully.

 Backwards.
 Warm humid air flowing over COLD item causes condensation.
 The issue with electronics at extreme cold is that it can stop working, or just not work right - but if it's running before the outside temp gets that low, the internal heat generation can often keep an electronic device warm enough to KEEP working correctly.


 One possible trick to use, if the shed is close enough to the house ANd if it gets warm enough - run a duct from the hot part of the shed to the house heating ductwork, with a temp-controlled fan blowing the air from the shed to the house and a flapper valve set up to not let the air flow back the OTHER way.

 

Nvidia makes the GPU for ALL Nvidia based cards by ANY manufacturer.
Same goes for AMD and AMD based cards.

 It's what the manufacturer does after that on board design, cooling design, choice of memory, etc that makes a big difference in "is this a good MINING card".

 There are often cards using the "reference design" by other manufacturers, but most cards use a manufacturer-specific modification or complete redesign, and some of those are night-and-day BETTER than the reference design.

Does your CPU-based mining rig even generate 1 MH/s ?

 Compare this to a SINGLE Antminer S9 (highest-hash current ASIC rig) that generates over 11,000 MH/s (some versions of the S9 manage more like 14,000) - and then you'll understand why you would be lucky to get even ONE share in a week with your very old, very behind the times, very poor performance for high energy consumption CPU-based rig when competing against probably THOUSANDS of S9 units (and many more thousands of the other ASIC units with SOMEWHAT less performance) that is pointed at Slush's pool.

 You should look into a CPU-centric altcoin to mine with your rig, it's a total waste of time and energy trying to mine Bitcoin with it and has been that way for a few YEARS now.

 As the miners heat the shed up, it will DROP the relative humidity in the shed, moisture won't be an issue.
 Just make sure it doesn't leak, and that you have the ability to flow a little air through it even in the winter in case your miners are generating TOO MUCH heat.

I've had good luck with most PNY cards over many years, but they don't seem to be designed for high-end miner usage on their cooling systems.
MSI has a pretty good rep for mining.

I would AVOID founder edition cards, you're paying a premium for an INFERIOR cooling system and a non-factory-overclocked card with LOWER performance.


 Gigabyte Windforce, Sapphire, and EVGA have been my go-to preferences.

Newegg has some 4-way KVM new for around $80ish, Iogear brand IIRC.

 If you're wanting to switch anything BUT old-style VGA video though, the price starts going through the roof - DVI and HDMI KVMs are ALL a ton more per port, which IMO is dumb as they're digital signals not analog and should be EASIER to switch.