Unless your power goes out all the time, I would recommend bypassing the UPS completely and plugging the rig into the wall directly. You can use a passive surge suppressor to help protect against some spikes if you want, but the few times a UPS might keep your system up is probably more than offset by the extra electricity it is consuming 24/7. Even if you had a 95% efficient UPS, a rig drawing 1000 watts would always add an unnecessary 50 watts draw to your utility bill.

So unless you have free electricity you are wasting power for a little bit of insurance for the few times the power might go out. Also considering you are worried about the heat, your UPS is probably less than 95% efficient, so the excess waste would be even higher. You should be able to determine to exact rating from the manufacturers specifications if interested.

Not too many listings where I live yet.


Well that's a start I guess. I wouldn't get too excited until I see a bunch of listings for at least 50% off of (normal) retail pricing, which they should be anyway considering most if it is going to be heavily abused mining gear.

At this point in the cycle I agree that it is NOT time to be thinking of buying a new rig. Two main reasons for this is the currently highly inflated price of the components due to all the new people getting in, and the insanely high difficulties to mine any of the coins due to this inrush. As has been pointed out, ROI times of 12+ months are assured and may never make it as you are trying to pay down a rig you paid 1.5x the price for compared to 6 months ago. Relying on reselling your cards will also be a gamble as once the masses realize the jig is up, there will be a mad dash for the exits and mining cards will flood the secondhand market.

The main argument I hear for buying a rig now is that "if ETH goes back to $400 everything will be great again". This is wrong as it does not take in account the difficulty increase in mining. When the run-up first began early this year, one of my rigs could make almost 1 ETH per day by itself. Now it takes almost 20 rigs to bring in that 1 ETH per day.

So even with ETH returning to the $400 range, profits will not be as great as they were and the difficulty is still climbing day by day. It will take a month or two of very low to negative profits before people start abandoning mining in mass due to them clinging to this hope that if price recovers everything will be ok again. The price would need to not only recover but grow exponentially again (think $800, $1200, $1600, etc.) for daily profits to keep up with the growing hashrates being added daily.

Getting to your question, the thing to do now and in the immediate future would be to take that cash and invest directly into the coin(s) you would otherwise mine.  I think both BTC and Ethereum, as well as many other coins, will be trading pretty low here just before August 1st. You might even pick up ETH for $150 or less in short order. For sake of comparison lets look at some examples.

You invest say $6,000 in a new rig (using your specifications from above). You would build a rig capable of making $15-$20/day after electrical costs. This would take you 400 days or well over a year just to recoup your investment. Even if the coins were to double in value again you would only be looking at $30/day or 200 days to ROI. But these values do not count the increasing difficultly, so again it would probably be closer to 2 years, if ever, to fully ROI.

Take that same $6,000 and buy ETH. Say it does go down to $150 you could buy 40 of them. Even if ETH recovers to "just" $300, your $6,000 becomes $12,000, or double your original investment. So the question you need to ask is what is the more likely outcome in the next two years. ETH recovering to at least $300, or mining to remain profitable enough to just break even, much less double your investment?

Finally I just used ETH as an example, you would probably mine Equihash (Zcash) or some other algo with Nvidia, but the overall principle is the same as all coins are following the same downward trend in mining profitability.

I doubt very highly he would open source it as I am sure all of his mining programs share a common code base which would lead to clues on how people could circumvent his other mining software. Just be happy he realized that since it is no longer being actively maintained he removed the fee.

I would recommend waiting on building a rig until the next 30 days go by. With the BTC chain split coming up and pretty much most coin prices seriously depressed, coupled with the ATH hashrates and difficulties of GPU mine-able coins, getting in right now will be a losing proposition. The other factor is high hardware prices right now. So you will end up paying 1.5 to 2 times the normal cost for a rig, while at the same time entering the market when projected mining profitability is sinking faster than the Titanic did in the North Atlantic.

If you are just doing research for when the time is right again, just google pretty much "building mining rig" and you will get a lot of hits. The big things to watch for are a motherboard that can support multiple GPUs, a PSU sufficiently large enough to handle the load of you GPUs probably around 1000 watts for 4-5 GPUs (hint stick with a one PSU rig for your first build), and GPUs that can efficiently mine the coin you are looking at. Nvidia's are slightly better at mining Equihash algorithms (Zcash) than they are Ethash (Ethereum), but the Nvidia are still pretty efficient as terms of power usage with both algorithms. I think the 30-60 days ROI's days are over even if the market recovers somewhat, so you might be better at looking at efficiency number rather than max hashrates.

Yes, the markets will be very uncertain from now until August 1st, and perhaps even a bit afterwards depending on how smoothly (or not) the split goes. I have moved most of my BTC back to my own wallet where I control the private keys so I can be ready no matter what happens. I recommend this to anyone who has a significant portion of BTC on exchanges or other services that control the private keys for you as you do not know which way they will turn if the sh*t hits the fan on Aug 1st. Remember some exchanges were not going to honor the ETC chain after the ETH split, even though most eventually did. But why take the chance on someone else making that decision for you? Move those coins!

I would also recommend you act sooner rather than later if you do plan to move your BTC. Waiting until July 31 could be risky as who knows the war might be in full force and transactions might be delayed and never clear in time for the split. If you end up on the loosing chain, say good bye to your coins. For large amounts I would be taking action now, even for smaller amounts you will want to have your funds in their "safe" positions by at least the Friday (28th) before.

As far as ETH I also expect it to be very uncertain until this event has passed. I know a lot of people are hoping for or anticipating a "flippening" at some point, and it may indeed eventually happen, but for the short term BTC is still king and how it goes, goes the entire crypto-market. Assuming a smooth BTC transition, after a few days or weeks into August we should be able to judge the new direction, which I expect to be a return to a slow overall growth in the crypto-space with it picking up more steam again by the time we get into the Winter months.

With most coin hashing difficulties still increasing at a rapid pace and with market prices declining, that $50k would be better spent on buying coins directly at this point in time. From now until sometime around August 1st, I think most coins will keep declining in price until BTC's immediate future becomes more clear.

Like it or not, most coins still sink or swim with BTC, so if you have faith in your preferred coin I think the next couple of weeks will present many excellent buying opportunities. You will get much more bang for your buck buying right now than investing in overpriced mining hardware, and your 6-12 months payback period is going to quickly become 18-36 months or longer.

Who knows, when the price for mining hardware comes back down from the stratosphere and you can actually buy for under MSRP, and once some of the excess capacity has bled out from mining, maybe in 6-12 months time you can look at getting back into mining. For right now the conditions are the worse they have ever been for anyone just looking to get started from scratch. You cannot use today's profitability figures to forecast several months out, as unless coin prices continue to exponentially increase to keep pace with their mining difficulty, the future mining profits are going to continue to plunge.

One other reason is the philosophy of the Dev team and community. There is no real technical reason Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other coins that are currently being mined with ASICs couldn't, with a switch to another POW algorithm, be put back in the hands of GPU miners. Point is, if the Dev's and community wanted to keep a coin out of the ASIC realm, they could just change the code if/when that moment happened. A few of the lesser known coins have already did this with great success. The problem as we know with Bitcoin is there are too many big players with deep pockets that would fight tooth and nail to keep that from ever happening. They can't even agree to a minor thing as a block size increase much less something as dramatic as changing out the POW.

Actually the small players will likely last the longest, as you pointed out they mainly use their GPU for gaming so ROI isn't an issue as they bought their graphic card originally for a different reason (to play games). Since most of them are (like you said) likely school-aged, or in college, they probably have free electricity (mom and dad, or dorm room) so they really wouldn't not have an financial incentive to quit mining. They may reduce their single GPU income from $5-$6/day to $1-$2/day, but again since they have no on-going costs why would they quit?

Also, the other small players that do pay their own way would probably keep mining too, as keeping a few GPUs running could be considered a hobby and they might not mind if they just break even since the electrical costs for such a small operation would be fairly minimal.

The people who will be hurt the most are the ones who have just recently build new rigs, and lots of them, with highly inflated component costs. The increased up-front investment compared to just a few months ago and rapidly decreasing revenue may make ROI impossible except for those with super low electricity rates <5 cents KWh. Even then it will be a long haul.

So unless Ethereum recovers and starts pushing $500 or higher, along with increases in all the other mine-able alts, the revenues will be dropping pretty soon.

That was my thoughts as well when reading this $30 per rig per day business. Even if a 6x1080Ti rig could consistently make $30/day, which it won't due to the increasing difficulty as many have already explained, just the GPUs alone will have cost you close to $4200 and the including the rest of the components you are talking about a $4500 investment. So this would take you around 150 days to break even at $30/day, but the catch is both market price and difficulty are both variable and the $30/day will not hold for any length of time, so the ROI point is going to be even longer, perhaps well over a year.

It doesn't matter what facts people put out there, as new miners will believe what they want to believe and imagine that the good times will roll on forever and they have it all figure out. The dreams of quitting their jobs and living the easy life cloud any rational discussion until the reality eventually sets in. Also, thinking you are going to get 75% back by selling all those GPUs will be another hard lesson as once mining profitability collapses there will be millions of GPUs dumped on the second-hand market, you will be lucky to get 10% if anyone is even buying at that point. Thus will also drive down the price of brand new GPUs as the manufactures will find they suddenly have a glut, so trying to hawk that "barely used" mining GPU on eBay will be harder that it was in the past.

It is not possible to directly use a PCIe cable that was included with your PSU but if you are handy with using a soldering iron or making custom pin crimpings, you can utilize this often unused connector on your PSU. Just be aware that the 4+4pin CPU connector has 4 +12V wires and 4 grounds, whereas the PCIe 8-pin has only 3 +12V and 5 grounds (one is used as a sense pin).

There are many pin-out diagrams on the Internet of the two connectors and how the wires are terminated, even the link bathrobehero posted has a good diagram with an overview of the differences. Always double-check with a volt meter before plugging any modified cables into your equipment to be sure you got the wiring right and you should be fine.

No, I actually said "who is to say the new cards released in a few months will not also be selling at a premium" which means it is a possibility. With the renewed interest in the Nvidia cards for just the reasons you are switching over, they may be higher, or they could be lower. Anyway, I don't set my plans in stone, like most people I monitor the various conditions on a regular basis and plan accordingly. A week from now I might be selling my cards too, but for today I am keeping them.

I think about this every once in awhile too, but I re-did the math after reading this and decided that for me keeping them is the best deal right now. While it is true you can get $100 or more than you paid for them on ebay, in my case I am grossing $36/day on a 6x RX480 rig, so even after electrical costs I am clearing $34 which is about $5.50/day profit for each card.

So an average RX480 that I paid ~$200 for I could sell for $300 on eBay. To keep it simple let's be generous and assume the $300 is after all selling costs are subtracted, shipping, ebay fees, etc. Let's also just use $5.00 day for net income per card on average to account for daily fluctuation. After only 60 days I would make the same $300 as I would by selling but I would still have the cards. Even if mining falls off somewhat to only around $3.00/day profit, after a little over 3 months (100 days) I would still have the same profit as selling while also retaining the cards.

The cards will continue to hold value for sometime, so even if they dropped to $150 after the three months, I still netted $300 (mining) + $150 (net after selling) or $450 in total. Sure everything could collapse at any moment, but if you believe that is the case you would probably be better off just shorting the market.

So for me I would rather keep them for now and continue to mine. In 60 days I would have $300 and the cards would still be worth $200-$300. Since all my cards are ROI it simply comes down to which way I will make the most profit off of them.

Also, even if everything works out the way you think, who is to say the new cards released in a few months will not also be selling at a premium. So the way I look at it, I got a discount when I bought my cards (compared to what I could by them for today) and I am also continuing to make $5/day from each one, so for every 60 days that profitability keeps up, it's like doubling my investment (again and again).

If you have one dollar and I have 64 dollars, which one of us has more?

Sounds to me as if you are trying to screw over your friends, or simply use their capital to make yourself some money at their expense. Besides everything else you posted that diverts the lion's share of profit to yourself, after 9 months the GPUs will be worth a lot more than 10% of their original value, so sounds more like a final exit scam on your friends.

I cannot discern how many friends you have from your post, but for sake of arguments lets run through a (imho) better alternative with yourself and say 3 friends.

1: Figure out how much the total cost for the rig will be once setup and running. Divide by 4 and you each are equal investors. Agree with your friends on a setup/support/maintenance fee you will charge each month. Say 10% of the net profit (after electrical), but up to you to negotiate up-front with them the exact amount.
2. Setup and run the rig for a month. Keep careful track of profits and electricity costs. Subtract electrical costs from the total profit, and also subtract the fee for yourself. Divide the remainder (or net) profit equally among everyone 25% each. Keep good records with screenshots (at least 1x a week) showing hashrates, exchange prices, etc. so there are no questions on how you arrived at your calculations. Might also be a good idea to share with them the pool link so they can keep tabs in real time if they wish. Also, you will want the address you are mining to with the investors rigs to be totally separate from any private rigs you are running.
3. Repeat each month as long as rig is profitable. Remember your fee includes you keeping up to date on latest mining software, most efficient settings, best algorithm to mine for max profit, etc.
3. If they do want a buyout at some point, again this should be negotiated up-front, but I think with a more fair value say 33% of purchase price after a year. Maybe 10% after 2 years.

Don't worry guys I think he is trolling you all. I started reading the thread too and all the advice that was given was correct, I at first though he was a legitimate newbie asking for advice until I got this this replay:


Well he either wants your advice or doesn't and seeing how he is ignoring everything and actually arguing with the advice he has already been given, it is time to let it rest.

As Socket54 suggested, there are a few sites that maintain databases of the original "clean" ROMS just for such an occasion. One I have used is TechPowerUp. You can change the query to match your specific card, but here is a start for your Sapphire 470's: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=&manufacturer=Sapphire&model=RX+470&interface=&memType=&memSize=4096&since=

As suggested earlier, the first thing you need to do is get all the cards working again with a stock BIOS and default speeds/settings before looking around for another modified BIOS.

Which processor are you using, Skylake or Kabylake? There have been reports of certain motherboards not able to run cards on all the PCIe slots when used with a Kabylake CPU.

I agree with what everyone else has posted. You should re-flash all your cards back to the original bios again, one-card-at-a-time, to ensure that the flash was applied correctly. This means stripping out all the risers and just start with the motherboard, processor, memory and one video card installed in the PCIe slot directly on the mobo (no risers). Flash, shutdown, swap out the card with another and repeat.

Once you have flashed all your cards back to the original BIOS in this fashion you can begin the build again. Start out with a fresh OS install and just one card mounted directly to the motherboard again. Try to mine at default settings and if it runs let it go for 30 minutes or so to make sure, if that card passes, mark it with a piece of tape, or sticker somehow and swap in another card until all of them have been vetted in this manner. Then you can start building the rig again by adding one additional card with a riser. Let the system run with just those two cards for awhile, again to check for stability. Slowly add in the rest of the cards, running the rig for an hour or so between each addition until you either find the problem component or you have the rig back in operation running all of the cards at default speeds and bios.

If you do reach this stage of all cards running again, just let the whole rig run at default for 24-48 hours to make sure there isn't something else wrong, weak power, bad riser, etc. If it passes, then you can begin to try and make changes again to increase your hash-rate.

I know this sounds (and is) tedious, but unless you take the time to troubleshoot each component one at a time and give it time to pass a burn-in test you will ultimately spend even more time chasing your tail in circles trying to figure out what is wrong with so many variables. I know the temptation to skip or short-cut many of these steps will be strong, but think of the other benefit by doing the exercise you will become more acquainted with how the entire process works and will help with future builds and troubleshooting.

First off, why are you posting this question in the Claymore mining thread? There are plenty of other threads discussing the issues Dwarfpool is currently having.

Secondly, why are you asking a bunch of Internet strangers what to do? Be you own man and take action! If you are worried enough to make a post about it you should be worried enough to move to a different pool until the issues are resolved.