Always keep the following in mind when it comes to most things in cryptoland, "A fool and his money are soon parted".

How much are you selling them for and are you in the US? I have been buying them from China but the shipping takes 4-5 weeks so I am looking for something a bit closer.

The 1150 processors are available everywhere, where are you having a hard time finding them? On NewEgg the socket 1150 has the most selection available of any socket type, including the 1151. Intel is also still cranking out the higher end processors in the line. They may be looking to begin phasing out the lower end once Kaby Lake hits, but even once this happens there are plenty of chips in the supply pipeline to last a few more years easily.

Yes, story is the same with every new popular coin launch, we read about people losing their shirt by investing in cloud mining. Sorry to hear it happened to you, but look at it as an investment in a good life lesson, i.e. stay away from cloud mining and other too good to be true schemes.

ZEC is pretty volatile right now, but there may be opportunity for profit yet as it is still a young coin. Forget about mining it, unless you have your own hardware and fairly cheap electricity, but look for good dips in the exchange rate and buy the coins directly. Right now it is on a tear again so I wouldn't invest today, but I expect it to experience several more peaks and valleys in the next few months. With a bit of good timing and patience you may be able to offset some of your cloud mining losses.

I use 5x of these SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 470 100407NT+4GOCL 4GB in each rig with that motherboard. Currently I have three of those rigs up and running in that configuration with no issues. I do not mix or match GPUs in any of my rigs as I usually buy everything I need to build one in a single order.

I have been able to get 5 GPUs to work on the ASRock H170 Pro4S boards. They are selling for $85 on NewEgg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157640


I also have the MSI Z170-A PRO board you asked about, and with that I have only been able to get 4 GPUs to work. I am disappointed a bit in that one for mining, but I might just use it for my gaming rig instead.

Well you can never know for sure, but there is such as thing as packet capture programs you can use to monitor the traffic being sent in/out of your machine in detail. Wireshark is a good place to start if you are actually interested in learning. https://www.wireshark.org/#download

I made most of my money mining Eth not when it was trading > $10.00, but back when I could mine several hundred of them in a day. By the time it was trading high the gold rushers were here and you could only mine a fraction of what was possible before. With ZEC it appears to be in reverse, so the opportunity is still ahead of us and not behind as is now with ETH.

Think of the local hash-rate displayed by your miner in the same way as you would your optimistic MPG readout on your car. Say you have 1 gallon of gas left in your tank, your car's readout is showing you are getting 30 MPG and the nearest gas-station is only 25 miles away. According to the local readout your should be fine as you only need to go 25 miles not 30. However, the car's computer does not see the big hill you have to climb in order to get to the gas station, and that hill will temporarily drop your average down to 15 MPG, meaning you will only be able to drive 22 miles before running out of gas.

So if you turn your mind-set around a little and view the pool as the real hash-rate, and what your miner displays more like that car readout, you will be more likely to have better results as the pool takes into account real world factors such as stales, latency, bad (or good) luck, pool maintenance, etc.

Welcome to the wonderful world of mining! Yes, it is normal to see less hash on the pool that the local miner displays. There are other factors other than fees that play into this, such as stales, miner or GPU restarts, momentary disconnects due to your ISP or the pool itself, and also just plain old luck.

I have now done this too with my last build and plan to do more builds using a server PSU. Thanks MarkAz for pointing me in this direction earlier, and to Sidehack for selling the ready to go kit!

I will say the total cost is about 20% less that a consumer PSU, but here is what got me to switch over.
 

• I was already running 240V and Server PSUs are pretty much designed for this anyway, even if they will run at 110V with reduced wattage output.
• I am running these rigs in my garage so noise will not be an issue. Yes noise is a concern with server PSUs as the tiny fans need to run super fast to cool the unit.
• The cabling and gauge of wire is superior for powering the risers and graphics cards. No more worrying about overloading Molex connectors as each GPU has its own dedicated run (up to 6 GPUs).
• Probably the biggest reason is if the PSU itself dies, I can replace it for $30 as the breakout board and cabling will most likely be in usable condition.

Yes I do realize consumer PSUs come with up to a 10 year warranty, but I liked the idea of having some cheap ready spares on-hand and not worrying about shipping and the whole RMA process. Also as someone else mentioned, server PSUs were designed for 24/7 use and have high efficiency already due to their intended purpose.

I would stick with Zcash for now. The last few days it has flip-flopped back and forth with Ethereum as which is most profitable at any given moment to mine, but Zcash usually comes back on top within a few hours. Sell regularly, but be watchful of the peaks and valleys on the exchanges. We will hit the maximum block reward in about 2 more weeks, after which the picture should become a little more clearer.

For the beginner, you can use NiceHash. You basically supply a BTC address, which to save a further step you can use your Coinbase BTC wallet address. Then you point your miners to their website.

You can mine with the Ethash (Ethereum) or or Equihash (Zcash) algorithms which are currently the most profitable, but they will pay out directly in BTC to your Coinbase wallet, which you can then sell for USD. While they may not be the best way to squeeze out the absolute most profit, it is pretty streamlined and saves a few steps along the way.

Once you are more advanced you can mine alts directly and try to sell them on an exchange for a bit more profit if you can time it right.

I didn't read this whole thing, but this is obviously a troll post. Does anyone use dollar bills for illegal activities? Is the Sky blue? Does the sun set in the west? Are you a troll?

Reading people moaning about how they missed out on selling at 50 BTC/ZEC reminds me a lot about people who also whine about not holding on to this or that collectable; baseball cards, beanie babies, etc. The problem is if *everyone* held on to these they would not be so valuable. Same thing with ZEC. If everything was working perfect and pools were paying out, the price would have plunged even faster and you would have still only been able to sell at 10 btc/zec, 5/btc/zec, or whatever you ended up with.

You might as well bemoan the fact that you didn't pick those exact wining lottery numbers after the drawing has already taken place. And if this explanation doesn't satisfy you take comfort in the fact most of those crazy high early trades were fake with speculators trying to establish an early high price and buying into their own sells. Sorry Sunshine, no one actually bought at 3,600 BTC/ZEC and gave someone else an instant ROI mining farm.

I also have found very little actual difference between -0, 1, or 2 as far as shares reported to the pool. I had a couple of rigs start off on 2 and crash after a few minutes. I lowered them down to 0 and noticed the shares/hash did not really seem to change that much. It is much more stable though on 0 and the CPU usage drops a bit, although I didn't really notice a huge difference there either.

Setting GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR=0 allows access to 32-bit address space of memory ~3.8 GB, while GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR=1 allows access to 64-bit of address space. So yes in order to utilize all of your GPU memory your should leave this set to one.

I think the main benefit to setting this to 0 for mining was that it cuts the required number of clock cycles needed to access the memory in half, thus improving (in theory) mining speed. Since most algorithms will fit within 3.8 GB of memory, for dedicated mining rigs it is set to 0. For gaming rigs or dual purpose (mining/gaming) with more than 4 GB of GPU memory, leave it on 1. I think the performance gains are minimal if noticeable at all.

Yes, with Winter coming the effective rate for power is even cheaper if you can use mining heat to offset your normal heating bill. Unfortunately, I usually have a surplus of heat, even in the Winter, so electricity is still a "cost" for me. I need to figure out a way to harness all this heat for other useful purposes, like heating my water.

You would put 47 in as sols correlates to hashes with other algorithms. This has been explained all over many times, so while technically one iteration produces around 2 sols (1.88 on average) all calculations are based upon sols. The confusions stems from people wanting to equate iterations, rounds, or whatever you want to call them with hashes. WhatToMine simply uses the term hashes since all the rest of the coins are based off of that metric.

When using WhatToMine to base your calculations on, this is further confused by the overly optimistic predictions it offers, so the real profit prediction I found is closer to 75% of what the site displays. So since this number falls in-between your "halving" methodology and simply inputting sols, I can see where you might have been lead to believe this was correct.

On one of my better rigs, I get around 300 sols or 50 per RX470 x 6. The entire rig (GPUs, mobo, CPU, etc) draws 580 watts from the wall when plugged in a 120V outlet and measured with a kill-a-watt meter. I normally run it at 240V and expect it gets slightly better efficiency there but do not have a precise meter for that measurement.

Anyway, using the 580 watt 120V reading, I am using 13.92 KWh each day and at $0.08 power it is costing me about about $1.11 a day. So my mining "cost" is about 300 sols for $1.11/day. According to the WhatToMine site I should earn about 0.06 ZEC/day with this rig and should clear close to $11.00 in profit after electricity costs are subtracted.

So even accounting for pool fees, miner fees, inefficiencies, lost shares, etc and only assuming I am getting about 75% of whattomine's figures show, I am still making close to $8.00/day profit after costs. For the record, the later figure is what pretty much matches up with my pool figures.

Most of my rigs were already bought and paid for by ETH mining (some even from the LTC/Doge days), so this is pretty much all profit for me. So if you are losing money even with today's depressed prices, you need to research more and tweak you cards more. You can under-volt like crazy with ZEC for some reason.