Advice on getting back into GPU mining

[AlphaBridge]

Hello Everyone,
I mined some LTC a few years ago but had to stop. I want to start mining again and have the following gear:

2 X Sapphire 280X Dual-X OC 3GB
6 X Asus 280X DirectCU2 TOP 3GB
3 X Gigabyte 270X Windforce 2GB
4 X Asus 270X DirectCU2 TOP 2GB
2 X Visiontek 290 Reference 4GB
2 X Gigabyte 39o 8GB
2 X XFX R9 270 DoubleD

Are any of these still power efficient enough to mine compared to a 470/480?
Would it be better to sell all of these at a loss and just buy BTC directly?
I have enough circuit power to use 1/3 of the gear, what do I keep and what do I sell off?

I need help and would appreciate any advice, thanks!

[RentGPU]

Hello Everyone,
I mined some LTC a few years ago but had to stop. I want to start mining again and have the following gear:

2 X Sapphire 280X Dual-X OC 3GB
6 X Asus 280X DirectCU2 TOP 3GB
3 X Gigabyte 270X Windforce 2GB
4 X Asus 270X DirectCU2 TOP 2GB
2 X Visiontek 290 Reference 4GB
2 X Gigabyte 39o 8GB
2 X XFX R9 270 DoubleD

Are any of these still power efficient enough to mine compared to a 470/480?
Would it be better to sell all of these at a loss and just buy BTC directly?
I have enough circuit power to use 1/3 of the gear, what do I keep and what do I sell off?

I need help and would appreciate any advice, thanks!

The 280x is making a good hashrate on zcash now with claymore ,as an old LTC miner you should know that electricity costs is the key specially on those 280x

[AlphaBridge]

I've been renting out my hashrate on NiceHash and the Sapphires have been solid performers with respect to mining but I was unable to lower voltage via TriXX. The Asus 280Xs can be dropped to 1100mv in GPU Tweak but actually fluctuate to 1148-1150mv; Between the two, the Sapphires perform consistently better due to the fan curve being more aggressive and the heatpipe and cooling being simpler but better than the Asus it seems.

[meeow]

whether or not it is worth keeping them depends on power cost
also, rx470s are not that much more expensive than used 290s in the US if you get them on sale, especially with a mir, so you could consider dumping the old cards and buying 470s
I would be looking at zec and xmr for tahiti and hawaii cards, dual mining probably consumes too much power to be viable if you pay for electricity, plus tahiti sucks at mining eth.
Unsure about exp/pasc as I generally don't bother with low tier altcoins but there are plenty of calcs you can input your stats into, like whatttomine and mycryptobuddy

[eckmar]

Depends on your electricity cost. If it's low I would sell everything other than r9 390s and if it's high I would just sell everything. You can still get some money with that cards but efficiency is of course not as good as 470.  You can also look at it this way, if you don't care about electric costs you already have hardware so you don't have anything to lose really

[AlphaBridge]

Unfortunately, cost of electricity here is 0.11kWh. Right now I use a single 390 for sporadic mining, it does 344 Sols. A single Gigabyte 270X does 500 h/s (cryptonight) I have three  running 24/7 on NiceHash.

I'd like the idea of getting more energy efficient cards but I feel like I have to get the most of what I currently have and it seems like the market is saturated with old cards at the moment.

What type of 470s would you recommend?

[eckmar]

Unfortunately, cost of electricity here is 0.11kWh. Right now I use a single 390 for sporadic mining, it does 344 Sols. A single Gigabyte 270X does 500 h/s (cryptonight) I have three  running 24/7 on NiceHash.

I'd like the idea of getting more energy efficient cards but I feel like I have to get the most of what I currently have and it seems like the market is saturated with old cards at the moment.

What type of 470s would you recommend?

Best ones atm are Sapphire Nitro+ 4gb cards. They have best cost/performance ratio and very good cooling. I personally have a few of them and I'm more than satisfied with them

[brian_notgrr]

For XMR:

Review results on the "monero benchmarks" site, just remember that flogging the card is not the point.  It's like tuning a motorcycle, it needs to be right for the race you're running.  This race is about fast access to slow memory, basically.  Architecture-wise, Gen2/Hawaii got it right.  Main advantage of Gen4/Polaris is energy efficiency. By the same token, Gen1 cards are working with a handicap, that can be compounded by crappy memory and crappy timings.  Comparing 7950/280x with rx470, on average I get probably 60% of the hashrate and burn I dunno ~60% more energy per card.  The gigabyte ime is the biggest piece of crap ever, I'm gonna keep the cooling system, which might come in handy someday. And think of some way to blow up the board.  Might launch it into orbit with a cluster of bottle rockets, that would be cool.  I'm no fan of that Sapphire 280x; crappy memory, cheap card, not much you can do to tune it.  

With regard to your Gen2/Gen3 cards, if you're following a "mine-and-hold" strategy, you're banking on future demand.  The profit equation has to include time value of money as well as energy costs.  Given prevailing interest rates, time is on your side. (Well, that's a strong statement; let's say it's not exactly not on your side.)  If you think XMR is going to pop, you can absorb some energy costs now.  

Conclusion:  Keep the 290's and the 390 for XMR.  Hashrate will crush, don't look at the electric bill.

 

For Dagger-Hashimoto variants:

I'm sure you know more about ethereum-style algo's than I do, all I can say is, my gen-1 cards are doing well with PASC, which is in the same general ballpark I think.  I've been shying away from ETH, because of concerns that the difficulty is going up, although maybe I should give my 3gb cards a chance.  With PASC being newer and more of an unknown I'm assuming I'm more likely to come out ahead.  I have no idea what the deal is with PASC and don't care, I mine to an exchange and flip it.  

Conclusion:

Me, I'd dump the Gigabytes if you can.
I'm not sure what to do with the Sapphire, might give it a chance with PASC.  But I think it has some resale value and not sure I want to flog it too hard.
Personally I'd hang on the Asus's, get multi-algo software, mine to an exchange.  Take what you can get and flip it.  

Ebay:

Seems like the Gen1 cards -- at least the ones that look spiffy -- go for anywhere from $80 to $100 on ebay.  Gen2's sometimes go as low as $90.  

Gen4's are going for as little as $160 (check NewEgg, which takes BTC like it was paypal).  Avoid 460's.  I'd favor Sapphire.  Their "platinum OC" 4gb is a fine card for the money; I guess it must be better for mining than gaming.   Looks like the nitro's are faster, although I'm not convinced the 8gb nitro 480 is worth the money.  Probably has the best resale value, and it's a "keeper" for games.  But it's not clear to me that 8gb gives you much of an advantage over 4gb for monero, and the marginal cost of the extra compute units is exorbitant, $20 vs $5. 

Gen2's are faster than the Sapphire references, on my rigs I'd say 3 Gen2 vs 4 rx470's is about a wash all the way around for a hobbyist.  Little doubt in my mind that the 400's will have more salvage value.

Conclusion:

I'd dump something, and given the prices on 400's, I'd try to acquire one or two to play with.  

[AlphaBridge]

Thanks you all for the great comments, advice and observations so far!

Hawaii
There is a general consensus to keep the Hawaii series cards, when they are not throttling from heat, the cards perform very well. I purchased Tri-X fans and heatsinks to replace the reference style blower cooler, I'll update the progress of this once I receive the fan and heatsink combo.

RX 470
I'm not able to use all of my gear due to not having enough circuit power (yep, noob mistake made) so I'll put everything up for sale and see what sells at a price I can live with. As I sell, I'll look to either outright purchase of BTC or getting 470s (most likely)

Gigabyte
Greg, the 270X have performed well and stayed cool and were survived mining LTC back in the day, my frustration with Gigabyte in general is that they are voltage locked and unlike Asus, they probably use the OEM reference PCB design and chip specs. The 270Xs have been solid, but I did have Windforce 290s that were eventually upgraded to 390s through Gigabyte warranty which I thought was very generous but the 290s did go back to Gigabyte several times for repairs. I think your opinion is a valid point because the cards seem fine for normal use but in the case of my 290s they didn't survive very long despite having a Windforce heatsink and triple fans.

Asus
270X and 280X are well built but they both throttle due to poor heatsink design and a fan curve that  favors silence over performance, voltage can be adjusted -100mv using GPU Tweak.

So Far...
Keep the reference 290s and convert the blower style cooler to a Tri-X if possible, keep the 390s.
I'll continue to use the 3X Gigabyte 270X and 2X Sapphire R9 280Xs for mining on NiceHash, and start selling off the rest of the gear.

Thanks!

[meeow]

I would not get rid of the blower coolers unless noise is a problem. The blower coolers have incredibly robust fans and won't fail you--you just have to run them loud.

Meanwhile, the tri-x cooler is good in general, and has no problems if you're a gamer not running 100% 24/7, but the fans don't hold up to constant load from personal experience, and will start to become stiff or wobbly.

[AlphaBridge]

On the 290 reference cooler, I would have to run the fan at 100% all the time but it was sufficient to keeping the card cool enough to mine. I just may convert one of them over then and see, thanks!

[fury420]

Just as a suggestion, the bulk of "voltage locked" AMD cards are not truly locked on a hardware level.
As I understand it, some have a BIOS-level restriction that prevents software adjustment, and others use voltage regulator that isn't supported by the usual software.

But... in both cases BIOS editing is usually able to adjust the voltage, which can do wonders for Pitcairn & Tahiti series cards that shipped at 1.25v

This will do it:
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/vbe7-vbios-editor-for-radeon-hd-7000-series-cards.189089/

[Maskedman]

All will depend of your electrical cost. Most if not all of these cards are still profitable in most of the World.

[meeow]

On the 290 reference cooler, I would have to run the fan at 100% all the time but it was sufficient to keeping the card cool enough to mine. I just may convert one of them over then and see, thanks!

You should be able to run at 65% or less if you undervolt/underclock, which is what you should probably be doing if you pay a significant amount for electricity

[AlphaBridge]

I've tried BIOS editing in the past, but didn't have much success; I will find a BIOS that had been edited for my cards. A reference 290 BIOS should be fairly common and easy to acquire. I like the idea of keeping what I have and tuning for efficiency until I can get a 470 or two.