Why is Ethereum actually the only cryptocurrency worth GPU mining?

[adaseb]

In my place, the 970 and 390 cost the same. So for me, it is better to buy the 390. It also has 8GB memory.

If the Ethereum last more than 2 years, we might need big memory size to minimize the hash rate decrease.

That is right. That is the reason why I mine with 8 GB and 4 GB cards. I have 280x, but they are hashing less and less.

Ethereum will not last 2 years.  I am pretty sure that it will go POS before the 2GB cards can't mine anymore. Buying GPUs with 4 or 8GB is a waste of money.

Even if it doesn't go POS, then the difficulty will be too high for any decent profits.

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[adaseb]

Ethereum isn't the only GPU-mineable coin that can be profitable right now - it's just probably the MOST profitable, and pretty much profitable even if you have average-to-high electric rates at this point.

 X11 (Dash) is still GPU mineable, there hasn't been enough ASIC deployment to noticeably affect the hash rate.
 YET.
 But that looks likely to change this summer.

 There are other coins that can be GPU mined for a profit if you have cheap to VERY VERY cheap electric, but cryptocoin mining has always had a "cost of electric" factor to it's profitability.


 8GB cards are overkill for Ethereum mining, though if you plan to have other uses for the card later the extra memory might be useful.
 Based on DAG file size growth rate and probable timeframe of Ethereum converting to PoS from PoW, it's uncertain if a 4GB card would be overkill (3GB will almost definitely be needed late this year or early next year, I forget the exact timeframe, if Ethereum stays profitable to mine).


 IMO avoid HIS fan-cooled cards, they tend to use VERY CHEAP fans that die way too young. Their Ice-Q BLOWER models seem to use good blowers though.


 Rents in the US vary a lot - but the average if you avoid HIGH RENT areas like Southern California or the New York megaplex seems to be in the ballpark of $10-15/m(squared).
 Where I live right now is at the low end of that range, but it's a fairly low cost-of-living area - apartments for $500 are easy to find, most around here are less than that for
 1-2 bedroom places.
 Most folks in the US don't speak Metric very well if at all, US is still on the old "imperial" measurements system with feet, miles, and such with some exceptions.

 Food - varies. I eat pretty comfortably on $190/month but a lot of that is Diet Pepsi consumption - drop the soda and I could get down to more like $100-$120 range.
 I have pretty simple tastes though.

Are you sure that X11 (Dash) is actually worth mining?? Both coinwarz and whattomine tells it is not. According to whattomine, with one R9 280x (~6.4 Mh/s, with my computer consuming ~450W and $0.13 kWh) I would get ~$1.13 per day... IN DEBTS!! And so is with any other coin mineable with a GPU, except ETH... for now! Or aren't these calcs able to estimate correctly even for these coins?

I just bought a HIS R9 280x (see above if you want to know the technical specs of this graphics card), so I hope you are wrong. 

I forgot that the metric system used in the USA is different. My bad. In fact, USA is exception among practically every single country, lol: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Metric_system_adoption_map.svg/2000px-Metric_system_adoption_map.svg.png

You drink too much soda, by the way! Why don't you opt for drinking juice instead?

No its not worth X11 mining anymore because ASIC are out.

Before ETH you could mine X11 and make about $0.30/day (on free electricity).

There is also Qubit and Quark but those also made about $0.20-$0.40/day (on free electricity), so unless you have free power, you won't be able to GPU mine anything.

[Marvell1]

In my place, the 970 and 390 cost the same. So for me, it is better to buy the 390. It also has 8GB memory.

If the Ethereum last more than 2 years, we might need big memory size to minimize the hash rate decrease.

That is right. That is the reason why I mine with 8 GB and 4 GB cards. I have 280x, but they are hashing less and less.

yeah i dumped around 30 280x on ebay last week $200 per card or so not bad considering oi bought them about a year ago for $220 a card and have mined thousands of eth with them over the last year.

Are you buying the 490 or other high end cards?

Buying Nanos since they use like half the power or less even

24.6 mhs for 100 watts on a nano vs 20mhs and 220 watts for a 280x   no brainer for me, my farm will be smaller but cooler and more efficent, also the nanos seem to be able to run for days withnoute reboots or anything

one 6 gpu nano rig has been running for two weeks never had to do anything to it, some of my 280x rigs are flakey and i need to reboot them daily.

Same thing goes for the 390s they run for days with no issues but they pull like 260 watts using claymore  and generate a ton of heat, im dumping those too

[QuintLeo]

In my place, the 970 and 390 cost the same. So for me, it is better to buy the 390. It also has 8GB memory.

If the Ethereum last more than 2 years, we might need big memory size to minimize the hash rate decrease.

That is right. That is the reason why I mine with 8 GB and 4 GB cards. I have 280x, but they are hashing less and less.

Ethereum will not last 2 years.  I am pretty sure that it will go POS before the 2GB cards can't mine anymore. Buying GPUs with 4 or 8GB is a waste of money.

Even if it doesn't go POS, then the difficulty will be too high for any decent profits.

 It's due to go POS sometime next year. Looks a bit marginal for anythign past ONE year at this point, and the DAG size growth is guarenteed to keep eroding hashrate.


 X11 ASIC have been seen - but in TINY quantities that appear to have had no noticeable difference on the network hashrate. That SHOULD change soon, but it's not happened YET.


 Only 2Gig cards I have (and am mining with) were either already on hand (my NVidia stuff and some leftovers from Litecoin/X11 mining days), one VERY cheap HD7870 that's well on the way to paying for itself, and a couple of GTX 750ti small form factor cards I was going to get for the machines they are going into anyway eventually.
 I doubt I'll bother with any more 2Gig cards - I've pretty much filled up every open PCI-E slot I had available (living situation RIGHT NOW precludes going open-case and risers, that should change after I move this summer) so even cheap used stuff is about out of attractiveness for now.

[Amph]

In my place, the 970 and 390 cost the same. So for me, it is better to buy the 390. It also has 8GB memory.

If the Ethereum last more than 2 years, we might need big memory size to minimize the hash rate decrease.

That is right. That is the reason why I mine with 8 GB and 4 GB cards. I have 280x, but they are hashing less and less.

yeah i dumped around 30 280x on ebay last week $200 per card or so not bad considering oi bought them about a year ago for $220 a card and have mined thousands of eth with them over the last year.

Are you buying the 490 or other high end cards?

Buying Nanos since they use like half the power or less even

24.6 mhs for 100 watts on a nano vs 20mhs and 220 watts for a 280x   no brainer for me, my farm will be smaller but cooler and more efficent, also the nanos seem to be able to run for days withnoute reboots or anything

one 6 gpu nano rig has been running for two weeks never had to do anything to it, some of my 280x rigs are flakey and i need to reboot them daily.

Same thing goes for the 390s they run for days with no issues but they pull like 260 watts using claymore  and generate a ton of heat, im dumping those too

buying nano right now, is a bit stupid, too much in cost, you will pay upfront your electricity

better wait for new amd, so the nano price will be discounted heavily, i'm also sure that the new polaris or vega will match the nano in MH/w

[agente]

In my place, the 970 and 390 cost the same. So for me, it is better to buy the 390. It also has 8GB memory.

If the Ethereum last more than 2 years, we might need big memory size to minimize the hash rate decrease.

That is right. That is the reason why I mine with 8 GB and 4 GB cards. I have 280x, but they are hashing less and less.

yeah i dumped around 30 280x on ebay last week $200 per card or so not bad considering oi bought them about a year ago for $220 a card and have mined thousands of eth with them over the last year.

Are you buying the 490 or other high end cards?

Buying Nanos since they use like half the power or less even

24.6 mhs for 100 watts on a nano vs 20mhs and 220 watts for a 280x   no brainer for me, my farm will be smaller but cooler and more efficent, also the nanos seem to be able to run for days withnoute reboots or anything

one 6 gpu nano rig has been running for two weeks never had to do anything to it, some of my 280x rigs are flakey and i need to reboot them daily.

Same thing goes for the 390s they run for days with no issues but they pull like 260 watts using claymore  and generate a ton of heat, im dumping those too

buying nano right nano, is a bit stupid, too much in cost, you will pay upfront your electricity

better wait for new amd, so the nano price will be discounted heavily, i'm also sure that the new polaris or vega will match the nano in MH/w

Nano is good option for long term vision and you can resell in the future better then other cheap cards.

[Dev_Sempak_coin]

everyone here is talking like the mining will die after ethereum, there is nothing more wrong

we will talk about another more profitable coin in 1-2 years, guaranteed...

How can you be so sure?

because it happened like 3 times already or maybe even more? since 2013 there was always something to mine form time to time, it's not like ethereum was the only coin profitable since altcoin scene went all out

so after paycoin, etherum we will see new altcoin worthed to mining with VGA ?

[ol92]

everyone here is talking like the mining will die after ethereum, there is nothing more wrong

we will talk about another more profitable coin in 1-2 years, guaranteed...

How can you be so sure?

because it happened like 3 times already or maybe even more? since 2013 there was always something to mine form time to time, it's not like ethereum was the only coin profitable since altcoin scene went all out

so after paycoin, etherum we will see new altcoin worthed to mining with VGA ?

Paycoin is not comparable to ethereum : ethereum offer a huge amount of btc equivalent to mining daily for a long period thanks to the sustained volume and price.
In the future zcash has probably the potential to offer a good gpu mining period.
https://z.cash/blog/why-equihash.html

[Jistlad]

buying nano right nano, is a bit stupid, too much in cost, you will pay upfront your electricity

better wait for new amd, so the nano price will be discounted heavily, i'm also sure that the new polaris or vega will match the nano in MH/w

It depends on the mining efficiency of the new AMD cards, if they are not so good, it is better to use Nano now.

[xingqiaoyin]

You guys think we can use Rx 480 with the current mining softwares ?

[QuintLeo]

RX480 looks interesting, if only due to the HUGE memory bandwidth increase - which *hopefully* would translate to good Ethereum mining hashrate.

 Availability is going to be an issue - NVidia is already having availability issues with the GTX 1080, a "mainstream" card like the RX 480 is likely to have even worse such issue....

[Docnaster]

You guys think we can use Rx 480 with the current mining softwares ?

RX480 has only 256 bit memory bus, that is slower than the 512 bit from the 390. The memory frequency could be higher.

[Anarchy101]

I don't know anything about Eth. mining. Can a asic scrypt miner mine Eth?

[Charloz24]

I don't know anything about Eth. mining. Can a asic scrypt miner mine Eth?

No, gpu only.

[X7]

Ask the R3 consortium

[QuintLeo]

I don't know anything about Eth. mining. Can a asic scrypt miner mine Eth?

 NO.

 An ASIC can only mine the specific algorythm (or algorythmS in the case of the Gridseed/SFARDS dual-algorythm chips) it was made for.

 RX 480 is listed as appx. 8/5 of the memory speed of the R9 390, as I recall.
 Should make up partly for the narrower memory bus, but probably not entirely.

 It's not really AIMED at being an R9 390 replacement though for most usage - more of a R9 280/280x/380/380x range card with some pretensions of arguing with an R9 290/390 on stuff that isn't memory-limited (It'll probably be faster on RC5-72 work than my 290s, but that's a rare "don't care at all about the memory" extreme example).


 It's still GCN supporting OpenCL, should work with current software once the drivers are updated to support the card - might not be "optimised" but should still work.

[EssentialCoin]

For the Etheruem  mining, I will not buy the RX480 if the performance is less than 390, even it consumes less power.

[Amph]

the real 390 competitor it's vega, the 490, not the 480, but since gpu do not scale in the right way with etheruem, i would not hold much hope for the 490 being the best card to get

[asrilani]

the real 390 competitor it's vega, the 490, not the 480, but since gpu do not scale in the right way with etheruem, i would not hold much hope for the 490 being the best card to get

The Vega was originally to be launched early next year, but that has been put forward. If there is big improvement over the 390, I might buy it.

[Simpan]

the real 390 competitor it's vega, the 490, not the 480, but since gpu do not scale in the right way with etheruem, i would not hold much hope for the 490 being the best card to get

The Vega was originally to be launched early next year, but that has been put forward. If there is big improvement over the 390, I might buy it.

It has HBM2, very wide bandwidth. It could be faster than the R9 390. But the price could be very high.