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January 20, 2017, 01:11:30 PM |
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You guys have some unreasonable expectations.
The R9 290 is indeed a good card for mining. I have three of them running on zcash, I get about .07-.08 per day so something around $3.75 per day (with 3 good GPU's). I have two more of them running on ETH (actually they run on an ethash multiport so they don't mine ETH exclusively) but it takes me several days to get a single ETH. Something like 3-4 weeks or so to get 5 ETH with intermittent ETC and Expanse in between which I sell for BTC.
I have a couple of RX 480's doing XMR. The RX series does about 60-70% of the hashrate of a 290 on most coins but it uses much less power due to the smaller nm design so I consider it a good investment. It takes like a week or so to get a single XMR.
Pool luck can make a difference in profits. As does fluctuating difficulty which changes along with the exchange rate as miners and pools switch coins. There can be a lot of luck involved in just mining the right thing at the right time. Sometimes a coin is easily mineable and then the exchange rate goes through the roof. If you mine and hold and then sell high your profit can be much better than mining and dumping. But who knows which coins will be worth 100%-1000% more in 6 months?
The last thing to note is that GPU mining is a pain in the ass. Figuring out which drivers to use with which miners can be very time consuming. Meanwhile you are dealing with crashes and OS or miner software freezes. Some motherboards do not play well with some PCIe risers so running multiple cards on some boards can be more trouble than it is worth. You can minimize some of those issues by using known good hardware combinations but that can be pricey. I usually just get whatever piece of crap computer I can get for free to setup my miners and only pay actual dollars for GPU's so I can earn my money back faster. But installing and then uninstalling drivers and then having to use driver uninstall utilities gets old. This is why I have miners spread out on different coins. Sometimes zcash is the most profitable and sometimes not, easier to leave a rig on it all the time then switch. Same with ETH, same with XMR.
Meanwhile, even with relative stability on all my rigs, I still have to watch for occasional crashes because it happens. If you minimize your costs and maximize your effectiveness in terms of what you mine and when then you can make your money back in 6 months or even slightly less. If you have to pay for the mobo, the PSU, the HD, the RAM, some kind of open air case, maybe some fans, and the GPU, then you may need more than a year to get your money back.
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