I'm relitivly new to BTC mining. I've been doing it for a couple of months and doing alot of research before investing in a "mining rig" and buying/selling BTC.
So I'm going to give you a snapshot of my mining operations
as a normal, probably majority consumer and new to the bitcoin idea.
When I first started out:
- Bitminter as my mining pool. ( I found them to be easiest when starting out, and fee 1%)
- Coinbase as my "bank" aka e-wallet for storing my BTC (this is also where I transfer real money
so I can buy and sell BTC.
- I use GUIminer as my mining tool (I've used Bitminter's mining tool and cgminer, but couldn't get same results...I'll explain later)
- My "mining rig":
AMD A8 APU which has a Radeon HD 7550 or something.
16GB DDR3 1866 OC RAM
128GB SSD and 1 TB backup drive
NO dedicated FX card
This yielded me roughly 55-58Mh/s which is EXTREMELY pathetic. But that rig was not meant for mining. It is a Photo editing computer, but it was all i had to get started.
Now 4 months later I just recently built a dedicated mining rig. It's built for expandability and places for many fans which is important if you want to keep those GPUs cool when hashing. I will explain and provide cost, equipment, setting (overclock), and flags I use in GUIminer to show you what I'm getting now and what I plan on upgrading to in the future.
Rig:
COOLER MASTER HAF 912 ($59) Simple, plenty of room, not all light-up and showy, plenty of fan options.)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119233ASRock MB-970EX4 Socket AM3+ ($99) (bought because it has 3 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots for 3 GPUs)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058HUQJ0/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1CORSAIR Builder Series CX600 600W ($65) (good, inexpensive, strong enough for 3 GPUs)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139028AMD Sempron 145 Sargas 2.8GHz ($38) (because you don't need a strong CPU for mining
)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103888G.SKILL NS 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 ($19) (because you don't need much RAM for mining)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231395Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHZ edition (inexpensive, moderate hashing, small, new architecture) 208-214 Mh/s (I'll explain more)
Old HDD I had lying around ($0)
So for $380 I have a great starter rig that I can add 2 more GPUs or better ones down the line.
Now let me explain my GPU overclock settings in MSI Afterburner:
Core clock: 1125
Memory: 525 (the lowest setting because you don't need it to be any higher and it won't make a diff in hashing power)
power: -2
fan speed: 55%
These setting yield 208-214 Mh/s
So in the next couple of paycheck I'm going to purchase 2 more 7770s, which in theory should get me a total of 624 Mh/s.
If you have any questions let me know. Also, if someone wants to add their opinion, I'd like to learn more. thanks.
