Is mining hardware still profitable?

[gfaust]

If I'm doing my math correctly using this online calculator:

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

Difficulty is at 877266, and a 5830 will yield approx 240Mhash/sec without overclocking, maybe 265Mhash/sec for an average overclock.

If you purchase a new 5830 for approx $130, it will not pay for itself in a month.  This online calculator doesn't include difficulty increases so it's sort of a "best case" scenario.  Next difficulty increase will likely be over 1,000,000 and will likely continue to be 50% to 80% increase every week or 2, so by the 2nd month that 5830 would make about $70, 3rd month, about $40.  Then we take into account the rest of the mining rig, electricity, air conditioning, shipping costs, etc.

I guess for now I'll keep running my existing rigs, but not plan any expansion.

Does this seem right?  Will we see a flood of used ATI cards on eBay?

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[picollo7]

you don't take into consideration the increase in the price of bitcoin . . . if your electricity is cheap it is well worth it.  even at $1 profit a day you are still making a hefty return on investment, and you have a video card at the end of the day . . .

[gdrop]

Also, it's more "worth it" if you have another use for the hardware, such as gaming.

[gfaust]

Agreed about the "worth it" factor.  In about 3 months the weather will start cooling off, so even if the difficulty rises over the summer in the fall/winter I have to heat the house anyways.  Granted that mining hardware is not as efficient as a heat pump, but at least the waste heat goes to use rather than running the air conditioning even more.  We'll see about next summer.  By then the Radeon 7xxx cards will be out and there will probably be FPGA/ASIC clusters online as well.  Having said all that, I still think we're quickly approaching the point (maybe 2-4 weeks away) where purchasing new hardware dedicated for mining will not be worth it other than for the "fun factor" to get a few bitcoins and join the community.

[Yeti]

Au contraire. I think now is the time where buying a dedicated rig and expecting to break even before the end of the year is risky, if there even ever will be a break-even!

Be prepared to never recover your hardware costs, if you are in it for the profit you should trade!

I made my calculations last night with LibreOffice and although I did join last week when everything looked peachy, predicting even a modest difficulty increase such as we have seen will be enough to make it never ever profitable again if the hardware is not already refinanced.

I don't care because I didn't invest much and I had other motivations, but if you're looking to increase your profits, spending more on hardware is certainly not a good option right now.

[Philj]

I agree with Yeti to an extent. Buying a whole rig is probably not worth it at this point unless you were going to be buying a new computer anyway. Adding 1 or 2 GPUs to existing rigs may still be worth it though for a few more weeks. It sounds like we may be just a few months away from ASICs going into production, so I wouldn't try to cacuate any return beyond say 90 days.

[gfaust]

I'm looking forward to Friday when difficulty hits 1.3M and ebay gets flooded with used "gaming" rigs.

[REF]

If you have open PCI-e slots or you can get the rest of the equipment dirt cheap i find it to still be worth it. If your mobos are full consider buying a PCI-e splitter. you can fit up to 8x cards on most mobos with that method but youll also need a second power supply. which is still cheaper then setting up a whole new rig.