Alt coin mining set-up

to be honest, it's a bit of a tough time to get into mining right now. this is mostly because of the scarcity of good mining GPUs. There simply is not a good supply of pretty much any GPU right now, meaning the ones that are available are mostly at quite a premium. However, if you really want to give it a shot, I see these as your 3 main options for around $2k:

- Build a rig with 6 x used rx 470s. 470s are still the best profit ratio cards on the market, especially for mining anything but ZEC. You can probably get them on ebay for around $250 each, so that leaves $500 for PSU, RAM, Mobo, etc. Should be doable. However, realize that even though 470s are currently the best card out there for mining, they will not be forever. In addition, ETH will soon be dead for mining (less than 2 months) and that has been the most profitable coin to mine with these all year. Still there will be other good coins to mine with these, but when ETH dies out, there's a shyt-ton of hashrate that has to go somewhere, so be warned. Luckily, the recent rise in XMR has made it a top gainer for 470s but those returns will dwindle as well due to ETH EOL.

- Build a rig with 2 1080ti's. At current rates, you should be able to get $4-$5 per GPU per day on ZEC/Skein/a few others. Downside here is that ti's are really only great miners at equihash and a couple of algo, while the radeons are much better at ETHash, Cryptinight, etc... much more population of profitable coins on that side, so you would be somewhat future proofing given these have 11GB of RAM (vs 4 or 8 with Radeon rx) but also limited yourself on algos. Also, the $750 price tag per gpu is a bit shocking. Normally i would not recommend building a rig with only 2 GPUs but at the price point, you dont have an option unless you go well over 2k.

- Build a rig with 2-3 Vega series GPUs. This is tough to quantify as these are just hitting the market and are pretty much not available for retail prices (already high mind you) and also have not been thoroughly tested by the mining community yet. Unfortunately, early indication are that these are not nearly as impressive as originally hoped. You can research them on these forums but i personally would not recommend this option, esp for someone new to mining.

So bottom line... your "last longest" option would be the 1080ti's but I think your best overall option would be the 470 rig... just realize that you are probably looking at a year or less of reasonable profitability.