Basic startup costs

[Walrus1]

Hey dudes merry Christmas. The only way I've gotten crypto to this point is with fiat via coinbase. I'm interested in mining perhaps etherium and or litecoin. I am just starting to look into this so I am ill informed but I did want to know how much a decent rig should cost. I see them from 199 to 20,000. I'm not planning on going big time but if I'm going to do it I want to be at least decently equipped. I'll read up here on getting started but I am curious to know what I should expect to invest in a one person operation that will work well but not be cost prohibitive. Just a rough idea, I'm also not very computer literate I'm a counselor and a mechanic so I never really worked in the tech feild, my wife is an EE but has no clue of crypto or even the blockchain as it's not part of her work at this time

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[MinerPath]

I would start with $700-$800 at least. You can buy a good motherboard and power supply for ~$300, CPU and RAM for ~$100, and you need a $100 more for some cheap SSD, monitor, keyboard and mouse. For $250-300 left you could buy one AMD RX 470 and start mining.

Then, when you gather some more money, you add additional GPUs, you're mining power goes up and your ROI gets much better.

If you have ~$2000, you can go with 6 GPUs right away. But if not, you can start with $700, just make sure you buy a motherboard and power supply that does support 6+ GPUs.

Now this definitely depends on what you would like to mine, your electricity costs and how much money you want to invest initially. If you have more money, you could go with 6 Nvidia GTX 1070 cards, or even Vega 64/56 or 1080ti.

Back when NiceHash was live, I've made a summary of best GPUs for mining which you can read here:

http://minerpath.com/best-graphic-cards-for-crypto-mining/

The numbers may not be the same without NiceHash, but should give you a better picture anyway.

[MikeJones!]

I started with just under $1,000, and one GTX1070 about 4 months ago, early August.

Yesterday i sold about 70% of my coins and purchased another GTX 1070 at $410.

Yes it took 4 months, but if you have the patience, and maybe get lucky with coin prices going up, you can build your way into a rig with just a small initial investment.

[thepez]

I'm glad to see this.  I am hoping my new investment in 3 1070s will produce the same effect.    Cheers.

[Agozyen]

When looking at mining rigs, you need to consider the price or the rig, the total potential hashrate of the rig and the cost of electricity.  

Many of the cheaper rigs you will find are older generation and are less efficient than the newer models.  

You can buy an Antminer S5 on Amazon for $900

It has a hashrate of 1155Gh, rated at 590 watts of power, and where I live electricity costs $0.11 per kWh.

When I plug that into Coinwarz I get:



Time Frame              BTC Coins   USD              Power Cost (in USD)   Pool Fees (in USD)        Profit (in USD)
Hourly                   0.00000761   $0.15            $0.07                     $0.00                               $0.08
Daily                           0.00018256   $3.53            $1.58                     $0.00                               $1.94
Weekly                   0.00127791   $24.70            $11.09                     $0.00                               $13.61
Monthly                   0.00547678   $105.85            $47.52                     $0.00                               $58.33  
Annually                   0.06663413   $1,287.82            $578.16                     $0.00                              $709.66


It would take over a year to get your money back, probably much longer because the difficulty will go up over time as newer and more efficient miners come online. If you just want to learn about mining then getting an older unit is a good way to do that.  I wouldn't spend a lot of money until you are confident in your ability to judge your finances against the cryptocurrency market.


EDIT:  This is only for ASICs, the above does apply to GPU mining but there are other things to consider when mining with GPUs.  You get better resale value and a wider range of coins to mine.

[ferall]

I started with just under $1,000, and one GTX1070 about 4 months ago, early August.

Yesterday i sold about 70% of my coins and purchased another GTX 1070 at $410.

Yes it took 4 months, but if you have the patience, and maybe get lucky with coin prices going up, you can build your way into a rig with just a small initial investment.

Would you purchase a 3rd of 4th 1070 eventually?

[min1217ac]

How much does it cost to build a rig??. It's all depends on hardware what are you choose. Like a motherboard, an SSD, a power supply, a processor, and GPU cards. Just for example:
1. a motherboard ( Asrock Pro BTC H81)
2. a Processor (Socket 1150)
3. SSD (64 GB or 128 GB) suggested Samsung.
4. RAM (DDR3: 8 GB)
5. PSU (adjust to the number of GPUs) can buy EVGA.
6. GPU (AMD: RX 480,580, Vega or NVIDIA: 1070,1080 cards).
7. PCIe USB Riser

for a price isn't stable.

[flip4flop]

I just recently recently wrote a quick into to mining series that also covers a few various builds you could do depending on your budget.  The problem is finding parts that are in stock as they sell out quickly.  I try to keep these guides updated with available parts every few days.

NVIDIA Guide
https://theminerhub.com/mining/building-a-mining-rig-part-2-hardware/


AMD Guide
https://theminerhub.com/mining/newbie-guide-part-3-amd-edition/

Intro to Mining
https://theminerhub.com/mining/newbie-guide-building-6-card-crypto-currency-mining-rig-part-1-decision-time/

Hopefully this help out a little!

[liktawak]

Im interested in mining as well and thanks to all who takes time replying to this post it helps a lot for newbies like me. Looking comments above I gor into conclusion that I should think more due to slow profit in mining.

[MikeJones!]

I started with just under $1,000, and one GTX1070 about 4 months ago, early August.

Yesterday i sold about 70% of my coins and purchased another GTX 1070 at $410.

Yes it took 4 months, but if you have the patience, and maybe get lucky with coin prices going up, you can build your way into a rig with just a small initial investment.

Would you purchase a 3rd of 4th 1070 eventually?

Absolutely, plan is to get to 6 eventually.

[Walrus1]

Im interested in mining as well and thanks to all who takes time replying to this post it helps a lot for newbies like me. Looking comments above I gor into conclusion that I should think more due to slow profit in mining.

yeah definitely, I'm really leaning towards figuring litecoin mining. I really like the team behind it and Charles Lee really seems to be honest and invested in it doing well not just pumping it up. My understanding is it would be more efficient to mine than Bitcoin. I'm being realistic as well. I'm not thinking, oh, I'll just plug this in and get rich. I just think it's fascinating how it's done and I greatly appreciate people answering my questions and even breaking down electricity cost. Of all coins I'm more invested in Bitcoin but I wouldn't even consider mining it with it getting harder to mine and me just getting into it. If u guys are saying a gpu gives more options of what coins you can mine I'll probably want to go that route unless u experienced guys think I'm making a poor choice. If I can get started for between 900 and 1500 hundred I'd be satisfied. No reason to go crazy off the rip. I'll probably take some btc profit to get started, again, thanks to all who took the time to answer. I'll spend another couple weeks studying and maybe get started mid to late January

[Undefined31415]

I suggest that you avoid making a GPU-based rig with only 1-2 cards, unless you already have the leftover components necessary to construct a rig of that scale.

When building a GPU rig, you want to spend as little as is realistic on parts that do not contribute directly to your hashrate (and thus revenue stream). If you buy the components necessary to host multiple GPUs, but only host a small number of cards, you're essentially tasking that small number of cards with the burden of paying back the entire cost of the rig. If you purchase more cards (or better cards, for that matter), then you increase the proportion of the rig budget that went to components that actually contribute to your overall hashrate.

Do note that when I say to spend "as little as is realistic" on the rig base, I do not suggest that you sacrifice quality in favor of the minimum price that is possible to achieve. (This is especially true when looking at power supplies. Always buy quality PSUs.)


If you're in it for the short-term, perhaps you could argue that the base components could always be resold. However, for those of us that are in it for the long run, these components can easily be reused with upgraded graphics cards (the PCIe standard isn't going away anytime soon).

[Walrus1]

Oh yeah, I would plan on long term unless crypto crashes or Amazon developes one and makes everything useless which they like to do. As I said I'm not thinking of resale, this would be a hobby/learning experience/ possible profit thing for me. My wife is an electrical engineer so she will be able to guide me to quality components when I determine the specifics but despite knowing code etc she has had no exposure to the blockchain or crypto other than listening to me talk about it. I asked her to read the white paper but she is to involved in projects at work at the moment to devote any time to it. We have been considering IBM stock and nividia due to the rise they are getting working on the blockchain but I'm thinking the market it's a little over heated right now (sorry I'm a stock guy had to throw that in) it's funny one Canadian company added blockchain to their name and had a significant jump in price and it was then found they were not actively involved in blockchain tech. Alright I wandered off topic, back to mining