Greetings

[Lintham]

Hello all,

Been lurking on the forums for ages, finally decided to get up the... whatever... to create an account and introduce myself.  I've been excited about cryptocurrency for a few years now but for reasons unknown to me (especially in light of the past few months) I never bothered to building a mining rig.  I finally got off my duff and began playing around, learning, reading, downloading and installing.  It's been an exciting time as I play with setting up and configuring CPU / GPU miners (Litecoins, as that ship has obviously sailed for Bitcoin of course).

I do have a few questions eventually, things I haven't found the answers to in any of the readme's, white papers, etc.  They can wait for subsequent posts though.

Anyway, howdy!
-Lintham

[AJninJA]

hi. this is my first post here as well. i like the idea of it as an investment, and it also seems like a great way to move funds around, make payments, etc- i saw some of the ted talks on bitcoin, and other youtube videos. Good stuff.

[Lintham]

Yeah, I think that was kinda my problem when I first learned about it, I thought about it less as an investment and more as a pure currency.  As in "why would I spend time and effort mining something with value about what my electricity costs are?"  I failed to realize the potential to go up in value.  Oh well, I'll join the party now 

[JamesD]

Hi Chaps,

I'm a long term lurker too, finally decided to take the plunge, looking at expanding my mining operation so have been watching the group buys like a hawk.

I've got 3 rigs at the moment turfing out 2400kh/s on Litecoin as a proof of concept and tempted to look at BTC mining with eruptors etc, I seem to make more coins trading on exchanges than mining though of course you cant always win.

Lintham, what sort of kit are you running and what settings? I've got 7 7850's 3 per rig and 1 in another, max temp is low 80's for the middle card but I've lost a few allready, luckily replaced under warranty, running 1025cpu/1250mem for 350kh/s ea.

Regards
James

[Lintham]

Impressive setup, James!  Right now I am just "fiddling" with the computers here at home.  My main machine is a laptop, so hardly ideal for mining (I bought it so I could continue gaming when I travel for work).  While it has dual Radeon 5870 cards in it, in addition to the heat problems, is not tremendously power efficient.  I played with CGMiner and Pooler's CPU miner on this machine and was getting a pathetic 16 kH/s and 18 kH/s respectively, while heating up my office.  I decided to cut that out rather than setting my main computer on fire.

My wife's desktop has a single GTX 570 in it.  Wrong manufacturer, but the very impressive CUDA Miner manages to wrangle ~230 kH/s out of it.  I really need to throw that guy an LTC or two as a tip, impressive tool.  It was sitting at 82C with the card defaults which made me a little uncomfortable.  So now I run MSI Afterburner to tweak the fan settings on it.  I set up a more aggressive fan profile and now it sits at a comfortable 68C all day long.  I highly recommend looking into it, you can even configure the tool to run on launch so your solo rigs can be perfectly happy sitting in the corner.

I am VERY tempted to build myself a 3x 7950 rig.  The trick is convincing the wife it's a good use of our $1,400, lol!  I'm also tempted by investing in an ASIC (who isn't), but the difficulty increases in Bitcoin scare me.

I currently have access to an air conditioned office which has free electricity to me.  Sadly I am probably going to lose that access in another two months or so.

[zulufields]

I know mining is fun but I really think with the diff increase it is very questionable, the best thing to do I think is to buy the coins you want rather than put loads of money into a "rig".

[Lintham]

Yeah, I played around on Mt. Gox for a little while before the US idiocy started, and then just moved all my BTC out to my own wallet.  It's nice having some bitcoin to do with as I please, hold on to, trade with, etc.  The nice thing about building a rig is that you can mine for whatever is more profitable.  If Bitcoin difficulty starts going off the rails (and it already is long gone for GPU mining), you swap to Litecoin.  If everyone else swapped to LTC, there are literally dozens of other choices out there.  Of course, the trick is picking out which ones are a waste of time and effort and which ones (if any) have a longer term future.  And if you can figure that out, well, you're doing better than most of the rest of us!

[JamesD]

Hi Lintham,

Thats a lot of hash from a 570, I have a 670 in my gaming machine and was maxing out at 150, still the Kw per Hash is low on the Nvidia cards, I wont be expanding my GPU mining anymore, looking to other developments before expanding as I have made more in trading, it's just nice to have a trickly of coins coming in at the moment.

3 card setups are hard to cool, I was tempted to swap 2 of the 7850's for a 7970 and only run two cards a rig but dont want to invest anymore at this time, 3 new 7850's side by side in a case, the max temp is the middle card at high 70's so it's not too bad, I got 3 ex displays and the middle card runs 88 which is to high.

However at $1400 I'd be looking at some USB miners instead, even with a 75% increase in difficulty month on month they should break even in 5-6 months, then keep a trickle coming in and not head the whole house :-)

Regards
James

[bitcoindigi]

welcome to the club

[johndec]

Hi Lintham.  I'm a bit like you, been playing around the edges for a bit.  Spent some money a couple of months ago and now running scrypt at about 1.5 MH/S.  At my best guess, I'm covering my electricity costs and should pay for my initial investment in about 6 months.  Like you, it's been fiddly setting everything up, trying to max out my cards without them cutting out on me.  Hate waking up the next morning and finding my cards have also been asleep!  

[Lintham]

Hi Lintham,

Thats a lot of hash from a 570, I have a 670 in my gaming machine and was maxing out at 150, still the Kw per Hash is low on the Nvidia cards, I wont be expanding my GPU mining anymore, looking to other developments before expanding as I have made more in trading, it's just nice to have a trickly of coins coming in at the moment.

3 card setups are hard to cool, I was tempted to swap 2 of the 7850's for a 7970 and only run two cards a rig but dont want to invest anymore at this time, 3 new 7850's side by side in a case, the max temp is the middle card at high 70's so it's not too bad, I got 3 ex displays and the middle card runs 88 which is to high.

However at $1400 I'd be looking at some USB miners instead, even with a 75% increase in difficulty month on month they should break even in 5-6 months, then keep a trickle coming in and not head the whole house :-)

Regards
James

Yeah, I don't know how I got lucky when I built that computer, but apparently the 570's are known to push great hashrates.  I'll pretend I was just that good when I selected the card (HA!)  It's very stable, I've been seeing 98-99% accept rates on the miner itself and my pools confirm very similar hash rates.  I even can run a CPU miner on the same computer (using 3 of the 4 cores) to squeeze an extra 30 kH/s or so.  The CPU mining is barely profitable compared to the electricity, but the GPU miner is definitely making money.

Yeah, I'll bet 3 cards are pretty brutal to keep cool, especially if you are in a case rather than in an open air rig.  88 degrees would scare me a little too!

I don't know about the USB miners, it doesn't look like they pay for themselves right now, nevermind as the difficulty cranks up.  The latest 39 EUR sale advertised in this same forum makes it a lot closer, but I wasn't a previous buyer so I can't get in at that price.  I do like your point about not heating the house, though!

[r3c4ll]

Lintham and JamesD... if you want share, what are the actually profits (last three months) of mining with those rigs?

[RodeoX]

Hi guys. welcome. 

[Nik1ab]

Welcome to the forum! 

[mprep]

Welcome to the boards.

[Lintham]

Lintham and JamesD... if you want share, what are the actually profits (last three months) of mining with those rigs?

I have been mining solidly only for about a week now, and I've had some power problems - the UPS the computer is plugged into would die every tiny power glitch - so I don't have actual concrete results.

I have mined on two different pools, Give-Me-LTC (LTC only) and now Multipool (all different kinds of altcoins).  As near as I can tell, and I've been trying several different methods to measure it, I have a coin mining throughput around >$0.80 USD / day value on either pool.  Since they are both PPLNS pools, actual rates depend more on the pool luck, esp with Multipool.

Power consumption is very steady $0.57 / day in electricity.  So I'm certainly not quitting my day job to mine coins any time soon, but I'm just happy to say I have a profitable rig at today's coin prices.  I'm more excited about the currencies as a concept than anything, so for now I'm hanging on to my LTC and BTC.

Thanks to everyone for the warm welcomes!

[Lintham]

Okay, while I have you guys here, a question for you.  I am running Pooler's CPUMiner 2.3.2 and CUDAMiner 2013-07-13 (both the latest version as of today 2013-08-10).  CUDAMiner is a mining tool built on CPUMiner designed for mining specifically on nVidia cards, for those who aren't familiar with it.

As I posted previously, I mine on either Give-Me-LTC or Multipool.us pools, both using Stratum.
Initially I set them up going through Mining Proxy for Stratum support.  When I learned that the latest versions of these miners actually supported Stratum natively (a fairly new feature), I tried switching over to mine without using my proxy server.  While the blocks were still accepted at roughly the same percentage, and they still reported the same hash rate (~230 kH/s for the GPU and ~40 kH/s for the CPU), I found that when running without the proxy, the number of blocks reported was dramatically less per hour than when going through the proxy.

I don't have any output available as an example right now, but I can get some captures if you are curious.  I did take measurements though on the GPU.

Running through Mining Proxy
Test Time: 34 minutes
Blocks accepted: 458
Blocks submitted: 470
Total blocks per minute: 13.82

Using native Stratum support
Test Time: 48 minutes
Blocks accepted: 109
Blocks submitted: 109
Total blocks per minute: 2.27

Assuming this was a very bad thing, I switched back to the proxy mining and haven't looked back.
Does anyone have any idea why this would be?
Is it just graphical and both really are mining at the same practical rate?
Or in spite of the fact that both report the same 230 kH/s, since one is submitting those blocks 6 times more often I am getting credit for 6 times more work by the pool?

It certainly isn't hard to use the proxy, it's just one more .bat file to launch on startup, but it seems like it would be good to go without it if the mining tools support stratum natively now.  There has to be some (even if it is tiny) overhead associated with using the proxy.  Anyone have any thoughts?  Should I find a better place to post this question so more people see it?