I personally like the RX570/580 cards. Last month I was buying them for 300-330 each, hard to catch in stock but possible. I average 29mh/s for Eth while dual mining and about 125w per card. I wouldn't put more than 2 cards in a standard desktop unless you're using PCIE risers and have the cards mounted external to the case (ugly, but possible).
I don't have experience with the nvidia cards, imo they normally seem more expensive initial investment. AMD cards seem to hash better on Ethereum compared to equivalent performance nvidia cards (Ethereum is what I want to mine). Nvidia cards do better on other coins, I believe Equihash algo, than the AMD cards.
I ran 2 cards in my desktop while I was waiting on my server power supply to arrive from China for my dedicated rig. It's possible, but I'm much happier not mining on my main computer. When I want to play a game, i don't have to make sure to turn my primary card off mining first, etc. Sometimes I would accidentally overstress something and my computer would crash. Dedicated mining rig stays up all the time and keeps me warm in the winter
Totally agree with you, especially if you plan closing the case, it will get hot in there very quickly, requiring faster fan speeds which leads to higher power consumption and noise.
Wish I got into all this mining a bit earlier, still bought my 1060 at a reasonable price compared to now, but still way too expensive.
I thought about 1050tis, they're good, but you will need more mainboards and so on, so not sure if it's really worth it and the 4gb may be too low by the end of 2018, nobody will buy them, so resale value is not high either.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I do agree that 2 GPUs is probably the limit for my main PC. I don't actually PC game, I console game, so the GPUs are purely for mining. I won't resell them either, I'm just going to pop my 1050ti into my daughter's computer and leave it mining too. lol. I'll mine with them until they burn out. Maybe eventually transfer them to a proper rig setup if I go that route.
I bought the 1050ti a year ago because that's all I could really afford at the time. Things changed pretty quickly as the Bitcoin price rose. I do wish I had put more money and effort into mining and pretty much everything. Shit, at this point I wish I had spent more time claiming from faucets, even. lol
