Is mining still profitable?

[Notrem]

Hi.

Quick question: Is mining still profitable?

I've got 2 x 5870 with 430mh/s each. They're making about 0.5btc daily which is about 6$ for now. I don't check the power costs, but I think they're consuming like half of that daily. So:

3$ daily makes only 90$ monthly...

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[nmat]

I've got to start counting the number of "is it profitable" threads. I think they are almost daily...

So, if you are spending $3 and earning $6, what does that tell you about profitability?

[kjj]

If you already have the hardware, then yes, it is profitable.  But unless you get an insane deal, right now a card will probably not pay for itself over time, even ignoring other costs.

The model that I've been considering is reinvesting the output from my cards back into new cards to sustain/grow income.  That model does not currently work, production gradually tapers off towards zero.  It takes nearly 1% daily growth in the exchange rate to grow income, and we are going in the wrong direction.

[NetTecture]

The question is more when epiople pull ou, then we have a chance to see difficulty going down a little.

[Spacy]

Power is not the only cost. You have to consider heat, noise, it's not possible to play 3d games at the same time + annoying to watch movies during mining with current drivers. Then the Bitcoin price is falling, so If you are making $6 now that could be $4 when you want to trade the bitcoins for cash in the future. So if I were you, I would stop mining 

[Xephan]

annoying to watch movies during mining with current drivers.

Why is this so?

[airdata]

annoying to watch movies during mining with current drivers.

Why is this so?

if you're just mining @ 100% and try doing other things, you could see choppy performance.  When I'm going to play Rift, I simply change my -f15 flag to -f150 and still mine @ 225Mh while I game. 

Not an issue w\ my 4 dedicated miners though.

[kokojie]

anyone that does not have free electricity, should not start mining now and those who already mining should start considering their exit strategy.

Those who have free electricity, can mine almost infinitely.

[Xephan]

if you're just mining @ 100% and try doing other things, you could see choppy performance.  When I'm going to play Rift, I simply change my -f15 flag to -f150 and still mine @ 225Mh while I game. 

Not an issue w\ my 4 dedicated miners though.

What's your memory speed? I run my display adapter at -f9 which is more aggressive than yours but I can play video fine, a check with MPC playing 720p across the network from my storage server shows about 0.5% frame drop at full screen (19x12). But this was after I noticed stuttering and flickering, tracing it eventually to the memory speed, raising it from 300Mhz to 418Mhz fixed that while not affecting my mining speed.

Haven't tried playing standalone games yet since I reformatted this system to clear out drivers about a week ago but Flash games seem OK and doesn't impact hash speed after I turned off hardware acceleration.

[airdata]

anyone that does not have free electricity, should not start mining now and those who already mining should start considering their exit strategy.

Those who have free electricity, can mine almost infinitely.

This is true for people who are in the 0-1000MH range.  And it also depends on electricity costs since those vary so widely.