The baddest (as in good) 2 card budget mining setup?

[ferbe]

I have a colossal desktop/server rig that was given to me as retired scrap from my employer and I wanted to mine Monero on it for investment, not monthly profits. I use it now to CPU mine shitcoin and as a hyper-v, it has alot of utility so I want to keep it. Plus its too damn heavy to move so it is staying.  

It's got 2 pci-x16 slots and a pci-8x slot which I have a riser and a crappy GTX 1050 ti on standby for later.  

But I want to get a couple of badass cards to put in those 2 onboard slots.   This will just be a 3 card system as I want to keep it all in the tower (open side panel though). Once monero is too hard to mine, I will move to a shitcoin.

My budget is $300 per card (need 2 cards).  Fast as possible! Don't care how much power it burns.  I do care about how loud they are, as wife will get aggro if too loud.  

Specs:
Miner: XMR-stak, plan to run GPU+CPU
Rig: Dell T7400
Processor: Dual Quad core Xeon 2.0 GHz
RAM: 64GB
HD: SSD
OS: Server 2012
2x PCIe x16 slots (max 225 watt draw on each)

[huntingthesnark]

Two vega 56, if you want to mine monero. But (and this is a massive ginormous but) it'll take you years to mine $600 worth of monero with two Vegas. If you pay for electric then you'll be losing money. Monero (until it forks) is no longer a GPU/CPU coin.

[styleshifter]

For $300 per card I would recommend Vega 56, GTX 1070 or GTX 1660 Ti.
You didn't mention your power supply. Make sure it has enough power and connectors! It should be gold or platinum efficiency.

[dragonmike]

Yeah... so at $300 per card, it's either Vega56 or 1660Ti... or you might be able to find some used 1080Ti's which will pack more punch for core-bound algos.

Don't expect to make your money back soon in any case. A 1080Ti will make you $1 a day in the current environment.

[socks435]

For $300 per card I would recommend Vega 56, GTX 1070 or GTX 1660 Ti.
You didn't mention your power supply. Make sure it has enough power and connectors! It should be gold or platinum efficiency.

I think Op is looking for 2 cards not 1 card for $300.

Anyway, I think gtx 1050ti is a the right card to buy with this amount of budget but expect only few coins that you can mine with this card.

If you are planning to mine with cyckoocycle algo they need more than 6gb cards before you can mine this coins.

So if you can buy gtx 1060 at the cheaper price then start to buy this card because I'm sure the price of this card will increase soon because bull market will coming soon.

[angel55]

You will make more if you use your $600 and just buy coins instead.  You probably don't want to hear this but the days of the small miner are over.  If your doing this for a hobby and not for maximum profit go and continue with your build.

[adaseb]

I think what you should do instead is instead of paying up to $600 for 2 GPUs, you should instead get a dedicated mining rig and buy some cheap $100 used RX series GPUs.

Basically buy like 4-5 of the RX 470 4GB on eBay and buy some cheap Socket 1150 mobo which supports 5-6 PCIe slots and buy some used cheap 1000 Watt PSU and just mine directly on that rig.

This way, if mining never picks up, you can sell most of your parts at cost since they are in high supply right now without many buyers.

[ferbe]

Wow thanks for all the comments…

@Hunting, The difficulty still seems relatively low, at least lower than ETN which I am mining now. The market value is a bit too high for me to invest, which is why I wanted to mine it. What are some USB ASICs that I can add to my rig since Monero is not ASIC resistent right now?  

@ styleshifter, sorry yeah forgot to mention it has a 1000w PSU.  People use them for servers and gaming rigs, or did anyway.  

@dragon, the money being made daily/weekly/monthly ideas are vexing to me.  The math on mining only reflects current market value, but what if it goes up later?
 
@socks, no I mean $300 each, so $600 total

@King, why Grin? Because it’s young?  I have a shitcoin miner with a GTX 1060 ti, a lazy 1050 zotac, and an overclocked GT 710 which I am waiting for it to explode.  It’s doing like 800 h/s on ETN now, perhaps Grin would be a good coin to mine on that rig?

@angel, I plan on investing also.  Already working on a pros and cons xls sheet.  But I just figured that since Monero has a relatively high value compared to its mining difficulty, I would mine it.  Maybe I am way off on this…idk. Also, regarding “the days of the small miner are over”, doesn’t that only apply if you are trying to mine high value high difficulty coins? They are champion cryptos now, but might not necessarily be later right?
 
@adaseb, I thought about this.  I guess I was just trying to use up everything I got now.  I might do that later.  

Honestly, my plan was to mine some, invest some, then just wait.  The mining is for hobby.  But if I am going to mine, I want to do it on something that will delight my console window with lots of “result accepted”s or “yay”s.  Maybe Monero is not the right one for that, still trying to determine that.  

[styleshifter]

Honestly, my plan was to mine some, invest some, then just wait.  The mining is for hobby.  But if I am going to mine, I want to do it on something that will delight my console window with lots of “result accepted”s or “yay”s.  Maybe Monero is not the right one for that, still trying to determine that.  

You should mine one of the top 20 maybe top 30 coins: ETH, XMR, ETC...
They have the most exchanges, wallets & pools.
Here are some nice statistics from Hive OS: https://hiveos.farm/statistics/

[ferbe]

Thats a nice chart thanks.  I notice one of the ones you mentioned was XMR (aka Monero) haha.  I am also looking at the mining difficulty.  For ETH its 2,951,561,441,131,250 that might be kind of high for my rigs, but the value of the coin still makes it tempting. 

[BitBustah]

You will make more if you use your $600 and just buy coins instead.  You probably don't want to hear this but the days of the small miner are over.  If your doing this for a hobby and not for maximum profit go and continue with your build.

I have heard this before and I think it's a short sighted point of view. When litecoins went Asic the miners dumped their GPUs and said the same thing. Then a coin like eth came and launched and if you bought those used GPU you could mine a ton for a small amount.

You still would of made more money if you just sold the gpus and bought eth instead.  You can go back and look at the past charts, you always make more money just by buying the coins instead of investing in mining hardware.

[ferbe]

@Bit, thanks, as mentioned above I am going to invest also, the mining is really just for fun, and for building altcoins that might have a future. 

[ferbe]

I just went ahead and got a used 1070 8GB for $200...lol you guys scared me from spending all that cash.  I will combine it with my 2 1050 TIs and make it work.  Will throw the rest on investing

BUT...still remains the items of me mining Monero.  So when comparing mining costs with current market values yes I will probably either break even or lose.  But I feel like this will be one of the coins going places and the future market value alone might make it worth it.  The difficulty now is 103627596073ish so it should be easier to mine than the ETN I am mining now which is about 4x that.

What exactly happens when and if it forks (aside from making it asic-resistant)? All that really does is slow down the difficulty increasing right?  Or will that benefit GPU mining immediately in some way?  

[styleshifter]

What exactly happens when and if it forks (aside from making it asic-resistant)? All that really does is slow down the difficulty increasing right?  Or will that benefit GPU mining immediately in some way?  

The network hashrate should go down and you will earn more.

[Sikkan666]

get two 1060s. the 3 gb is very well fine for many algos and performs a very good watt/hash-ratio

[swogerino]

The best card on that budget is the newly 1660 ti from Nvidia. It is nearly 300 dollars in price and is based on newest Turin architecture which should have an advantage from Gddr 6 memory over gddr5 cards.

Also the power consumption of this card is the same as 1060 at 120 watt making it the best budget mining card I would recommend.

[ferbe]

@ style and King, oh got it, thanks for explaining that. So if the asic miners get dropped my h/s will go up?

@ swogerino, i will check out that card as my next possibility. thanks

 

[ferbe]

alright so h/s would not increase but i might earn more? so then would I see more share accepted results?  

[ferbe]

So I guess I just need to know if it is worth it to mine monero on gpu and just to hold them long-term, not for immediate profit.  I plan on letting rig sit there for a couple years and mine. Then let the coin sit in my wallet for like 5 years and see what happens. Let's assume I would lose in terms of CURRENT expenses vs market value now, bit in 5 years monero is worth $150. Then was it worth it?   

But if mining GPU is pointless because ASIC miners would prevent me from getting enough coin to matter in years to come, then I guess I will choose another coin.