What to mine? Ancient rig

[Hookdisney]

I now have access to free power, and have my old first mining rig that I'd like to fire back up.

It has one HD 7850, two HD 7950's and one r9 280x.

What coins can I/should I mine with this ancient hardware? It used to be publicly advertised what every coins/algo minimum GPU VRAM requirement was, but I can't find that information for any coin now. I tried nicehash and the only algo that is working for the tahiti cards is beamv2 (lol miner). Nothing on nicehash worked for the 2gb 7850. I'm no stranger to setting up specific mining scripts if necessary, I was just hoping nicehash had some good options.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[JayDDee]

Software will likely the biggest issue, ignoring the inefficiency of old HW.
You will likely be limited to old drivers and old miner SW which means you won't
be able to mine any new algos, if you get it working at all.

[adaseb]

I actually had those GPUs for like 5 years.

Mined BTC then LTC then Darkcoin then ETH then ZEC then XMR.

When XMR forked to a new algo they became useless pretty much. Even with free power they are not worth mining anything. You can't mine ETH because the DAG won't fit. You can mine low DAG coins like Expanse but there is almost no profit.

Sell them on Craigslist for like $50.

[Hookdisney]

They served me well, I was using them two years ago to make around 70$ a month mining ZEC. Are you aware of any website I can utilize that keeps track of VRAM requirements for algos? The three tahiti cards are currently mining beam without issue on the newest drivers, I find it hard to believe there is only one algo that they can mine. I'd rather set them up mining a low difficulty coin than to have it sit doing nothing, they're in real rough shape, nobody is going to buy them.

[adaseb]

Besides ETH and ETC you can pretty much mine any algorithm with them however its just not worth it for many reasons.

First reason is that its an old GPU and the miner software is not optimized. Reason why is because the people who code the miner software like Claymore have no incentive to optimize an old GPU that nobody uses.

Second issue is that they are old 32nm technology and use tons of power. These days people consider the RX series power hogs when they consume slightly more than 100 Watts each. The 280X consumes almost 200 watts and thats when its undervolted. During the LTC days I had those gpus pulling over 350Watts each.

If you are patient some kid will buy it off Craiglist eventually. That's how I sold all my 280X. It took a while but eventually they all sold. Some bought it for gaming and some for rendering youtube videos.

[tale01]

Try mine NIM and HNS. Maybe take profit 

[OasisDre]

I now have access to free power, and have my old first mining rig that I'd like to fire back up.

It has one HD 7850, two HD 7950's and one r9 280x.

What coins can I/should I mine with this ancient hardware? It used to be publicly advertised what every coins/algo minimum GPU VRAM requirement was, but I can't find that information for any coin now. I tried nicehash and the only algo that is working for the tahiti cards is beamv2 (lol miner). Nothing on nicehash worked for the 2gb 7850. I'm no stranger to setting up specific mining scripts if necessary, I was just hoping nicehash had some good options.

Thanks for any suggestions.

The good news is new miners still support these old AMD gpus, go for cryptonight coins and you will make more profit from these old cards of yours, try with XMRIG AMD MINER and choose any cryptonight coins

[OasisDre]

It seems XMR (Monero) has lower difficulty level since they change to RandomX algorithm so XMRIG support this new algorithm, mining Monero will be the best

[rdluffy]

As user here already said, it's very old cards and have 2 major problems: power consumption (not for you because you have free electricity) and lack of support, because nobody wants to uses cards with low efficiency nowadays

So keep mining with Nicehash, you'll gain some BTC and have no headache trying to find a decent miner and deal with the problems

[Herry Toms]

These are pretty old cards that are not useful anymore for coins like ETH, but you can still try out mining Cryptonight-GPU(A core dependent mining algorithm) which can be mineable with low-memory cards. I'm not sure about the hashrate with these cards but you can give RYO a try.

[Hookdisney]

I know that nobody is going to buy them because I've tried to sell them before down to $20 a pop even on ebay as well, only hits I got were people asking me why I still had them lol.

I've discovered the cards perform adequately on equihash 144/5, I've only had the miner running for a day so far so these aren't the most accurate readings, but according to this calculator I'll be pulling around $15 a month with it (68/h combined hash rate mining XSG). Far better than it collecting dust

[miner29]

Probably can mine BTG.
Not saying it is profitable but will mine it.

[YuSoDum]

you could always fold instead of mine.
get banano for folding

[Doranile432]

Since the cards are old it's better to direct them to Nicehash miner you will get the best profit out of the cards daily and would be better if you have free electricity, but Nicehash still support these cards

[tbearhere]

  Try CNGPU and Progpow and x25x algo's.