Getting older GPUs to mine

[irishbeast]

Hi all,

hew here!

Now I know this isnt going to be profitable but wanted to try as a proof of concept. Have a geforce k710 and a Quadro k4200. neither of which are porwerhouses.  My rtx 3070  is fine and uses nicehash effectively and easdily

I was going to put another card in my build as its got all the connections, pins and a strong enough PSU for another.
When I put the older cards in I just get an error when attempting to benchamrk prior to mining. Although when I put the 710 into my main build the CPU started mining which wasn't producing much. Not seen that happen before. Would be good to get both working full blast although might get toasty.

Tried the  cards on another machine so assuming its a  shortcoming in the cards. K710 was only £40 odd of amazon so thought I would try and its been re-released.  Quadro the same and its a 4gb card (whether that matters), so can send ti back.

Did I read somwehere about CUDA 3 being a requirement? If that's the case could someone please explain it to me?
GPu shortage is a pain. Would like to set my new rig with 2 mining cards. If I want to play games I can always switch one off. The heating in the system is top notch, never gets overly hot.

Thanks and look forward to joining in

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[batsonxl]

It is not worth spend time for them. even you can find some shitcoins makes some money but later they will be worth nothing. You can use them like monitor out. maybe quadro can make some cents

[TheMimic1]

Damn, those cards can't even play counter strike properly, it's better to use them as display out for desktops to monitor, that's the only thing they can do, any other thing is useless on these cards

[JayDDee]

Notwithstanding the previous good advice you're on the right track with compute capability.
New miners are less likely to support older cards. Check the compute capability of you cards
and look for a miner that supports it. ccminer is out of date but that's probably what you need.
If ccminer doesn't support your cards it's likely no miner will.

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

[Bravehash]

I'm not so sure that cryptonight algorithm is now picky on cards, cos years back I was able to use hd5570 to mine some monero, back then XMR was still on cryptonight algo but unfortunately is now on randomX algorithm

[Bitbtc8]

Quadro k4200? The truth about quadro cards is they are bad for crypto mining either new or old it doesn't matter, sorry pal you just have to put those cards aside and use better gpus instead

[FP91G]

Buy a better PX 570 for £ 120-150 and you can still mine most of the modern coins besides Ethereum.
No need to buy for mining video cards that are more than 7 years old.
The oldest that you can buy from Nidia is 1060, 1070 and higher, and AMD has an example of R380 4 GB

[mak013]

Why do you want to use such GPUs? They are mostly useless. Any GPU costs same as much as profit it brings. Try to search AMD RX470-580 with 8GB memory at least. Or may be 1060 with 6 GB.
In another way you can buy 3GB or 4GB GPUs, but you can`t mine the most profitable coins with them.

[jims2321]

Why do you want to use such GPUs? They are mostly useless. Any GPU costs same as much as profit it brings. Try to search AMD RX470-580 with 8GB memory at least. Or may be 1060 with 6 GB.
In another way you can buy 3GB or 4GB GPUs, but you can`t mine the most profitable coins with them.

funny thing.  I picked up a pair of AMD Firepro S9000 (6GB ECC RAM) passively cooled gpu's for $175 off of ebay.  Popped one of them in to a test rig, fired up lolminer and off and running @ 23 MH/s.  They do run hot currently, 74c.  So I am redoing the thermal pads and paste on the second card.  This card is the pro version of the HD 7950.  But it was cheap, and I was interested to see if it would actually work.  If anyone knows if I can control voltage and clock speed via parameter setting with lolminer, please post a link to the documentation.

Thanks,

JimS2321

[adaseb]

You can't compare gaming benchmarks to mining speeds with relative GPUs. Say you are getting 100 fps with an RX 470 4GB and you find some old GPU which gets 50 fps in the same game. Doesn't mean you will get 15mh/s on that GPU.

One requirement is memory, the others are the drivers and the third is the software and algorithm used. Even if its a great GPU, there needs to be an optimized algo written for it. Since its not mainstream, no coders are going to waste timing optimizing their algo for it. Hence it will run inefficently and slow.

[FP91G]

Why do you want to use such GPUs? They are mostly useless. Any GPU costs same as much as profit it brings. Try to search AMD RX470-580 with 8GB memory at least. Or may be 1060 with 6 GB.
In another way you can buy 3GB or 4GB GPUs, but you can`t mine the most profitable coins with them.

funny thing.  I picked up a pair of AMD Firepro S9000 (6GB ECC RAM) passively cooled gpu's for $175 off of ebay.  Popped one of them in to a test rig, fired up lolminer and off and running @ 23 MH/s.  They do run hot currently, 74c.  So I am redoing the thermal pads and paste on the second card.  This card is the pro version of the HD 7950.  But it was cheap, and I was interested to see if it would actually work.  If anyone knows if I can control voltage and clock speed via parameter setting with lolminer, please post a link to the documentation.

Thanks,

JimS2321

Are you mining Ethereum or Ethereum Classic?
HD 79XX series hashrate dropped when increasing
Dag file, and so they were sold. Although these cards had 3GB of memory, except for the HD 7990.
These cards were very hot, if I'm not confusing anything, then they were heated up to 90 C. After 100 C, my farm turned off.

[jims2321]

Why do you want to use such GPUs? They are mostly useless. Any GPU costs same as much as profit it brings. Try to search AMD RX470-580 with 8GB memory at least. Or may be 1060 with 6 GB.
In another way you can buy 3GB or 4GB GPUs, but you can`t mine the most profitable coins with them.

funny thing.  I picked up a pair of AMD Firepro S9000 (6GB ECC RAM) passively cooled gpu's for $175 off of ebay.  Popped one of them in to a test rig, fired up lolminer and off and running @ 23 MH/s.  They do run hot currently, 74c.  So I am redoing the thermal pads and paste on the second card.  This card is the pro version of the HD 7950.  But it was cheap, and I was interested to see if it would actually work.  If anyone knows if I can control voltage and clock speed via parameter setting with lolminer, please post a link to the documentation.

Thanks,

JimS2321

Are you mining Ethereum or Ethereum Classic?
HD 79XX series hashrate dropped when increasing
Dag file, and so they were sold. Although these cards had 3GB of memory, except for the HD 7990.
These cards were very hot, if I'm not confusing anything, then they were heated up to 90 C. After 100 C, my farm turned off.

This is the professional version of the 7950 called the FirePro S9000.  They are passively cooled  and designed for high density servers and doing rendering/AI-ML type workload.   They come with 6GB of ECC RAM as well, so I am mining Ethereum.  The DAG generation is actually pretty darn fast around 3000 ms and one I have running has been rock solid at 23 Mh/s at 73-74c with a aftermarket mod from gpumod.com  Here are some links to the card.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/294135755702?hash=item447bdb73b6:g:b7AAAOSw3gNggGkp
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/firepro-s9000.c1879

The biggest draw backs I have found is while 'lolminer' will work with the card, tweaking it seems to be hit or miss if the changes actually happen because the monitoring tools under linux are pretty limited.  Oh and that it really does draw about 250w when running.

Update 4/22/2021  -- Complete redoing  the thermal pad and paste on one card.  It drop the temp 5c .. I have a universal mounting active cooler coming in.  When I get that, I will test that.  But for now a 5c drop works for me.

[FloridaKid]

Why do you want to use such GPUs? They are mostly useless. Any GPU costs same as much as profit it brings. Try to search AMD RX470-580 with 8GB memory at least. Or may be 1060 with 6 GB.
In another way you can buy 3GB or 4GB GPUs, but you can`t mine the most profitable coins with them.

funny thing.  I picked up a pair of AMD Firepro S9000 (6GB ECC RAM) passively cooled gpu's for $175 off of ebay.  Popped one of them in to a test rig, fired up lolminer and off and running @ 23 MH/s.  They do run hot currently, 74c.  So I am redoing the thermal pads and paste on the second card.  This card is the pro version of the HD 7950.  But it was cheap, and I was interested to see if it would actually work.  If anyone knows if I can control voltage and clock speed via parameter setting with lolminer, please post a link to the documentation.

Thanks,

JimS2321

Are you mining Ethereum or Ethereum Classic?
HD 79XX series hashrate dropped when increasing
Dag file, and so they were sold. Although these cards had 3GB of memory, except for the HD 7990.
These cards were very hot, if I'm not confusing anything, then they were heated up to 90 C. After 100 C, my farm turned off.

This is the professional version of the 7950 called the FirePro S9000.  They are passively cooled  and designed for high density servers and doing rendering/AI-ML type workload.   They come with 6GB of ECC RAM as well, so I am mining Ethereum.  The DAG generation is actually pretty darn fast around 3000 ms and one I have running has been rock solid at 23 Mh/s at 73-74c with a aftermarket mod from gpumod.com  Here are some links to the card.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/294135755702?hash=item447bdb73b6:g:b7AAAOSw3gNggGkp
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/firepro-s9000.c1879

The biggest draw backs I have found is while 'lolminer' will work with the card, tweaking it seems to be hit or miss if the changes actually happen because the monitoring tools under linux are pretty limited.  Oh and that it really does draw about 250w when running.

Update 4/22/2021  -- Complete redoing  the thermal pad and paste on one card.  It drop the temp 5c .. I have a universal mounting active cooler coming in.  When I get that, I will test that.  But for now a 5c drop works for me.

23MH per second for a 700$ gpu ? That's pure madness mate, not worth the money, even a 500$ worth rx580 8gb will give you 32MH per second, this is complete waste of money, it's always about the hashrate

[FP91G]

FloridaKid wrote everything right.
You bought the graphics card for $ 175 and now it is on sale for $ 700. If you have the opportunity to buy these video cards for $ 175, then they will pay off very quickly.
Even if every sixth video card is defective, it is still profitable. But researching the market, I did not find cheap prices for this video card.

[Gorosden]

It looks like some people are just buying graphic cards without doing some calculations on how much time it's going to take them to get their ROI back, this is insane, I'm sure newbies are the ones taking this crazy path, they will end up learning the hard way

[ZaebaloRegitsa4]

You can mine Zano on old GPUs. I use GTX960 

[Skinny48]

You can mine Zano on old GPUs. I use GTX960 

It's not about what you are mining or what works for your old graphics card but about how much you are making, GTX960 can mine zano? How much you making every 24hrs mining zano? To me I think mining turtlecoin on that GTX960 will do you some good than Zano

[MCcryptonia]

You can mine Zano on old GPUs. I use GTX960 

It's not about what you are mining or what works for your old graphics card but about how much you are making, GTX960 can mine zano? How much you making every 24hrs mining zano? To me I think mining turtlecoin on that GTX960 will do you some good than Zano

You are probably right because turtle coin runs on a lite version of crypto night algorithm which makes it even runnable on hd7790 and other older graphic cards, if electricity is 100% free there is nothing holding you back