Profitability of Mining + Excel Workbook

[Cheeseman]

And by the way, 5870's @ 370 Mhash/s?  Did you kill something to achieve this?

This doesn't require voodoo.

What does it require?  I get 330 with 900mhz clocks, i know i could go higher on the clock a bit but choose not too. 

It requires going higher on the clocks!   

Playing with other settings. Finding the right combo of drivers / sdk. Reading the forum and see what works for others. Basically try different things until you see an improvement.

Ok.  900mhz and 330M is fine with me then.  I do not want to push my cards over 900mhz. 

I usually run my clocks around 910 for Gigabyte 5870 and 965 for XFX 5870. Mem clocks are near 300.

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[Zamicol]

And by the way, 5870's @ 370 Mhash/s?  Did you kill something to achieve this?

This doesn't require voodoo.

My first thought
 

  This is the funniest thing I have seen on these forums. 

[xanadu]

Ha, I did the same thing but with different assumptions, I even measured the actual Wattage being used on the machine with a kill-a-watt meter.  Here is what I came up with (tl;dr = 3.5 months to recoup hardware if the difficulty doesn't change).

Note: all of the hardware was extra gear I had and/or snagged for a bargain locally, usually used via Craigslist so my hardware cost is low vs. retail.

I could send the spreadsheet to anyone interested.

[EPiSKiNG]

Ha, I did the same thing but with different assumptions, I even measured the actual Wattage being used on the machine with a kill-a-watt meter.  Here is what I came up with (tl;dr = 3.5 months to recoup hardware if the difficulty doesn't change).

Note: all of the hardware was extra gear I had and/or snagged for a bargain locally, usually used via Craigslist so my hardware cost is low vs. retail.

I could send the spreadsheet to anyone interested.

Yes please!

[trilogy456]

Ok.  900mhz and 330M is fine with me then.  I do not want to push my cards over 900mhz. 

Just a random comment: you can turn down the memory clock to 300Mhz without loosing hashes, and the temps are approx. 5C lower.

[xanadu]

Ok.  900mhz and 330M is fine with me then.  I do not want to push my cards over 900mhz.  

Just a random comment: you can turn down the memory clock to 300Mhz without loosing hashes, and the temps are approx. 5C lower.

I just tried this on the machine listed in the spreadsheet above, I still had the watt-o-meter connected, not only did it drop the temps by 3C per GPU it reduced the power load by 40W, that is almost 10% which really adds up over time - like $40 in savings if I run this machine for a full year!

Thanks for the hint!

[trumpetx]

If only I could find a 5970 for $400 on ebay like the spreadsheet says

[ILOVEFREEMONEY]

We need to make more and more spreadsheets and guide like this so everyone can make free money. OCN represent!!

[JJG]

For anyone considering using this spreadsheet: Don't use it to make forecasts longer than a few days out. Difficulty is rising rapidly, and as far as I can tell this spreadsheet assumes difficulty will stay flat. None of these predictions will work more than a few days out.

[Litt]

I'm so sick and tired of what I call "I hope" calculations. Where is the next difficulty rise of ~50% included with this?

I guess if you already had a lot of bitcoins then you want more miners to just jump in and help increase btc value you already have, but new miners really need to look and think twice.

Noone would have believed two weeks ago if someone said next increase will be 50%. Do you believe it now? I bet a lot of people already have bunch of hardware in transit sitting on the next rise in difficulty. Profit more or less cut in half. 

Would you believe it if I said we are past the point of no return and will be seeing exponential increases in difficulty from this point onwards for rest of bitcoin release? Noone knows, but I think we are very near this point or a News report or two away from it. I noticed first hand what one stupid forum thread does to a difficulty. I wonder what one cnn new report might do to it.

All I'm trying to say is people are throwing around all these "I hope" charts and tables filled with their flawed assumptions and I wonder what their intentions are. All they have to say in their argument is "don't worry the btc value will go up with difficulty" but reality doesn't guarantee it so. If anything it will only create a larger bubble following that simple logic. It's more like "don't worry and mine so btc I already have will go up in value faster now because it's becoming harder and harder to make for everyone even faster".

No matter how much you want to think that you didn't miss the rush yet, the initial rush of bitcoin early adopting is old news at this point. Think about what is benefiting who how now and later.

[Clavulanic]

A 5970 is ~$500 and can earn about 750mhash/s
That's 1.5mhash/$1


A 5850 is ~$150 and can earn about 350mhash/s. It can overclock a bit better than the 5970 due to less heat restrictions.
That's 2.33mhash/$1

I'm going to say you can fit either card on a motherboard, since they are both dual slots. The ASUS super computer mobo can fit 4 but is $400, and I can't think of any other atm.

So let's say...
Mobo $200
HDD $50
RAM $50
CPU $75
PSU for 5970's needs to be close to 1kw PSU as a rough estimate, so ~$200
PSU for 5850's needs to be around 750w PSU as a rough estimate, so ~$100

3x 5970's is around $2075 just for the parts.
2250mhash/s.
1.084mash/$1

3x 5850's is around $925 just for the parts
1050mhash/s.
1.135mash/$1

This all takes into account some modest overclocks. I'd have to say the 5850 is the better choice here. It's a smaller investment and a little more efficient than the 5970's. Not to mention there is more room for overclocking on the 5850 build.

[SchizophrenicX]

Sorry for reviving an old tread. I was doing some excel calculation of my own, Albeit different from what is going on here, I'm not an avid programmer and would like to ask a few questions.

Where do I fetch the information of the difficulty, network calculation power and etc. I'm very new to bitcoin and have been doing a lot of reading. But not that technically inclined like most of the people here.

After the where comes the how, I want my excel sheet to fetch some of these numbers from the net. But I really do not know how and where. Some of the things I'll probably be putting in my excel sheet will be like the
 - BTC/USD exchange rates (I don't know but I've been going to this bitcoinchart to see it although I hasn't really understood how to do exchanges yet)

 - USD to other currency rates
 - Current Difficulty
 - Current Network Power
 - Trading Charges
 - Mining Charges from different pool
 - etc.

I don't know how to just fetch numbers from websites I find and have been updating them manually, if any of you guys may please help because it's been exhausting these few days following all these different information from different sites. I'm sorry if I sound stupid to some but I'm trying. All help is appreciated.

[timmmay]

Ha, I did the same thing but with different assumptions, I even measured the actual Wattage being used on the machine with a kill-a-watt meter.  Here is what I came up with (tl;dr = 3.5 months to recoup hardware if the difficulty doesn't change).

Note: all of the hardware was extra gear I had and/or snagged for a bargain locally, usually used via Craigslist so my hardware cost is low vs. retail.

I could send the spreadsheet to anyone interested.

Yes please!

Me too please