I am a Chinese miner. I have been mining one year and a half since the latter half of 2012. At first I mined BTC and then LTC. For now it has become more difficult to mine and the mining capability on the whole internet has increased, this half year I have been mining Scrypt LTC and Scrypt Altcoins, including FTC, Blackcoin, Doge, AUR etc. I have invested more than 100,000 RMB yuan in addition to the cost of devices and electric, and have earned some money. There is no need for me to describe too much about the hard life of a miner.
Recently more and more chip mining devices have appeared on the market, which makes my GPU devices earn little and little, so I may change my devices as well. Just now I sold some sets of GPU miners in a QQ chatting group. There are still some idle devices here, if anyone need please PM me. You can use them as PC or for mining Altcoins.
In order to learn more information about LTC mining devices, I have checked a lot of websites, including the review articles on GPU hardware websites. Data showed below is the information of main GPU miners and ASIC miners. I sorted this out for myself to study as well as provide newcomers as reference. Please note the mining capability, consumption etc. indicated are LTC data, BTC miners please ignore them.
http://bbs.wiibox.net/images/xianka1c.jpgNote: The picture above shows the current main GPU devices and ASIC LTC devices. As only 6 graphic cards can be inserted on the motherboard at most now, the table showed above takes GPU devices, in which 6 graphic cards were inserted, as a standard, and makes them compare with each other. The electric charge was calculated on the basis of 0.5 yuan/kilowatt, the Beijing residents standard. If there are any differences on the cost, please calculate by yourself.
http://bbs.wiibox.net/images/xianka1a.jpgData showed above referred to the review on
www.pcpop.com.
At first I wanted to compare GPU devices with ASIC LTC devices separately, however the LTC devices in stock I can find on the market are Gridseed’s 5-chip mini USB devices and G-Blade. Others like Silver Fish and Zeus are all selling future goods. On one hand, there is no reliable news about them, on the other hand when the future devices come out, the difficulty of mining and profit will be profoundly different with that in current days. In order not to mislead miners, I did not make a comparison between them independently.
According to the mining difficulty and value of LTC, we have to regard consumption and electric charge as important elements when choose devices. A device with its whole mining capability over 3M will cost 10~20 RMB yuan every day, if the electric charge is 0.5 yuan/kilowatt. As far as I know, in many metropolises the electric charge can be over 1 yuan/kilowatt, which makes the cost of electric higher. It seems that mining has entered an era of ‘Electric Charge Battle’, no wonder some time ago a guy in our chatting group said he would like to invest in a small power station to save cost.
But a ASIC device with same mining capability costs much little. A set of Gridseed 5-chip mini USB miner, with the mining capability of 3000K, costs 0.84 RMB yuan/per day. A G-Blade, with the mining capability of 6000K, costs 1.2 RMB yuan/per day. Compared with the GPU devices, these costs can even be ignored.
However, can we decide to buy which kind of miner only by the consumption? Of course not. We also need to consider the cost of device itself. To view from the unit cost of mining capability, the cheapest GPU mining device will cost more than 4000 RMB yuan/M, a Gridseed 5-chip device costs 2260 RMB yuan/M, and a G-Blade costs 1733 RMB yuan/M. Therefore on the basis of same mining capability, where the higher the general electric charge is, the more advantages of ASIC devices will show. I myself would like to change into ASIC LTC devices as well.
Consider from the consumption of mining capability/per unit (W/M) and the investment of mining capability/per unit (yuan/M), ASIC devices are much better than that of GPU devices. These costs may be more important for miners to refer to.
Of course, for larger-scale deployment, other necessary things to consider are the heat-dissipation problem, size of mining field, house rent etc. Besides, some miners regard how to deal with the depreciated devices as very important, as they may think the GPU miners can be sold as PC accessories after used while ASIC miners cannot. On this topic different miners have different ideas.
All above are my personal views. Hope we can have a discussion together.
