Mining stories

randombar

unkel wrote: »

If you can already build PCs, there's nothing to it. The only thing extra is that you need a frame and some riser cards. If it is the mining itself you are interested in, I wouldn't bother building a rig (yet). Just get yourself a new or a second hand high end graphics card and just stick it into the pci-e 16 slot of your mobo. I got a R9 390 8GB €200 last month. They are perfect for it, very stable. No need for BIOS flash if you don't want to get into that, and high hash rates of about 28-30MH/s out of the box with the right driver. Best of luck!

Edit - ondafly beat me to it! And yes, it is mostly a hobby. It's taken up a lot more of my time than I had planned, but I like doing it.

Might be a stupid question but I've a microserver with ubuntu at home running plex etc (the proliant ones) can I put a decent graphics card on that and start mining while the server is running the other stuff?

unkel

Absolutely. I'm typing this from my main PC running W10 Pro at the moment with the R9 390 at full mining speed (for the last 131 hours). I can even watch 4k movies through my on board Intel HD graphics no bother. I've not run ubuntu and mined at the same time, but I presume it's the same in any general purpose Linux distro.

smacl

ondafly wrote: »

you don't need a powerful cpu at all - gpu wise; I paid 290e for a rx570 8gig, and funnily enough it plays PUBG extremely well so worse case scenario I'll end up with two gaming PCs out of this. But I do plan on buying a few more GPUs in the next few months.

I'm only running minergate currently, its nice/simple and easy to get going. Once I have my hardware chosen, I'll look into more serious cli style mining.

I'm only doing this as I enjoy tinkering with computers, I am under no illusion that I will make a penny out of it. Its purely for learning. I always like to have a project to do.

Cheers for that, just set up minergate on a few PCs and will have a mooch around for some half way decent GPUs. The old 670 hasn't been turned on in awhile so looks like it will be loading windows updates for the next few hours (days!), but a couple of other regularly used PCs were up and mining in minutes. Also very much into tinkering and excuses to upgrade and rebuild PCs.

randombar

unkel wrote: »

Absolutely. I'm typing this from my main PC running W10 Pro at the moment with the R9 390 at full mining speed (for the last 131 hours). I can even watch 4k movies through my on board Intel HD graphics no bother. I've not run ubuntu and mined at the same time, but I presume it's the same in any general purpose Linux distro.

Nice one, any recommendations on a coin to start with, no point looking at bitcoin from what I can tell.

unkel

I mine ETH, the biggest of the alt coins. Consistently one of the most profitable bigger alt coins to mine too. And when BTC took a massive crash last week, it was one of the few bigger alt coins that held up well.

randombar

unkel wrote: »

I mine ETH, the biggest of the alt coins. Consistently one of the most profitable bigger alt coins to mine too. And when BTC took a massive crash last week, it was one of the few bigger alt coins that held up well.

From what I've read up I should look for a "AMD Radeon RX 460" to put into the microserver (Just have to check if it's compatible)

One thing I'm wondering is can you stop and start the mining i.e. while on nightsaver mode or is that very inefficient.

unkel

You'll have to do the sums yourself once you have your rig up (with a power meter like they sell in Aldi / Lidl from time to time for €9.99). And it depends on your provider. But even at the full time day rate, you are likely to make a profit even with an inefficient 1 card rig, as the value of the coin is so how high now. ETH broke the thousand dollar today :eek: You might have to change plans if the coin loses half its value

I wouldn't get an RX460, but any of the following are good cards and almost as fast as each other. I would buy one with 8GB though, more future proof and better resale:

RX470/RX480/RX570/RX580. You will have to mod the BIOS though. A second hand R9 390 is cheaper, no BIOS mod necessary and it's faster. But uses a good bit more power...

Prezatch

I have 4 x 1070 ti on the way and will be looking to dual mine ETH with PASL/PASC or alternatively solely mine ZEN. I've been inspired by this thread and am looking forward to my first crypto build :cool:

smacl

unkel wrote: »

RX470/RX480/RX570/RX580. You will have to mod the BIOS though. A second hand R9 390 is cheaper, no BIOS mod necessary and it's faster. But uses a good bit more power...

Picked up a new RX 570 NITRO 8GB yesterday for £215 (€249 shipped to Ireland ex VAT) from an Amazon reseller yesterday and notice the same seller has it listed at £294 this morning! A number of RX570 4gb options around the £200-£220 mark.

Where did you pick up the R9 390? Looking around on ebay the 2nd hand cards seemed seriously overpriced. I'd tend to be cautious of buying any 2nd hand computer parts that may have been OCed for an extended period by the previous owner an would be reluctant to go much over 50% of new retail.

unkel

Both second hand on adverts.ie. I got them too cheap, the sellers were gamers not miners and they weren't aware of the recent inflation in GPUs suitable for mining

smacl

unkel wrote: »

Both second hand on adverts.ie. I got them too cheap, the sellers were gamers not miners and they weren't aware of the recent inflation in GPUs suitable for mining

Nice one, I had a look on adverts but didn't see anything worthwhile.

thunderdog

Anyone here mining sia (dual mine with ethereum) on nanopool? My miner is hashing away on both eth/sia but only my ethereum balance has increased in the last 24 hours.

My sia balance has been stuck at the same value for the last 24 hours

thunderdog

thunderdog wrote: »

Anyone here mining sia (dual mine with ethereum) on nanopool? My miner is hashing away on both eth/sia but only my ethereum balance has increased in the last 24 hours.

My sia balance has been stuck at the same value for the last 24 hours

Back in action again. Seem to be hanging for the last 24 hours

unkel

I mine on nanopool and I regularly have a look at my hash rates. Checked today several times and everything was fine. I find nanopool to be very reliable (far better than ethermine, with whom I started as they're the biggest). I've had the odd time where they didn't pay out very soon after reaching my minimum payout. One time I contacted support and they got back to me within a day with apologies and explaining it had been so busy, payments were a bit delayed. I was so impressed with nanopool that I sent them a few days worth of mining in exchange for a few tokens

linky

will56

unkel wrote: »

Absolutely. I'm typing this from my main PC running W10 Pro at the moment with the R9 390 at full mining speed (for the last 131 hours). I can even watch 4k movies through my on board Intel HD graphics no bother. I've not run ubuntu and mined at the same time, but I presume it's the same in any general purpose Linux distro.

What sort of return have you made in the that time ?

unkel

will56 wrote: »

What sort of return have you made in the that time ?

That's one card hashing at 29MH/s for 5.5 days solid. According to one of the profitability calculators, that would have made me €17

Thargor

Have you decided to start holding the ETH you mine yet or still selling it straight away Unkel? Your returns must be way up whatever you're doing.

unkel

Thargor wrote: »

Have you decided to start holding the ETH you mine yet or still selling it straight away Unkel? Your returns must be way up whatever you're doing.

My strategy when I decided to go mining was to sell immediately. This was a very low risk strategy (worst case scenario - a total collapse of all crypto currencies => a bit of depreciation on the graphics cards and a write-off of some low value bits and pieces like riser cards, cables, etc.). I have stuck to my plan.

With hindsight, I would have obviously made a tidy sum if I had HODL the ETH I mined

I'm just grateful that, despite the increase in difficulty, my mining revenue is a bit more now with ETH at over $1000 when I made my analysis and ROI timing calculations and decided to go mining based on the average rate of about $300 in the few months before I started

thunderdog

unkel wrote: »

My strategy when I decided to go mining was to sell immediately. This was a very low risk strategy (worst case scenario - a total collapse of all crypto currencies => a bit of depreciation on the graphics cards and a write-off of some low value bits and pieces like riser cards, cables, etc.). I have stuck to my plan.

With hindsight, I would have obviously made a tidy sum if I had HODL the ETH I mined

I'm just grateful that, despite the increase in difficulty, my mining revenue is a bit more now with ETH at over $1000 when I made my analysis and ROI timing calculations and decided to go mining based on the average rate of about $300 in the few months before I started

Out of interest what is your plan when ethereum goes from pow to pos? I’m also mining ethereum but I will be looking at decent alternatives late summer of this year

unkel

thunderdog wrote: »

Out of interest what is your plan when ethereum goes from pow to pos? I’m also mining ethereum but I will be looking at decent alternatives late summer of this year

This is turning into an I'm mining Cryptocurrency, AMA

ETH isn't even the most profitable coin to mine at the moment. It's a big coin and and at that a reasonably solid one. When the switch to POS happens, I'll mine another coin

I'm looking forward to installing Solar PV panels on my roof in the next few months. I already have 40 solar tubes heating my hot water from the sun and our family car is an EV zero emissions vehicle...

unkel

And I'm nowhere near making back the money I invested in gpus and other bits. If the revenue comes calling, I will claim money back

I'm loving it as a hobby anyway. And I will do my best to make it as renewable as I can. Next stop - as much solar PV as my 100% south facing roof will take.

randombar

Hi All,

I know of a PC dismantler and I was just wondering if there is a list of popular cards that he should keep an eye out from a mining perspective.

Thanks,
Gary

moonlighting_1

Doubtful. only new gpus are of any value.
old gpus can still mine but they cost a lot in electricity for the amount of hashrate you get.
also ram size is increasing for some coins meaning they wont work with 1 or 2 gb cards.

jon1981

unkel wrote: »

This is turning into an I'm mining Cryptocurrency, AMA

ETH isn't even the most profitable coin to mine at the moment. It's a big coin and and at that a reasonably solid one. When the switch to POS happens, I'll mine another coin

I'm looking forward to installing Solar PV panels on my roof in the next few months. I already have 40 solar tubes heating my hot water from the sun and our family car is an EV zero emissions vehicle...

Looking at an advert for the Antminer S9 at 3k euro. It's claiming 3.36 BTC per year, given current prices that sounds like a tidy profit to me.

Pinch of salt on the 3.36 BTC claims?

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/hardware/antminer-s9/

wannabecraig

GaryCocs wrote:

I know of a PC dismantler and I was just wondering if there is a list of popular cards that he should keep an eye out from a mining perspective.

Maybe the boards and power supplies will be useful though.

smacl

jon1981 wrote: »

Looking at an advert for the Antminer S9 at 3k euro. It's claiming 3.36 BTC per year, given current prices that sounds like a tidy profit to me.

Pinch of salt on the 3.36 BTC claims?

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/hardware/antminer-s9/

From my admittedly limited understanding once you start going into ASIC based devices such as the Antminer you're locked into specific coins and algorithms that are hard coded. The way the alts are going this could be severely limiting for a very small mining operation. While GPUs are likely to have a much slower ROI in the short term, they're effectively general purpose devices that will attract far more attention from developers and have the potential for flexibility going forward. While most of those not involved in software development think of performance improvements in hardware terms (processor speed, number of cores, available memory) the bigger improvements have actually come through new and improved algorithms. Just my opinion, but if I was going for an ASIC miner, I'd want to be confident that I could get a reasonably quick ROI as there's a greater chance it could be obsolete junk sooner. That said, as a lifelong programmer interested in getting into a bit of CUDA development, I'm entirely biased.

smacl

wannabecraig wrote: »

Maybe the boards and power supplies will be useful though.

In my experience a lot of the bigger manufacturers cut corners on PSUs. That said, if he happened upon a few modular corsair 850s or 1200s....

thunderdog

I see that bitmain have released the antminer A3 today to compete with the Obelisk sia miner (and others)

Bitmain A3: 815GH/s 1186w
Obelisk: 800GH/s 500w

I initially had one eye on the obelisk sia coin miner, batch 2 (end purchase date 31st Jan), but with the release of the new A3 from bitmain, I think I will let this one pass. A lot of talk online that the antminer A3 for siacoin will end up like the D3 for dash i.e. a decent profitability for the first few weeks, with a very sharp drop off, making it somewhat worthless within the first few months. With this in mind, I can't see how the obelisk miner, with a first batch release date in June of this year, can be anyway decently profitable. To me it looks like the Chinese bitmain producers have managed to get in there first (again).

Links

Bitamin A3: https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020180116164357365a2ljX8gx06D3

Obelisk Miner: https://obelisk.tech/
They have dropped their link from their wesbite for the siacoin miner (only showing decred now). It was 1599 dollars a few days ago with approx 1500 sold for batch 2. It looks to me like obelisk are attempting to speed up production to compete with bitmain, with perhaps announcing an earlier release date.

cnocbui

I don't understand why the A3 should be of interest - 1.875% better performance for 237 % greater power consumption.

patnor1011

cnocbui wrote: »

I don't understand why the A3 should be of interest - 1.875% better performance for 237 % greater power consumption.

Oh believe me it will be but only for first say thousand people who manage to put it online first. It make about 500$ a day but that will last only few days anyway.

Estimated 11,000 units sold. If only half of it hit network within next 2-3 weeks (chinese miners will likely have them in 10-12 days overseas buyers add in another 7-10 days) it will render them pretty much useless in about month from now.

thunderdog

cnocbui wrote: »

I don't understand why the A3 should be of interest - 1.875% better performance for 237 % greater power consumption.

Mostly because the bitmain miners will be dispatched 10 days after purchase, whereas the first batch of obelisks aren't due to be dispatched until June. By the time June rolls around there will be 10s of thousands of these antminer A3s mining siacoin

patnor1011

Anyone buying new antminer V9?

Tinder Surprise

Bitmain releases details of its new E3 Ethereum ASIC miner

first batch already sold and limited to 1 per customer $800

might be of interest to HoneyBadger and others.

h0neybadger

Tinder Surprise wrote: »

Bitmain releases details of its new E3 Ethereum ASIC miner

first batch already sold and limited to 1 per customer $800

might be of interest to HoneyBadger and others.

Wouldn’t touch it. Ethereum will hard fork like Monero did to remain ASIC resistant.

Another tale of Bitmain running these for a few months, selling them, and then everyone who bought them being left with a miner that can’t mine on the coin they bought it for...

unkel

It's a lot of hash rate for the money, also uses about 10% less power than a similar hashrate 6 * RX570 4GB rig. As always the PSU is not included in that price though and all these bitmain ASIC miners are far too loud to keep in your home, so no heating benefits and a bit risky to stick in your shed. And these become obsolete very quickly where conventional GPU mining rig can be sold for parts (GPUs in particular keep their value well)

Big gamble, could pay off if you get one early. I'm not touching it.

h0neybadger

unkel wrote: »

It's a lot of hash rate for the money, also uses about 10% less power than a similar hashrate 6 * RX570 4GB rig. As always the PSU is not included in that price though and all these bitmain ASIC miners are far too loud to keep in your home, so no heating benefits and a bit risky to stick in your shed. And these become obsolete very quickly where conventional GPU mining rig can be sold for parts (GPUs in particular keep their value well)

Big gamble, could pay off if you get one early. I'm not touching it.

earliest shipping is July

unkel

Yeah for that reason alone I wouldn't touch it, I'd be too impatient

patnor1011

Anyone here water-cooled their mining rigs? I am thinking about it as it is quite hard to maintain a low temperature around my rig with 5 vega56. I wanted to use 6 vega cards but no matter what I do when I run it with 6 cards it is not stable at all. 5 cards are little better but rig restarts quite often as soon as the temperature in room rise above 19 degrees. I do have a ginormous fan under the cards but that helps only to some extent.

unkel

Are you sure it's the temps that are the problem? What temps are your cards? Also what mining software do you use and do you specify temp stops and fan control settings? 20C-30C is a very reasonable ambient room temperature. We are lucky that way in Ireland

smacl

unkel wrote: »

Are you sure it's the temps that are the problem? What temps are your cards? Also what mining software do you use and do you specify temp stops and fan control settings? 20C-30C is a very reasonable ambient room temperature. We are lucky that way in Ireland

Agreed. First thing I'd check is whether it is a specific card that is leading to the instability, or will the rig crash if any five out of your six cards are in use. If it is not a card issue, I'd then look at the PSU which might be underrated for the load, followed by the mobo. Also worth checking if the crash only happens when a given card slot is in use, which could be anything from a dry joint to dirt in around the connectors. As things get warm, you get expansion which can lead to loose joints exhibiting faults, so unplugging, cleaning and re-seating all your connectors might well help. Also, if it is a wooden frame on the rig, this expands quite a bit with heat, so leave a small bit of room for cables to move.

patnor1011

I started with 4 vega and one rx480 it was working like charm for 3 months. Then I swapped rx480 with vega and had 5 of them working. It was working perfectly for another month. I tried to add 6th and no matter of what I did it would not budge. It was mining for like minute then I got fractals and system crashed so I settled for 5 vegas and sixth is sitting in a box.
I started to get these random crashes and restarts and first thought it is due to temperature as they mostly happen when room temp exceeds 18 degrees.
PSU could not be an issue as it is new 1600W EVGA which is overkill for 5-6 vega cards anyway.
I suspected there may be some problem with mobo so I ordered a new kit (mobo, CPU, ram) as my rig used an older mobo with 1150 socket and DDR3 ram and what was supposed to be easy thing turned to a nightmare when I damaged CPU slot when unpacking.
I found exact motherboard I do use on my rig so I bought it hope to get it home sometime next week.

I do not have that big of a problem with restarts as my system is set in a way that if it restart then it start miner and mining monitoring program itself only sometimes it hangs in a way that I need to do it manually. What concerns me is that cards may suffer when the system crashes often. I used to have one restart say every 2 days and now it restarts like 10x a day.

unkel

Welcome to the world of mining fun / pain

I've had awful problems hardware and software related. Instability and actual physical issues like burnt cables.

patnor1011

Yep that sounds like my life. Always dollar short and a day late. I actually need to change my post. My hash monitor program is logging events and to my surprise I have found that it does not restart 10x a day but approximately 40x a day which is a tad too high. I am going to shut it all off for a few days till new motherboard come. I will be losing some cool coins but it seems safer than waiting for disaster. I am mining newish coin which looks promising but it will have to wait till I can bring my rig back on track.

Dr Bolouswki

Almost every problem I have had seems to be power, temp or riser related. So all eventually get sorted, just requires a lot of troubleshooting.

unkel

Yeah that was my experience too until recently. The most instability I have had was on my best hardware though. 13gpu dedicated mining mobo and AX1200i with just 6 cards. Melted a bloody molex and lots of other instabilities

My most stable rig is my good old previous PC with a 4th gen i5 and Z97 mobo. 5 cards running super fast and stable with just a 860W Seasonic. You really can't tell in this game what's going to happen

Interesting developments in the last few months with Anorak's mining pool and Phoenix miner software. I've moved to both.

And BTW lots of risers I replaced because I had spares (in the troubleshooting process), tested them later and every single one of them was fine. They were not a problem.

drunkmonkey

Anyone know if I'd be up to anything with 2 x GTX 1070's have an alienware laptop and thinking of picking up a graphics amplifier and putting the 2 cards to work on it..

patnor1011

A little follow up on my "problems".
I have found the culprit. It was not riser, mobo or card...
Somehow my config file for OverdrivenTool got corrupted and numbers changed so after weeks of trying it seems that something I took for granted was actually cause of it all.
Vegas requires a lot of fine tuning if you want to squeeze the maximum out of them and even slight change can cause a lot of problems. After few days of fine tuning after I spot strange values in my config everything now works perfectly. No restart or any hiccup last 2 weeks. I actually am getting 11.2 kH/s on cryptonight and even quite a high number on cryptonight heavy - 8.7 kH/s.

Dr Bolouswki

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Anyone know if I'd be up to anything with 2 x GTX 1070's have an alienware laptop and thinking of picking up a graphics amplifier and putting the 2 cards to work on it..

Try the ETHlargement Pill form OhGODacompany

Does 50 Mh's per card (1080, but I believe 1070 version is coming/out)

As long as you have sufficient power for the cards and it connects via PCI bus, you should be laughing. However, you could also just pick up a cheap 2nd hand m-atx board with ram and cpu and a 600W PSU - probably cost you significantly less than an expansion box. (Certainly less than €200).

wannabecraig

Have 3 x RX570, what SW would you guys recommend for ETH?
Currently getting 26Mhs per card. Can get it higher but consumes too much electricity
I'm currently using claymore 11.2.

unkel

Use W10 instead of Linux (if you weren't already), BIOS flash the GPUs (higher hashrate), underclock core voltage and core speed while overclocking memory (this uses less power overall than leaving things default). Use Phoenix instead of Claymore (cheaper and faster) and use a pool like Anorak over Nanopool / Ethpool (cheaper and more community spirit)

Happy mining