• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Considering trying to mine....

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
Well after 10hrs or so. I’m back up and running all 8 cards! What a nightmare.

Picked up an open box MSI Z270 Gaming M5 from microcenter. Has 6 PCIe slots and 2 M.2 slots (I bought a couple adapters a while back). MSI’s website even lists it as a potential 8GPU board. Got it installed (very tight fit), windows installed pretty painlessly, then came the task of installing the cards. I tried enabling Above 4G decoding from the get go. But that made almost nothing work. So I disabled it, installed one card. Installed the drivers, installed another card, and so on. At card #3 I enabled 4G decoding. And it seemed to be smooth sailing....Until I tried to install cards to the PCIe m.2 adapters...

NOPE. I don’t know if my adapters are just bunk, or the board somehow doesn’t support PCIe devices on it even though it’s supposed to. I tired with power connected to the adapter, and without it, didn’t work any way.

So I threw one of my expanders back in. Then started having issues with driver crashes and BSODs, allthe same crap I dealt with with the bad USB cables. Narrowed it down to either a bad USB->PCIe adapter or the slot it was in was bad. I didn’t feel like messing with it anymore so I just moved it.

Reinstalled drivers for good measure, flashed some quick and dirty settings to the new 580, and off we went!

Toasting at about 211 MH/s and 1070W from the wall. I haven’t done much in the way of power saving on the 580s yet.

J23hNJ1.jpg
 
That one system is doing more than all mine individually together :) I often half wonder if I should "go serious" about mining, but reading about setup pains like this gives me 2nd thoughts.
 
Spoke too soon lol. It crashed after about 10mins. Flashed the new 580 back to stock for now. Maybe that was the problem. It does 22MH stock.

Box total about 208.5 now.
 
deathman20 said:
Mining Zec (equihash)
1080ti @ 80% TDP - 1850-1900 core / 6000 Mem = 750 sols
1060 @ 80% TDP - 1875-1925 core / 4200 Mem = 315-330 sols

Mining Eth my 1060s have crap Mem so only ab OK it 19.2MH give or take a little - don't remember exact settings
My 1080ti gets around 38MH or so. Might be able to do more now that I know how to tweak it. My R9 290 does close to 28-29MH as an example.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the specs. It would seems that mining ETH is best for a 1080 Ti. Can you tell me what miner you use and what pool? I don't know the first thing about setting up mining for ETH on Nvidia, other than I know you need to bump ram speed as much as possible. If you could give me what speeds you're running for ETH mining too I'd appreciate it, thanks!

Edit- Oh, do you have any 1070's? If I get this 1080 Ti, I might just dedicate a box with my 1070 and the 1080 Ti to mining ETH. Or would I still be better off mining ZEC with the 1070?
 
gsrcrxsi said:
Spoke too soon lol. It crashed after about 10mins. Flashed the new 580 back to stock for now. Maybe that was the problem. It does 22MH stock.

Box total about 208.5 now.
Click to expand...

Long night troubleshooting. I think I’m into driver issues now. I’ve always run the blockchain drivers because it gives you the good Compute settings without having to install the god awful AMD Settings software. But if I’m constantly crashing, what am I gonna do? Apparently the blockchain drivers dont play so nice with the fall update (v1709) for win10. i avoided using 17.* drivers because none of them seemed to be able to report card temps to Claymore (and hence no fan control, BIOS only, which runs the cards hot).

Installed the brand new 18.1 drivers and *shudder* AMD Settings. Changed every card to Compute mode and reboot. I can't stress enough how terrible AMD settings is. it takes AGES to switch the GPU to compute mode, then you have to do each GPU one by one. on a system with slim CPU resources, enabling compute mode on all 8 cards took a solid 15 minutes and that was going as fast as i could lol. I wish you could do all cards with a single click. Seems to be working OK now. 18.1 is properly reporting temps and everything seems happy again.

208.5MH @ 1100w. Still need to tweak the new 580
 
Last edited:
87dtna said:
Thanks for the specs. It would seems that mining ETH is best for a 1080 Ti. Can you tell me what miner you use and what pool? I don't know the first thing about setting up mining for ETH on Nvidia, other than I know you need to bump ram speed as much as possible. If you could give me what speeds you're running for ETH mining too I'd appreciate it, thanks!

Edit- Oh, do you have any 1070's? If I get this 1080 Ti, I might just dedicate a box with my 1070 and the 1080 Ti to mining ETH. Or would I still be better off mining ZEC with the 1070?
Click to expand...

When I mined Eth I used https://ethermine.org/. I personally mine Zec though, especially on the 1080TI as I can make almost $60 more a month off it at current rates/prices! $6 on Zec vs $4 on Eth per day. My TI is now clocked at +200 +500 (~1900Mhz core and 6000Mhz Ram) with 90% TDP. I can go to 100% and scales perfectly for power to sol production but just puts off more heat (gets close to 70C) than i feel comfortable with on a day to day basis. I like it running with my 1060 in the system cool (58C on 1060, 64C on 1080ti).

As when I was mining Eth this is what I had... But I was dumb and stupid back then and didn't know what I was doing as that was only a few days into mining. I have since learned a key thing, optimization on settings! I'm sure I could probably get more out of it knowing how to do things now, just haven't played around to see if I could get more out of it now since the price difference is so out of whack it isn't even worth looking into. Now this was at 100% TDP, just OCing, no additional tweaks just bumping core clock up some.
Guess i'll have to settle with 37-38 MH/s then in 2D mode (2025/6000) and loose a nice 13 hours of mining today (4 hours last night and 9 while im at work). Guess maybe I'll let my secondary machine crank a bit tonight to make up the difference while I play and tweak it to work hopefully headless.
Click to expand...
I did get more and upwards of 40MH/sec on it but I think I cranked the TDP up and really cranked the memory up to make it work. Either way it wasn't reasonable what ever setting I had to run it like that. Probably crashed on me in a few hours.

As for 1070's, nope have non. Decided to get my 1060's which are not great for Eth, but scores an extra $15 or so a month doing Zec than Eth right now. Since 1070ti is more of the card being out now I know it does pretty good putting out around 460-480 Sols/sec for around 110W. Nvidia cards are great at most things, but Eth isn't really one of them, unless you get a 1060 that has Samsung memory and can sore a nice 24-25MH/sec on Eth then it is almost equal to that of Zec when mining currently (at the time of this post).

I do have some of my experiences with mining Eth and Zec in this post. http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...ts-try-out-this-CryptoCurrency-thing-Ethereum
Trying to keep it updated with new results as it happens and my tweaks that I've been doing.
 
Yeah Newegg is getting pushy too. They’ve got rx 570s and 580s approaching and over $400. Or making stupid bundles with monitors and motherboards.
 
I know on eBay I could sell my 4 year old R9 290 for more than what I paid for it!
 
Yeah they are just jumping on the bandwagon with everyone else. They were just late to the party.
 
What a bunch of BS coinbase, ''temporarily'' not allowing paypal payouts while bitcoin is the highest its been in like a week. I swear every big name in cryptocurrency screws you over in one way or another eventually. I specifically was waiting until today to cashout because I figured it would be higher, and it is.....except from the time I tried to cash out 2 hours ago it's already dropped $200. BS

Edit- Well the price has come back up but still can't sell my BTC at coinbase for paypal. :mad:
 
Last edited:
87dtna said:
What a bunch of BS coinbase, ''temporarily'' not allowing paypal payouts while bitcoin is the highest its been in like a week. I swear every big name in cryptocurrency screws you over in one way or another eventually. I specifically was waiting until today to cashout because I figured it would be higher, and it is.....except from the time I tried to cash out 2 hours ago it's already dropped $200. BS

Edit- Well the price has come back up but still can't sell my BTC at coinbase for paypal. :mad:
Click to expand...
You should be able to at least convert it to USD aT least within the account.
 
deathman20 said:
You should be able to at least convert it to USD aT least within the account.
Click to expand...

Yeah I can, but that doesn't do me any good. The only thing I can do with it then is buy bitcoin back....or take 4-5 business days to transfer to my bank account. I need to pay someone tomorrow for some goods, I promised paypal payment by sunday. Didn't know coinbase was going to screw me over.
 
87dtna said:
Yeah I can, but that doesn't do me any good. The only thing I can do with it then is buy bitcoin back....or take 4-5 business days to transfer to my bank account. I need to pay someone tomorrow for some goods, I promised paypal payment by sunday. Didn't know coinbase was going to screw me over.
Click to expand...

Aaah ****, yeah nm that sucks. I just do the bank transfer, reliable and no paypal fee crap to deal with. Sorry hopefully it gets sorted out.
 
guys we've been straying off topic for a while now ;)
how about we start a new thread, along the lines of - prices and shortages BS; I call it BS, because its being taken advantage by everyone, from the manufacturer to the 2bit a** who buys to resell on ebay/etc, but here's a thing - it will chill, dont overpay, its not worth it
 
Last edited:
was having lots of stability problems with the MSI z270 gaming M5 board. i bought it initially to be able to use the 6x PCIe plus the 2x M.2 for an 8-GPU board without the need for expanders. well after getting it setup, i found 1x PCIe slot to be non-functional, and neither of the m.2 ports worked with my pcie adapters. so i was back to the expander to get all 8 gpus working. then after a week or 2 i started seeing consistent crashing that i traced back to another PCIe port acting flaky. either this specific board was defective, or this line of boards just isn't great for mining.

Most people seem to like the ASUS Prime Z270-a/ar/p boards for 8/9 GPU setups. these aren't terribly expensive when in-stock, but not super cheap either. expect to pay $150-ish. So after looking around I found a youtube vid of a guy with the much cheaper H270-plus board and got 8 GPUs working. and it's about $100 so much better priced too. got it hooked up and got all 8 GPUs detected and working without much trouble.

LLXMUTP.jpg

stable for mining so far.

also, for anyone running windows, there's a new kid (ETH miner) on the block. Phoenix miner.
Windows only for now, Linux version in the works.
Developer seems pretty active and responsive to build updates.
Still new, but working pretty well for most people.
about 2-3% faster for me than Claymore AND has a lower dev fee (0.65%)

check it out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2647654.0
 
im also planning to get either this rig, or the next rig setup with dual server PSUs. server PSUs are cheap, and you use a breakout board for 12v power to a multitude of PCIe connectors.

like this: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Womail-D...0990&wl11=online&wl12=506426016&wl13=&veh=sem

i picked up 2x 750w platinum rated HP server power supplies for ~$40/ea from amazon.
then 2x breakout boards with 18x 27" PCIe cables. for about ~$125
then a PicoPSU to power the motherboard, pico will get a 12v input from the server PSU.

gets you 1500w of platinum rated power with 18x 6-pin connectors for about $200-250. open air rigs this works great, but in my case i might run into some space problems, we'll see.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

D
New Build questions
Replies
9
Views
357
Droidriven
D
Celeron_Phreak
GPU ownership history
Replies
14
Views
858
magellan
magellan
AnEEsO
ZOTAC GTX 1080 TI AMP EXTREME CORE EDITION 139mhz Clock bug after Bios flash
Replies
5
Views
372
Kenrou
Kenrou
R
Still Considering New Laptop
Replies
8
Views
914
DeadSmiley
DeadSmiley
T
New config. advice
2
Replies
29
Views
875
TELmo
T
Back