Mining experiences so far from a newbie's perspective

[Tech Tweaker]

Those are awesome results TTdude! Sweet!!!

I've been running maybe about 10 days total using a couple different builds and cards and generally trying to get stable. Got one of the asrock h110's and a 4400 but, until I get some risers, am only able to fit the 1080ti and gtx980. Nicehash has me mining the same stuff as you but you're getting much higher profitability! With the 2 cards plus the cpu, nicehash is estimating $4.75-$5.50/day...clearly I've still got tuning to do. :/

Hoping to get time to swap out the 3x, wc'd gtx680's for 4-5x, wc'd 7970's this weekend. That should bring my numbers up a bit.

Am also back to thinking about grabbing an antminer (the L3+) :/ About $1600 for this estimated: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/bitmain-antminer-l3?e=0.16¤cy=USD

That was just a fluke mate, in a month and-a-half mining off and on I'd never seen $5.5-9 a day for just this one card. I think Z-Cash had a big increase in value and that caused miners to jump on it and order numbers to jump up (did see it was up around 20% that day). Edit: after some research apparently it had something to do with a new currency called Bitcoin Gold that just went live. Not really certain how that related to mining on Equihash though.

Normal for this 980 Ti is more like $1.50-2.50/day last month, and $1.90-2.50 lately ($3/day, rarely). ($.53/day power cost at $.11/KWH with GPU set to 80% max power target)
$.48-.55/day for my 4790K (Which I just discovered last night is actually profitable to mine with, I had overestimated its power consumption greatly. Read some review online that claimed their overclocked 4790K was drawing 200W from the wall, but I think that was actually for their whole system with just the CPU under load. My system (with the 4790K, a GTX 780 Ti, and a Radeon HD 6870) with only the CPU mining was only pulling 160W (and 145W after the conversion from AC to DC (yay, Corsair link cable for that data, assuming it's accurate)).
$0.85-1.05/day for the 780 Ti ($.46/day power cost at $.11/KWH with GPU only using max 70% power for mining with CryptoNight, $.53/day for 80% power if it switches to some other Algorithm) The increase in BTC price really helped that one be more profitable...
$0.26-0.40/day for this HD 6870 (with an apparent $0.26/day power cost) Hugely overestimated the power consumption of that initially, read some review that claimed it used 285W at full load, I've seen nothing of the sort. Adding that to the system only added another 100W at full load in my 1155 system, and 80W in my 1150 system, weirdly. Don't know why the power increase would be higher in one system than the other???
$0.58-0.65/day for the 3770K (with $0.33/day power cost. Once again, hugely overestimated the power consumption on this one last time. Thought it was around 180-200W, actually the full system with the 980 Ti in it only draws 125W from the wall for only the CPU mining.) And how this 3770K is more profitable than the 4790K I still don't understand. Makes no sense to me that an older platform would be more profitable, when both are at the same core frequency with the same number of threads.
So, that's an estimated $3.96-5.39/day for two CPU's and 3 GPU's at current market values of the cryptocurrencies, with an estimated power cost of $1.86-2.00/day if all are mining at once (depending upon actual power draw on the GPU's).

The 6870 was showing $0.58-0.65/day with CryptoNight_Old, before I realized it was rejecting every share and realistically doing nothing, because that algorithm doesn't work anymore I guess. Apparently there are some algorithms that are disabled on the server side and/or don't accept work, but are for some reason still available to use in the mining software. Didn't find that out until I went searching on google and found others reporting the same problem with Radeon HD 6000 series cards using this algorithm, with no known solution to the issue.

Not sure if memory capacity or speed makes a difference, but the LGA1150 rig has 16GB of DDR3 2667MHz in it and the LGA1155 rig has 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz in it. Started with 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz that I had overclocked to 1800MHz in the 1155 rig, but system really was much less responsive while mining if I had to do anything on it and it was using more than half its available RAM while mining on just the GPU.

I'm not sure if I actually exceed your profitability or efficiency, funsoul, I think that 1080 Ti ought to be a pretty heavy hitter in terms of BTC mined per day, though like my 980 Ti it's a high power 250W card. And I haven't really done anything special that I know of.

In other news, forum seems to be working much better now. Tried to post this several times yesterday and it wouldn't let me. Posted it in one attempt just now.

 

[Janus67]

Those are awesome results TTdude! Sweet!!!

I've been running maybe about 10 days total using a couple different builds and cards and generally trying to get stable. Got one of the asrock h110's and a 4400 but, until I get some risers, am only able to fit the 1080ti and gtx980. Nicehash has me mining the same stuff as you but you're getting much higher profitability! With the 2 cards plus the cpu, nicehash is estimating $4.75-$5.50/day...clearly I've still got tuning to do. :/

Hoping to get time to swap out the 3x, wc'd gtx680's for 4-5x, wc'd 7970's this weekend. That should bring my numbers up a bit.

Am also back to thinking about grabbing an antminer (the L3+) :/ About $1600 for this estimated: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/bitmain-antminer-l3?e=0.16¤cy=USD

I don't think I'd get an L3+ at this point, Stefan. The miner has been out for several months now and the profitability has dropped pretty significantly. I think in order to earn the most out of an expensive piece of hardware like that is to get in on the first couple batches before the rest of the folks have a chance to get them and the difficulty rises too much. From reading around on /r/litecoinmining and elsewhere people are seeing about $25-30/day with those miners, which while that sounds good, considering how much difficulty is going to spike in the coming months (due to more and more being purchased and adding to the overall hashrate) that number is going to decrease. I don't think you'd get ROI any time soon.

 

[NiHaoMike]

One of the smartphone coins I am mining got pumped a few days ago, with my humble cluster of cheap smartphones and old tablets breaking $5 in a single day. Then they started to come back down right as I reached the exchange minimum ($25, technically not a minimum since it is possible to exchange smaller amounts but then the exchange rates are worse) so I quickly sold them. My friend and I were very happy that the order went through. Haven't seen that kind of profitability since over a year ago when the difficulty was low, although back then it was close to constant rather than an occasional peak.

 

[funsoul]

I don't think I'd get an L3+ at this point, Stefan. The miner has been out for several months now and the profitability has dropped pretty significantly. I think in order to earn the most out of an expensive piece of hardware like that is to get in on the first couple batches before the rest of the folks have a chance to get them and the difficulty rises too much. From reading around on /r/litecoinmining and elsewhere people are seeing about $25-30/day with those miners, which while that sounds good, considering how much difficulty is going to spike in the coming months (due to more and more being purchased and adding to the overall hashrate) that number is going to decrease. I don't think you'd get ROI any time soon.

Thanks dude!

Yeah...been struggling with the asic question so all thoughts are welcomed. I've been thinking about it along these lines.
- nicehash calculator is currently estimating $19/day. With electricity at $0.16/KWh, that works out to about $590/month profit. ($25-30/day would put that estimate much higher)
- Placed a bet on btc and with the profit based on current prices (I bought at $6100/btc), that'd make the cost of the L3+ (currently $1600 without psu) come out closer to $1200 ==> 2-3 month payback

Thoughts?

 

[Janus67]

Thanks dude!

Yeah...been struggling with the asic question so all thoughts are welcomed. I've been thinking about it along these lines.
- nicehash calculator is currently estimating $19/day. With electricity at $0.16/KWh, that works out to about $590/month profit. ($25-30/day would put that estimate much higher)
- Placed a bet on btc and with the profit based on current prices (I bought at $6100/btc), that'd make the cost of the L3+ (currently $1600 without psu) come out closer to $1200 ==> 2-3 month payback

Thoughts?

The last time I saw the $25 number was over a month ago so looks like expected return has decreased again.

I'd say it is up to you, but even with .12c power here I'd still be apprehensive this late in the products life cycle. As I made the mistake with a 50MH/s miner back in 2014 but didn't do enough homework to get ROI fast enough. Barely squeaked by with the values that were present at that time. If you are okay with possibly mining at a loss with power costs or looking at a long ROI with the possibility of higher future values it could be worthwhile.

It may be worth waiting it out until the next generation miner comes out for scrypt or a different algorithm (the D3 just started shipping a few months ago that mines dash/x11 iirc).

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Well, haven't really been mining much at all since around March.

Profitability has really tanked (starting around mid-February), and that kind of reduced my interest in it. Lately around $0.80-0.9 estimated to be mined/day on just a 1080 (if I were to actually set it to mine for a whole day), whereas I was getting $3-4/day when I started mining on this card. CryptoNightV7 is around $0.24-0.27 mined/day for a 3770K, was $1.5-2.0/day back around last November-this January, making it pretty unprofitable with a $0.30/day power cost for the 3770K.

Pretty much just waiting on BTC value to go back up to say $10K per coin or more (assuming it does) so that most of my investment will be worth closer to what it was when I mined it (most of what I have was mined when BTC was at or around $8-15K/coin) and I can consider whether to spend it or cash it out.