Lets try out this CryptoCurrency thing - Ethereum

[deathman20]

Lets try out this CryptoCurrency thing - Eth/Zcash

So since I was in the market for a card I decided to start looking around at this crypto currency thing. So surprisingly my old R9 290 still packs a punch. Sucks a bit of power but still does decently. I'll get some true readings from the power consumption side when I place it in my other rig but got it chugging away right now doing 1050/1350 with a -50mv on the core, on GPU-z its pulling 110W ish on the GPU which it was 160W before so there is improvement Holds around 69-72C with 69-72% on fan (i have it tied into the after going over 50C). Anyways started mining just this past weekend and right now averaging around 27.1 MH/s, rate is still climbing now roughly 36 hours into it.

Pretty happy about it. Eventually be putting this into my old rig (bottom on my sig) where it was last year before my upgrade. Warms my basement up a little nicer to its not as chilly even during the summer with the AC on (can hit mid 60's). During the winter it will be fantastic probably help hold in the mid 60's as well without needing to turn on my larger heater for an extended period of time. Might not get much out of it but figured to why not run it and see what it can do.

I've been reading stuff all over the place and it seems waaaay over my head at this time but is there any good reference information or sites that help with understanding how to setup the mining, what settings to use in the bat file to start running the program to get maximum performance out of the card? Also anything more on OCing the card and yet undervolting it? Is there a concern if I don't give it enough juice that it will spit out errors, or will it just crash the system?

 

[deathman20]

So since my 1080TI is now in my hands figure I would finally update this a little.
My R9 290 I got into a -100mV on the power, 1050/1375 on clocks and seemed to work just fine. Increasing Clocks for what ever reason didn't change the rate so decided not to do that and with the combination of power drop and this I came in around 50W lower then when I started. Note yes the card sucks power like nothing else and its LOUD! Average temps was hitting 75-78C with similar fan speed settings in the newer case I put it in (Old Timer / Fun Machine Rig) So temps went up a little. Overall the system sucks around 300W almost on the dot. I down clocked the CPU slightly (3.3Ghz) and changed the voltage to 1.2V and enabled speed stepping (wasn't on previously) to help with the Wattage of the overall system. MH/s rate held pretty steady around 27 give or take a little for the few days I ran it on my new rig. I don't have it going on the old one right now after reading the real numbers, and noise sitting on my desk is a real turn off... maybe bring it into work

Now I got my 1080TI in my hands Decided to have a little fun comparison test. One thing is I don't have full rigs Wattage still but I know its lower.
Anyways got this thing up and running. I believe my final settings I'm running with is -250 to +100 core and +1000 mem (gives me 6,000 Hz when running Ethereum). Yes the core speed doesn't seem to affect it... I did drop the Power Threshold to 88% (hovers around 85-87% TDP) but just to make sure it doesn't spike out of control. This overall gives it a constant voltage, constant boost clocks all around. That being said it spits out roughly 38.4 MH/sec on average right now... I'll get true numbers in a day or two. Best part its quiet and holds a nice 65C in a sealed cabinet! I had to have the door cracked on the other one just to hold around 75C, and fully open to hold 69-72C and it was LOUD. I barely hear the fan on this now which is great.

The one thing that gets me and still trying to figure it out a little more. In 3D I can push +150 core and +750 mem no problem (puts it at 6,258Hz effective in 3D), but the as I menitoned above if I do +1000 mem above it tops out at 6,000 Hz on the ram. I'd love to crack it up to 3D speeds as it really improves the hash rates... ALOT. Anyways key thing I have to remember if I close the program to game is to first change the clock speed on the memory (load a slower profile) otherwise lock up Either way very happy with the card and performance of it, this is just an "extra" bonus now that I'm playing around with. If I'll actually keep it up that is to be seen but right now its cool and quiet setup to mine with.

 

[Sentential]

Nice! I’m dabbling in this myself and managed to get 29mhs on a rx580 I got for an Egpu setup

 

[deathman20]

Very nice. Planning on doing it for the long haul or just playing with the waters?

 

[Sentential]

Very nice. Planning on doing it for the long haul or just playing with the waters?

I planned on taking courses on Openstack Hypervisor which requires me to deploy and test VMs and since NVIDIA won’t allow that without a quadro I needed an AMD card. I figured why not

 

[deathman20]

I planned on taking courses on Openstack Hypervisor which requires me to deploy and test VMs and since NVIDIA won’t allow that without a quadro I needed an AMD card. I figured why not

Nice. Guess why not do it if you got to play with it.

Oh and yeah just to confirm I can do -250Mhz on the Core or 0 and it doesn't change a single bit of performance wise.. Strange but ok what ever. Best part now I've been holding at 57C with 55% fans speed all day on it. TP hovers at 85.8% roughly... just nice and cool. Question though is there anyway to push past 1000Mhz on the memory in MSI or EVGA clocking programs? I'd love to push it another 250Mhz which I know it can be done or even more but not sure how to get past this threshold.

 

[Sentential]

Nice. Guess why not do it if you got to play with it.

Oh and yeah just to confirm I can do -250Mhz on the Core or 0 and it doesn't change a single bit of performance wise.. Strange but ok what ever. Best part now I've been holding at 57C with 55% fans speed all day on it. TP hovers at 85.8% roughly... just nice and cool. Question though is there anyway to push past 1000Mhz on the memory in MSI or EVGA clocking programs? I'd love to push it another 250Mhz which I know it can be done or even more but not sure how to get past this threshold.

I'm sure you could modify the BIOS perhaps?

 

[deathman20]

Well found a nice little trick to kick it into 3D mode and it seems to stay. I kick off my Oculus rift launcher kicks it into 3D, start the miner, then apply the clock adjustment and wahla.... 3D memory clocks
So was hitting around 37-38 MH/s before now hitting 40-41 MH/s As long as I keep my Core clocks above -250 it produces good results, actually have it at +150 for mining and works very well.

So runs around 2025/6250 (ish) pretty solid for mining. Not to shabby. I'll have to get the watt meter over to my main rig to test it out, not really in a convenient spot to test. Overall it beats the pants off my older R9 290 that was turning out maybe 26-27 MH/s and eating some considerable power at around 300W, loud and hitting roughly 74C, now its closer to 81C in the "old rig". I'm going try re-routing some cables in there and see what I can do to help get a little more air flow. Might even put it in another room, or at work ideally when I move if I can make it quieter/cooler.

Edit: NM really doesn't like that increased speed haha. Works for about 1 hour then miner crashes, computer still stays up. Maybe my +750 on mem is a wee bit aggressive even though it works in games so far that I've tried it with. 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.

 

[deathman20]

Well just short of 3 months into it....
Got my old AMD R9 290 mining, makes a nice space heater, actually quieter than the space heater i really do have.
Also got my 1080TI mining when not gaming.

I did Ethereum for 1 month but the difficulty was just getting insane on it for causal me. So switched to Zcash the past 2 months and really happy with the returns as running average around 960-1100 H/hr between both the cards. Now I hold a little bit in some 3 different currencies as I've been diversifying my earnings. Just amazed that I can make money doing this and really not doing "anything" besides watching the numbers here and there for a little side cash which it will end up being when I sell stuff out. I'm not out to make $$$, not planing on buying more cards to mine with, just enjoying the little returns I can with the cards I have is nice.

Not sure when I'll eventually cash out but if my earnings drop or difficulty gets to hard I'm sure I'll just do a full cash out and call it a day. Til then hopefully it will continue to work nicely and will net me a little down payment to a truck I'm looking at late next year or early the following year.

 

[CrystalMethod]

I threw together a dedicated mining rig with "affordable" GPU's (4 X 1050 4 gig TI's). Not the greatest. But, affordable.

I'm still working on making a permanent chassis for the rig. It's FUGLY ATM. But, it's putting Bitcoin in my wallet. I'm also experimenting with some REALLY old hardware to see if I can get them to mine.

 

[Kenrou]

I only heard about Ethereum about a couple months ago and it was bad ?

http://fortune.com/2016/06/18/blockchain-vc-fund-hacked/

http://fortune.com/2017/08/28/ethereum-cryptocurrency-stolen-bitcoin/

 

[Janus67]

Ethereum has been around for a couple years now. I remember in 2014 when I stopped mining it was just starting to be discussed here. Would have been nice to get in then!

As far as I know there's nothing 'Bad' about ethereum (or most currencies), just some are get-rich-quick schemes by the developers, some try to use similar naming to be somewhat confusing, or make a small change etc.

 

[deathman20]

Heck if you spend $100 back in 2010 on Bitcoin, earlier this week you would of been worth over 400 million dollars! Right now I mean it would be worth like 350mil... pssh.

For me, just gaining something on a system I already use/have is a nice added perk. I don't plan to go out of the way to buy up a few thousand dollars worth of cards to be making potentially decent money.

I mined Ethereum right away as it was the "big one" being talked about. Hey i could earn money sure, but not as great as some other ones that was doing decently well at the same time. I looked around and decided to sit on Zec (Zcash). Working for me, as while its keeping relatively the same pace as the bigger ones, the payouts seem to be better, and day to day mining was considerably better (almost 2x as much value). With that I've traded my old Ether coin and some Zec in for Bitcoin when it was considerably lower (5,000). Right now I'm happy where its sitting

Course I'm talking a few hundred dollars here, nothing like some people have tens of thousands of dollars invested in some of these.

I threw together a dedicated mining rig with "affordable" GPU's (4 X 1050 4 gig TI's). Not the greatest. But, affordable.

I'm still working on making a permanent chassis for the rig. It's FUGLY ATM. But, it's putting Bitcoin in my wallet. I'm also experimenting with some REALLY old hardware to see if I can get them to mine.

Nice. Lots of things can mine, but the question is weather the power they use, is actually posting a profit for you.

 

[CrystalMethod]

I think the thing is "getting in", essentially for dirt cheap considering the rigs most of us run. Re-purposing, slightly older hardware.

"I got some parts that are collecting dust. Maybe they could make me some Bitcoin..."

For me. It's not about whatever a Bitcoin is valued in $. That's going to go up and down. It's similar to investing into stocks. Only, you're just using the hardware you already have.

 

[ecthellion]

ive got an old 2600k with maximus iv extreme mobo that im no longer using, its a spare back up from my old system. been thinking aabout setting it up to mine some sort of crypto currency, any suggestions on gpus to get?

 

[CrystalMethod]

The problem with getting GPU's is the cost vs. ROI (Return On Investment). The price of graphic's cards has taken a HUGE spike due to crypto-currency mining. You have to balance what a particular GPU/CPU can earn. The power it's going to cost to run the system, etc... Oldest card I have running/earning, is an Asus GTX 550 Ti.

Ain't gonna hurt to try out what you got and see if it'll make some coin before you start spending cash.

 

[ecthellion]

im curious how long does it take to mine 1 bitcoin, i keep seeing all over the internet that bitcions are going for updwards of 12k, yet i read the posts here and some people say your only going to be making a few dollars a day, how can this be? can you only make good money with dedicated miners? can you make any money on a 4 gpu setup? tryin to understand just exactly how this bitcoin thing works

 

[deathman20]

im curious how long does it take to mine 1 bitcoin, i keep seeing all over the internet that bitcions are going for updwards of 12k, yet i read the posts here and some people say your only going to be making a few dollars a day, how can this be? can you only make good money with dedicated miners? can you make any money on a 4 gpu setup? tryin to understand just exactly how this bitcoin thing works

Either buy a bunch of hardware or it will take a while. If everything stayed at the exact same value for years... it would take me 6-8 years to mine that amount of cash with my current setup. Course I'm doing it for "fun" and small interest in how it all works. Now if you buy a bunch of GPU's you could make a few thousand dollars a month and the return could potentially come much sooner, course you'd have to pay off the hardware first which could take 6+ months if its some serious setups your doing.

But.... the more that mine, the longer it takes to get a payout as the network is tied with a difficulty factor with how many are mining said currency. As well over time it gets harder to mine as things called difficulty bombs happen and jump the amount of processing power required to mine currency.

If you really want more information you'll have to search the web and start digging into it. I tried to a few years ago and went totally over my head. Recently started looking into it after reading a bunch of articles and finally understand it much better now, but its still difficult to explain.

 

[ecthellion]

i was thinking about getting some 7970s and using my old setup to mine, thats what i was thinking anyways or some r290x's but im tryin to hunt down waterblocks for those. also we just got solar put in, so i wanted to see what i could make to help gma pay off the solar panels. so i dont think electricity will a drawback. tryin to wrap my head around this cryptocurrencty thing. if you join a group of miners do you only get a slight percantage of a bitcoin?

 

[ecthellion]

Either buy a bunch of hardware or it will take a while. If everything stayed at the exact same value for years... it would take me 6-8 years to mine that amount of cash with my current setup. Course I'm doing it for "fun" and small interest in how it all works. Now if you buy a bunch of GPU's you could make a few thousand dollars a month and the return could potentially come much sooner, course you'd have to pay off the hardware first which could take 6+ months if its some serious setups your doing.

But.... the more that mine, the longer it takes to get a payout as the network is tied with a difficulty factor with how many are mining said currency. As well over time it gets harder to mine as things called difficulty bombs happen and jump the amount of processing power required to mine currency.

If you really want more information you'll have to search the web and start digging into it. I tried to a few years ago and went totally over my head. Recently started looking into it after reading a bunch of articles and finally understand it much better now, but its still difficult to explain.

ive perused some of the guides on here, would you know of any in depth guides i could read to try to get a better understanding on how this cryptocurrency thing works. would be greatly apreciated. thx!!