Any of you nerds know where I can get a Graphics card. One of my boys built a computer two years ago, my other son is currently collecting parts, he only needs a graphics card now.
Bummer is kid 1's computer is now worth double what he paid in components, kid 2 is not willing to pay todays prices. This is killing both of us, he wants to finish his build, I just feel bad for him.
Even something that he can use until pricing and availability settle down.
akylekoz said:Any of you nerds know where I can get a Graphics card. One of my boys built a computer two years ago, my other son is currently collecting parts, he only needs a graphics card now.
Bummer is kid 1's computer is now worth double what he paid in components, kid 2 is not willing to pay todays prices. This is killing both of us, he wants to finish his build, I just feel bad for him.
Even something that he can use until pricing and availability settle down.
If you just need a temporary card, then getting something that sucks at mining might be a solid bet. An older card, like a GTX 580 or something - I bought one on eBay for $68 earlier this year and it performs nicely for games, but it's old enough that miners don't want it. Anything modern is going to be double or triple what it should be, unfortunately. If you want to buy something new, Micro Center is one of the best places to go. You can buy cards there only a bit above MSRP, although I would call first to see what they have in stock. I would avoid something like a GT 610 or GT 720, those are nice and cheap but their performance is pretty unacceptable for gaming, even light gaming. I would also avoid newegg, they jack their prices up way too much. Facebook marketplace might be a solid option; I'm searching there as well, just try to verify that the GPU works before buying it, and probably buy it with paypal so you have a money back guarantee.
In reply to z31maniac :
The key with mining is airflow. If you have that many fans on your case then you may be good. Your 3080 will generate a LOT of heat though. Look up the recommended clock settings for mining with it - keeping your fans running at 80% or so will go a long ways towards keeping temperatures down, without being too loud. It works great in the winter - a free space heater!
I still have the funny feeling that crypto currencies are kind of like multi level marketing or questionable mortgages with balloon payments and variable interest rates. Some of the people who deal with them are a little on the shady side and the whole thing is a little sketchy. Hackers want ransoms paid in crypto currencies. Wealthy Chinese use crypto currencies to move money across borders without their government's knowledge, and so on. Why not just deal in cash instead of getting more complicated? What are you hiding?
I got the same feeling when somebody wanted to use an electronic money transfer service I had never heard of to pay for a car. He then wanted me to forward some of that money to a cousin and wait for an agent to pick up the car. I asked him what was wrong with meeting face to face and handing me cash. So much simpler. No computers. No agents. No electronic transfers. Yeah. I heard all the arguments. I'm too old. I don't understand complex finance. I don't understand technology. I hear the same thing from Amway and every slick salesman who knocks on my door. The only reason I see for making transactions more complicated it to hide something. Often it is some kind of expensive fee or worse. I keep hearing about people who lose all their bitcoins to hackers. People who lose a code and can't access a million dollars in bitcoins. And the values go up and down like penny stocks on a pump and dump.
infinitenexus said:In reply to Toyman01 + Sized and :
It's one hell of a rabbit hole to fall down! With 4GB, you can't mine Ethereum but you can still mine Ravencoin, and there's plenty of others you can mine. You can mine Ethereum Classic as well, I believe, which a lot of people do. And of course, Vertcoin, which I'm oddly fond of. Personally, I'd love to have a 1650. It's a solid card. I've been searching FB marketplace for one for an acceptable price and not having much luck yet. I think if I had to start over, I would have started with AMD cards. From what I've read, they tend to cost about 20% less than Nvidia cards for the same hash rate. Or in a perfect world, I'll find a 3080 like z31maniac has and start mining some real cash.
How about mine, Nexus? I've rarely heard such depth on mining when it comes to cards, annd like others 99% mine just goes unused.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
roughly $80/month mining Ethereum on your graphics card and $5-6/month mining monero on your CPU.
akylekoz said:Any of you nerds know where I can get a Graphics card. One of my boys built a computer two years ago, my other son is currently collecting parts, he only needs a graphics card now.
Bummer is kid 1's computer is now worth double what he paid in components, kid 2 is not willing to pay todays prices. This is killing both of us, he wants to finish his build, I just feel bad for him.
Even something that he can use until pricing and availability settle down.
I had to overpay for an expensive pre-built to be able to get a modern GPU.
I'm not sitting on Twitter or my email account to get in the Newegg lottery, or trying to set up a bot to get myself one.
So I bought a pre-built from Skytech, it was $2849 shipped but I had it a few days after ordering. It's well built and FAST.
If he just needs a temporary graphics card until prices settle down, an older one would finish his build and last until then. As I said, my old GTX 580 was I think $68 from eBay and it ran The Witcher 3 beautifully. That should hold him over and give him time to wait and find a good deal on a better card.
Also, akylekoz, look into AMD cards as well. They tend to run 20-30% cheaper than Nvidia. I saw a R9 280X on eBay last night for $150 and it's still a pretty decent card (userbenchmarks rates it as 85% better than the GTX 580 I mentioned).
So I went to Micro Center the other day and they had a factory refurbished 1070ti for $219. That's a pretty great price these days, so I picked one up and went home and put it in my main computer, alongside my RTX 2060. I'm using a simple little $10 PCIe riser so I can connect them both. Fortunately my power supply was up to snuff. I got them both running in no time and fired up gminer, and doubled my hash rate. I tweaked my settings some and got my power usage down as well, 105W for my RTX 2060 and 112W for the 1070 ti, and while the 1070 ti likes to run hot, I'm keeping them both at good temperatures. Right now I'm at roughly $120/month of Ethereum, according to my mining pool and online calculators. Not bad at all for a hobby.
I also picked up an older R9 280X from eBay for $100 and it came in the mail, so I hooked it up to my cheapo mining rig that I posted a picture of last page to check it out. It more than doubled my hashrate on Vertcoin, pushing me to roughly $30-35/month. Those old AMD cards are fairly power hungry though, and I was using a crappy 450W power supply that I found in the basement at work. I googled it and it was about $15 10 years ago when it was new. Not high quality at all. It lasted about ten minutes, then the power supply just died haha. So I have a better one coming in the mail tomorrow. I'm also going to move to a dual power supply setup and use an old server power supply with a breakout board to power the graphics cards once I get more of them. So my hobby is starting to snowball, but at least it'll pay itself off in a few months.
In reply to infinitenexus :
I've been looking at the big boy ASIC rigs as they seem to be easy available on eBay. Looking at profitability It looks like April and May sucked. Unfortunately I can't find long term graphs. Do you know any good sites for me to research?
In reply to Stampie :
It's going to depend on what currency/algorithm you want to mine. As far as I know, most ASICs are built for only one algorithm, although sometimes one algorithm can be used to mine several coins. Here's a good profitability chart for what's most profitable right now:
https://whattomine.com/miners
Then compare the profitability to the kw/h used and the price of electricity in Jacksonville. From there, I would look at the difficulty charts for the coin you want to mine. Here's Vertcoin's difficulty chart, for example:
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/vertcoin/difficulty-chart
Difficulties are down right now, since profitability went down a bit over the past two months, so people are panic selling their equipment (also China cracked down on miners and they're all leaving). When difficulties are down, that means mining is easier/better. So now is still a great time to mine.
Actually, other parts of that same site might be what you're looking for:
https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency
From that, I'm thinking an ASIC that handles the Script algorithm might be the best bet. Hope I was able to provide some helpful information.
In reply to infinitenexus :
Yeah this is a deep rabbit hole. I started looking at the Nicehash market place and I'm not seeing how buyers are making money. This is a weird thing to learn.
Stampie said:In reply to infinitenexus :
Yeah this is a deep rabbit hole. I started looking at the Nicehash market place and I'm not seeing how buyers are making money. This is a weird thing to learn.
Bingo
In reply to infinitenexus :
Hey Nexus, I'm trying to figure out how Coinwarz works for my own cheap bitcoin miner but it's asking for "miner specifications" for the hashrate (?). I understand what it's asking, but I'm having is a hard time figuring out how to find it, I think. Are there other sites I can look at?
I think I've figured out Nicehash. There's people making around 10% right now. Interesting. And by figured out I don't mean figured out. I mean like a 2 year old just told that the sky is blue because the blue wavelength scatters more than other wavelengths.
In reply to Stampie :
Same. Like, I understand the hash is the physical number of processes for the equation, but I cannot find anything that allows me to plug in computer specifications from something like a list for an estimate. Best I have is my cost of electricity.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
ASIC are easy to get the specs on. Are you running a GPU? I think there was a site earlier in the thread to figure out GPUs.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
Bottom of this page might help you.
In reply to Stampie :
Thanks! Nicehash say's about $49 a month on a 1070 mining, no idea yet on the processor. Extra $50 a month sounds dope, just gotta check Etherium next.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
Also look at the month graph at the bottom. You'll see how it varies day to day. I wish they would let you go back futher.
Good for those adventurers who bought mining equipment before the boom in crypto and video card prices. They are probably feeling great now.
In reply to Domition :
Canoes are crappy tools for mining
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
I just picked up a 1070ti from Micro Center, factory refurbished, for $219. I'm currently using it on gminer to mine Ethereum, averaging 28mh/s, which currently works out to about $50/month. I have my settings tweaked so that card is only drawing 106w, and electricity is cheap in Cleveland so the hit on my electric bill is pretty negligible. With Ethereum you'll want to download MSI Afterburner to control your GPU clock settings and crank your memory pretty much as high as you can get it without errors (mine is +820), lower your core clock speed (mine is -150) and lower your max power (mine is down to 59-60%) and raise your fan speed (mine stays at 80%). It's a pretty good card to mine on. My RTX 2060 is similar, just different numbers (-502 core clock, +1230 memory clock, 60% power, etc).
If you're wanting to find specific specs on your equipment, I generally will google things like "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 hashrate monero" or "1070 ti hashrate ethereum" and you can usually find some good stuff. Also, on the topic of CPU mining, if you have an AMD CPU and it's a Ryzen 5 3600 or better, you can mine a little bit of Monero profitably. Intel CPUs are a mixed bag, they don't do as well on CPU mining. Monero is generally considered the best and most profitable coin to mine with your CPU (from what I've read).
In reply to Stampie :
So, ASICs are an interesting topic. If you're looking at mining specifically Bitcoin with an ASIC, then you basically need the newest and latest one to really make a profit, because the difficulty of Bitcoin is so incredibly sky high. Remember, there are warehouses full of ASICs mining Bitcoin 24/7, and you'll be competing with them. That's why, regardless of what online calculators say, Bitcoin is not mineable with a GPU. A 1080 ti will get about 3 cents a month of Bitcoin. The difficulty of Bitcoin is down right now because of China's crackdown on mining, so we might be in a window where a slightly older ASIC can profitably mine again. Another option would be to find an ASIC built for that algorithm and mine a different coin that uses the same algorithm. ASICs are pretty fascinating; if you can find one for a good price that can mine a profitable coin then you can easily make a surprising amount of money.
Stampie said:In reply to infinitenexus :
Yeah this is a deep rabbit hole. I started looking at the Nicehash market place and I'm not seeing how buyers are making money. This is a weird thing to learn.
Check eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other places. If you're specifically referring to ASICs, they have a kind of crazy marketplace. Graphics cards are starting to come down to somewhat normal prices though, and great deals can be found. I just picked up a couple P106-090 GPUs for $155 each on eBay. Together they'll be mining about $60-65/month, and if I throw in my GTX 960 I got for free, I'll be around $75-85/month from those, mining Vertcoin (or more specifically, about 5 Vertcoin per day). Once my PCI-E risers and PSU comes in the mail (I think they're supposed to be here tomorrow) and I get all of my graphics cards set up and mining, I should be around $205-210/month in mining revenue. Electricity costs here in Cleveland will be maybe $20/month, which helps. Next month I might try to pick up another factory refurbished 1070ti from Micro Center if they still have them, which will put me over $250/month. Plus, I'm learning more about computers and Linux, which helps me with my job. Pretty awesome for a hobby!
On a side note, I found two awesome Dell server power supplies (750W, 96% efficiency) in an older server we're throwing out at work so I grabbed them, only to find that no one makes a breakout board for them anymore. Parallelminer did a few years back but never made more. So I can't really use them. Sucks. The good news is that an equivalent HP server power supply is only about $20.
You'll need to log in to post.
