Anyone else mining crypto?

I'm halfway tempted to start a "mining crypto on a challenge budget" thread haha.

In reply to infinitenexus :

I'm think I'm about to jump in head first with a Antminter L3+. Little more risk but looks like ~4 month ROI. 

infinitenexus said:

I'm halfway tempted to start a "mining crypto on a challenge budget" thread haha.

if you do, maybe some inspiration for your cooling needs?

In reply to Stampie :

I think I'm too scared to try an ASIC.  My fear is mostly due to ignorance.  

A quick google shows me that your antminer will need a bunch of 6 pin connectors to power it.  Currently, old HP server power supplies are the way to go.  94-96% efficiency and you can pick up a 750W one for 20 bucks, and a 1200w one for a little more.  parallelminer.com is a good source for breakout boards and cables.

In reply to infinitenexus :

I'm looking used and most of those come with PS.  Seems most are running 1200w PS on the 850w ASIC.

In reply to Stampie :

Looks like you're good to go then.  I'll be really interested to see your experiences with an ASIC.  I still need to pick up a server PSU, it's the best way to go with multiple cards.  I'm just going to wait a month and spread my purchases out.

In reply to sleepyhead the buffalo :

While an elegant solution that I would expect from an engineer I counter with KISS principle.

infinitenexus said:

I'm halfway tempted to start a "mining crypto on a challenge budget" thread haha.

I think you already did :)

Thanks for sharing, it's interesting to hear about the state of hobby mining and what works (and doesn't).

bluej (Forum Supporter) said:

infinitenexus said:

I'm halfway tempted to start a "mining crypto on a challenge budget" thread haha.

I think you already did :)

Thanks for sharing, it's interesting to hear about the state of hobby mining and what works (and doesn't).

Thanks man.  I'm hoping to shed some light on it as a whole, as I know plenty of people know of it but don't really know much about it, and plenty of people have been pretty clear that they think it's a scam/pyramid scheme/pump and dump/complete waste of time and money.  I'm going to do my best to show that it can in fact be quite a good idea, that will last for a good long while when approached with a proper 2000 challenge-style mentality.

In reply to Stampie :

unfortunately, there's no power consumption detailed in that build.  I'm self-interestedly motivated by low-noise aspect of the build... but I also wonder if the pumps/bellows would end up being a lower-power consumption.

In reply to sleepyhead the buffalo :

Off the top of my head those small aquarium pumps are ~50watts.  I think I saw 6 so that's 300 watts.  Now I'm not including the water cooling part just fan.  I looked up a KISS similar fan and it's 210 watts.  Actually surprised by that.  I expected more.

Lowes Fan

I'm not sure about ASICs, but with GPU mining the most common way is to put a cheap box fan in front of the rack and one behind, so you have a pusher/puller setup and a ton of airflow.  Cheap, and low on power.

Time for an update. I spent $13 at Lowe's and built a rack for my main mining setup(s) at home. With the leftover wood and angle aluminum I built a small rack for my setup here at work. 

I picked up a couple P106-090 graphics cards from eBay for cheap and added them to this rig. My hashrate went from 195kH/s to 796kH/s, so that's pretty awesome. I'm currently fiddling with my clock settings, trying to squeeze a bit more performance out of this while reducing power used. I should be able to get all three cards under 175w total power used without much issue, I believe. This rack is currently making about $60/month, and I do have one more p106-090 coming in the mail so that should put it up to around $85-90/month. I have an old R9 280x at home, currently turned off because The Wife had an urge to rearrange the living room, but once that one and another one coming in the mail are hooked up I should be around 1.6mH/s on Vertcoin, which will be awesome. 
 

edit: I'm going to try to tidy up the wiring tomorrow since it's such a mess. 

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Domition :

Canoes are crappy tools for mining 

Interesting that you identified me as a spammer, just because I am a newbie and commented on a thread I was interested in, in which only 2 people communicate with each other . Why not just delete my post instead of accusing me of something I didn't do?

In reply to Domition :

Welcome. I'll apologize for him as we're trigger happy on canoes sometimes especially on topics that would likely get targeted by canoes. Feel free to jump in. 

Domition said:

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Domition :

Canoes are crappy tools for mining 

Interesting that you identified me as a spammer, just because I am a newbie and commented on a thread I was interested in, in which only 2 people communicate with each other . Why not just delete my post instead of accusing me of something I didn't do?

Yep. I sure did. 
 

You joined on July 2, and have made a total of only 2 posts (both in this thread). Those posts didn't offer new information. Your profile says absolutely nothing about cars. Why look on GRM for info about crypto?

I apologize if you are legit, and welcome you to participate in our online community. So far you have not, and your profile and approach is an exact match to what we frequently see spammers do. 
 

I look forward to your positive participation in this forum. I like being proved wrong. 

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

Domition said:

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Domition :

Canoes are crappy tools for mining 

Interesting that you identified me as a spammer, just because I am a newbie and commented on a thread I was interested in, in which only 2 people communicate with each other . Why not just delete my post instead of accusing me of something I didn't do?

Yep. I sure did. 
 

You joined on July 2, and have made a total of only 2 posts (both in this thread). Those posts didn't offer new information. Your profile says absolutely nothing about cars. Why look on GRM for info about crypto?

I apologize if you are legit, and welcome you to participate in our online community. So far you have not, and your profile and approach is an exact match to what we frequently see spammers do. 
 

I look forward to your positive participation in this forum. I like being proved wrong. 

Sorry for the confusion, I'm not a driver myself and don't have the knowledge to hold an auto conversation, so don't post on auto topics but I am interested in reading your forum, maybe in the future I will join one of the auto conversations. I'll be reading for now, sorry again.

My Ethereum mining setup is currently at $86 total mined, which is pretty awesome.  I'm excited to break $100, which should happen within a week.  My cards mining Vertcoin have been going steadily all weekend with no crashing - I had my clock settings a little high last Thursday and one of my cards crashed so I had to restart the rig and back off a bit on clock speeds.  Overclocking for Ethereum is pretty straightforward and I've gotten quite good at it, but Vertcoin is a different animal.  The speed that a card mines the Verthash algorithm is often dictated by the bandwidth of the memory bus, so interestingly enough an old card like an R9 280X 3GB will mine Vertcoin faster than a newer and more powerful GTX 1060 6GB.  And they're cheaper by a large margin.  Being an old 3GB card though, they're not as "future proof" so to speak, so I am cautiously hunting for a couple more 280X and 290X cards to mine Vertcoin with.  At the prices I'm trying to get them at, I have a solid 3 to 4 month ROI.

My initial goal was to be at $250/month in mining income by the time my son is born.  The amount I'm mining changes as the prices of Ethereum and Vertcoin fluctuate, but I'll be at roughly $240-260/month once I get my additional PCI-E riser cables in the mail and get my additional two cards running, and my son should be born in a month at the most, so goal accomplished!  If things continue to go well, I might try to get to $500/month by the end of the year.  It will ultimately depend on me continuing to find really good deals on graphics cards, which is difficult.  Some of what I'm mining will be cashed out for USD but most will be saved.  Perhaps one day I'll have a nice big pile.

Got my PCI-E risers in the mail, so now I have all of my cards mining away!  My setup here at work is mining Vertcoin at 1mH/s, which makes me happy.  As for the R9 290 I got in the mail...

So I have an old R9 280X set up and mining Vertcoin and it mines surprisingly well for an 8 year old card, and with no real problems.  The R9 290(x) is a better card, with userbenchmark.com showing it performs something like 70-80% better on most benchmarks.  After seeing that, I set my sights on finding one, since it clearly would mine better than the 280X.  I found one for $77 on eBay, bought it and hooked it up to my rig and saw that it only mined slightly faster than my 280X.  That's fine, the price was right.  Then I saw it's temperature steadily increasing.  I struggled to get it under 70 degrees Celsius.  I ended up lowering the total power to 50%, undervolting the card, and having the fans up at 80% to keep it around 65 degrees Celsius.  And all that cut its mining speed in half.  Had I done a bit more research before buying, I would have seen that the R9 290 and 290X were indeed popular mining cards back in 2015 and 2016 and were known for two things: excellent performance and for being great space heaters.  Even undervolted and underpowered, the amount of hot air coming out of it feels almost identical to a hair dryer on high.  Live and learn, at least the card was cheap.  Now I know to avoid the 290/290x cards.  Once it pays itself off I'll probably remove it from mining and maybe just use it for its intended purpose in a computer, or use it to learn about BIOS flashing in graphics cards and the like.  If I find another 280X I'll grab up one more, but otherwise I'm going to focus on finding more powerful and modern cards for good prices, to help future-proof my mining setup.

Finally hit my payout point in my Ethereum mining pool, so this morning I woke up with about $92 worth of Ethereum in my digital wallet.  Took me a little under a month to get that with two GPUs.  My setup that's mining Vertcoin is sitting at about 36 Vertcoin over the past week or so, which is roughly $18.  It's nice to have a hobby that makes some money instead of one that just burns money!

I've tried several times to mine with my R9 290 that I was complaining about in the post above, with the same results.  So I disassembled it today and blew out the little bit of dust that was in there and cleaned off the old thermal paste that was sloppily applied and put some new Arctic Silver on.  I'm hoping that helps.  I'll try it again today when I get home.

Redoing the thermal paste on my R9 290 was a great success.  Instead of the temperatures ramping up and crashing the card within minutes, now it hums along nicely at about 62 degrees Celsius.  I repasted my "new" R9 390 and it helped a couple degrees as well.  I still need to find the right settings for that one, but so far it's going well and I'm at around 2.2mH/s mining Vertcoin now.  Crypto prices are down which means mining profits are down, so people are quitting and selling their graphics cards, so the prices of cards are still falling slowly as well.  It also means the difficulty of many crypto coins is down, which makes mining easier.  This is all good news for me.  

Really, the only downside is that the 750W power supply I have running my mining rig on my desk at work is kinda noisy.  The fan in it keeps it running very cool but it sounds like a vacuum cleaner.

I went down to the basement at work again to check the old servers we're getting rid of and searched online for breakout boards for all of their power supplies.  I was able to find breakout boards for two of them, so now I have two 700W extremely efficient server PSUs that I can use soon - that's a big help, as A) I need good efficient power supplies to continue doing this, and B) high wattage efficient power supplies tend to be very expensive.  My total cost is about $25 for two breakout boards and some cables.  Also, running the GPUs on one power supply and the motherboard on a separate one means I can just use a factory power supply to power the motherboard, which saves additional money as I have a handful of those.  There's some awesome 750W 80 plus platinum Dell power supplies in one old server that I really, really want to use but no one makes a breakout board for it, so oh well.

Got another R9 280X and I have it mining Vertcoin along with the others.  I removed the R9 290 as it was producing so much damn heat.  Once I get the breakout board and cables I'm going to try setting the R9 290 up to mine Ethereum Classic - it's a 4GB card so it can't mine Ethereum, but 4GB is fine for Ethereum Classic.  From now on, unless I find an extremely good deal, I'm going to focus on 6GB+ cards.

Doing some quick math, I'm around $160ish mined so far.  Pretty exciting to watch that number go up and up.

Found a good deal on a P106-100, which is just a GTX 1060 made specifically for mining, so it has no video outputs.  It gets about 24.4mH/s on Ethereum, so right now at today's prices I'm mining $175/month of Ethereum and $157/month in Vertcoin, while spending about $30-35/month in electricity.  Slowly getting there.

Prices of crypto have been increasing, so I'm now mining something around $350/month, although with prices increasing, the cost of GPUs is also increasing.  Tomorrow EIP 1559 will occur, which is supposed to reduce the  profitability of mining Ethereum by a good amount.  Once that happens I expect plenty of people to give up and just say "mining isn't profitable anymore" so the prices of GPUs will probably go down some.  I'm interested to see how it will affect my profitability as well.  I'm guessing it'll drop by about $40/month.  I have a few GPUs coming in the mail this week - two will be added to a rig mining Vertcoin, and the third is an RX 580 that I picked up for a great price that will be used to mine Ethereum classic along with my R9 290 and R9 390.  I believe the price of Ethereum classic will go up more than Vertcoin in the future so I switched my 290 and 390 over to mining that instead.

The server power supplies I mentioned two posts ago work great.  However, I don't know why I didn't think about noise levels - I've certainly spent plenty of time in a server room.  The fans in those things sound like a leaf blower!  So those power supplies will be kept in storage until we buy a house, where I'll set up all my stuff to mine in the basement.   

Looking back, I started mining seriously roughly a month ago, and I've made more than $200 since then and that number is increasing every week.  My son will be here in 12 days so I'm going to take a break from expanding much and just enjoy watching them make money (unless I find a crazy good deal on eBay or something).  As I've said plenty of times already, it's really nice having a hobby that makes money instead of wastes money.

In reply to infinitenexus :

I'm not sure I understand...

You've been mining for a month, and made $200. But you're mining $350 per month??