Cryptocoin Mining?

[3DVagabond]

This is ridiculous. I'm not paying that high above market price and betting on Litecoin. It's insane to think these profits are sustainable.

Well, if you would have got in early on BTC and rode it out you'd have a pretty big chunk of change right now. Seems like people are expecting LTC to be the same.

 

[Rikard]

I was looking to buy more 7950's but where I live they are all out of stock. I tried my luck on ebay but the prices people ask is about the same as I paid for my card *new* last year. It might be better to sell the card for more than I paid for it, and get a new 280X or a 770 for that price in a store. The pricing of 7950 does not make much sense to me at this point.

Edit: Now I see that the 280X prices increased by about 15% last night, so there is no easy way to increase hash rates in an affordable way...

 

[nwo]

The 290x costs way more than 10% more. I wonder if I should get a 7970 on cyber monday or get a 290. I'm sure I'd love the 290 for BF4.

Not sure you would really need a 290 for BF4. I play just fine with my 7870 at stock speeds and I get 60 fps on ultra and 4x MSAA at 1080p.

 

[Blue_Max]

kH/s only matters before they pay for themselves, after that, its purely kH/s as the only factor.

After 3 weeks, a R290 pays for itself. After that, pure profit.
A 7950 pays for itself in 2 weeks, after that, pure profit.

The delta is about a week. How long do you want to mine.. or rather, how long until newer ASICs obsolete GPU miners? Probably another year.

Do you run them in CF or just as two cards in the same machine?

 

[nwo]

yup. 7950's are going for $400 on amazon. all 280x's are out of stock (besides the xfx which has poor (aka none) vrm cooling). 290's are now $450 minimum.

290s are still $400 or less at newegg.

This is ridiculous. I'm not paying that high above market price and betting on Litecoin. It's insane to think these profits are sustainable.

It may not be sustainable but considering you would break even after 2-4 weeks, who cares? After you break even, you can cash out and enjoy the card for gaming or sell it. Either way, you profit.

 

[Smartazz]

I got in on bit coin mining but it's a huge bet to assume litecoin will do the same. I don't want to see how much difficulty is about to increase. People are buying cards like crazy.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

If you guys can't find 7950s or 7970s at this point, you can still go for cheaper 7850s and 7870s (at the $100-$110 price point). They're good for 350-400 kH/s per card and use much less power. They won't bring you in the coins as quickly, but it's better than no coins at all if you're looking to start this up as a hobby.

 

[nwo]

If you guys can't find 7950s or 7970s at this point, you can still go for cheaper 7850s and 7870s (at the $100-$110 price point). They're good for 350-400 kH/s per card and use much less power. They won't bring you in the coins as quickly, but it's better than no coins at all if you're looking to start this up as a hobby.

For some reason my 7870s can barely pull 300, even OCed.

The MSI 7870 that arrived today has crazy artifacts when I start up the miner, so I guess I will have to wait another 10 days before I start mining on my second 7870

Edit: Just spoke with newegg... They don't have these in stock anymore... Great... Maybe I should contact MSI directly and see if they will RMA me a replacement... Maybe get lucky with a free upgrade?

 

[Naer]

peercoin is the most energy effcient crypto and has aspects about it like proof of stake

 

[njdevilsfan87]

For some reason my 7870s can barely pull 300, even OCed.

The MSI 7870 that arrived today has crazy artifacts when I start up the miner, so I guess I will have to wait another 10 days before I start mining on my second 7870

My 7870s need to be underclocked to achieve max hash. I have the Sapphire Dual-X ones, and they run something like 900/1350 at 0.95-1v and get around 375kH/s each. Highest I've gone on them is 405 kH/s but I would get crashes after a while of mining. I think the memory wasn't stable above 1400.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

It all comes down to where you believe the price of BTC and LTC will be in a years time. If you think it will be higher than today, then the priority is to get as many coins as you can from mining (if you're not buying them outright). Therefore, higher long term kHa/s is better than efficiency since the electricity cost is so minor compared to overall LTC earned.

I agree, you can't argue the math higher hash even at higher electrical rates at the current sell price is higher profitability.

I went through this even when LTC was $2.50, you could mint so many that max hash was still yielding higher return than a more efficient approach.

peercoin is the most energy effcient crypto and has aspects about it like proof of stake

Wouldn't the most efficient coin be the one that yielded the greatest profit for the least amount of electricity?

Otherwise I'm not sure why you think anyone cares if on the technical side doing basically nothing of importance with one type of coin is better/worse than doing basically nothing of importance with another.

 

[nwo]

My 7870s need to be underclocked to achieve max hash. I have the Sapphire Dual-X ones, and they run something like 900/1350 at 0.95-1v and get around 375kH/s each. Highest I've gone on them is 405 kH/s but I would get crashes after a while of mining. I think the memory wasn't stable above 1400.

Which drivers are you using? Are you using guimer? Could you please tell me what settings you are using (for guiminer) so I can give them a try?

I just ordered this Sapphire 7870 Pretty hot deal imo, and the rebate is only $15, but if I can steal a 7950 or 7970 on cybermonday, I'll return this one for free with my shop runner But considering it's dirt cheap after MIR, I might just keep it.

By the way, I just updated to the 13.9 drivers and I don't get artifacts on my MSI 7870 anymore... Nice going with the crappy drivers on the install CD MSI Made me freak out and think my card is defective... But maybe I should still be concerned since those artifacts were pretty bad?

 

[Silverforce11]

Do you run them in CF or just as two cards in the same machine?

CF disabled, Guiminer 2 workers. Top card sucks in hotter air from bottom card and will be either a lot more noisy or throttle more.

 

[n0x1ous]

Firing up the litecoin wallet for the first time - asks for firewall access to private network...I assume that's required and safe?

and do I need to wait for it to sync before I start mining? Seems like its going to take forever.....

Time to put the 7970 to work.....

 

[nwo]

Firing up the litecoin wallet for the first time - asks for firewall access to private network...I assume that's required and safe?

and do I need to wait for it to sync before I start mining? Seems like its going to take forever.....

Time to put the 7970 to work.....

Yes, it is safe and yes, it does take a while for it to sync.

I assume you would need to wait for it to sync before you use your payment address but I don't see why you would need to wait for it to sync if you just want to mine and not cash out.

 

[Silverforce11]

You only need your wallet address to start mining and setting autopay, once the network syncs, your wallet will update itself.

 

[Blue_Max]

290s are still $400 or less at newegg.

It may not be sustainable but considering you would break even after 2-4 weeks, who cares? After you break even, you can cash out and enjoy the card for gaming or sell it. Either way, you profit.

How does one "cash out" and where?

 

[njdevilsfan87]

Which drivers are you using? Are you using guimer? Could you please tell me what settings you are using (for guiminer) so I can give them a try?

I just ordered this Sapphire 7870 Pretty hot deal imo, and the rebate is only $15, but if I can steal a 7950 or 7970 on cybermonday, I'll return this one for free with my shop runner But considering it's dirt cheap after MIR, I might just keep it.

By the way, I just updated to the 13.9 drivers and I don't get artifacts on my MSI 7870 anymore... Nice going with the crappy drivers on the install CD MSI Made me freak out and think my card is defective... But maybe I should still be concerned since those artifacts were pretty bad?

I use cgminer. It's old school for LTC mining.

The one you ordered is are the ones I have. I don't believe driver version matters but I'm either using 13.3 or 13.9 (I don't remember if I updated them since May). In MSI AB I set 900/1375. For these cards I've found the sweet spot core to memory ratio is somewhere around ~0.65. I use Sapphire Trixx to undervolt them. Then inside of cgminer.conf file

{
intensity : "19,19,19"
thread-concurrency : "16384,16384,16384"
worksize : "256,256,256"
gpu-thread : "1,1,1"
}

That's for 3x GPUs. It gives me about 375kH/s per card. You also make sure to go to command prompt and do "setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100" if you want to use thread-concurrency higher than ~10000 which is necessary to get the most out of 7850+ cards.

 

[nwo]

Thanks for the settings, I am getting almost 100 more kH/s now thanks to cgminer (which I finally got to work without HW errors) and your settings! Although I am running at 900/1250 because my drivers crashed when I tried 1375 at stock voltage. I did not undervolt my card though, I might look into it another time, but for now I am happy because my card runs at only 65*C under load and it's fairly silent.

 

[n0x1ous]

So I used the guide linked a few pages back for noobs to get going on wemineltc.com etc...followed all the instructions and chose 7970 high usage and am pulling 470kH/s. I see the card should be doing around 650. what do I need to tweak? Card is 7970 GHZ stock speeds.

How do shares correlate to the actual litecoins and how do you get them to your wallet?

 

[SPBHM]

i check on this thread occasionally, looks like i should have jumped on btc 2.5 years ago and mined from my rig that sits idle. oh well.

oh yes, I know the feeling
I tried to solo mine with my 5750 2 years ago, it obviously didn't work and I gave up, if only I had just joined some mining pool, oh well, I did leave my 5850 mining for a month this year and it gave me 0.25 btc, I think it was worth $20 at the time, now I look at the BTC prices and... what's going on?

the difficulty have increased much for BTC since April? I don't remember what it was back then, but it's when the 5850 made 0.25...

 

[zhuks]

I used the guide and have crap results as well. I am running a Sapphire 290x, cgminer, windows 8.1 64bit.

I have tried the latest beta as well as the whql and there were no differences. I tried with and without installing the AMD SDK still no difference.

The first issue I am having is when running cgminer without -T I get a blank screen. Sadly running -t doesn't provide all the information I want, but I guess I can just run cgwatcher in addition to it.

I am running on water so able to try a bunch of different clock speeds along with voltage settings.

I ran the below one time as admin and confirmed that the settings have been changed in windows.

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

When running 1200mhz on core and anywhere from 1250-1600 on memory I only get 630kh/s which seems very low. I used the settings below.

cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://xxxx:3333 -u xxxx -p xxxx--thread-concurrency 32765 --lookup-gap 2 -w 512 -I 13 -g 1 -T

I am able to get an avg of 750kh/s with the below setting, but due to the intensity of 19 the computer cant be used for anything else.

cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://xxxx:3333 -u xxxx -p xxxx --gpu-engine 947 --gpu-memclock 1250 --thread-concurrency 32765 -I 19 -g 1 --worksize 512 --gpu-powertune 20 --lookup-gap 2 -T

With the exact same settings as above, but the intensity set to 14 I can use my system, but only get an avg of 600kh/s.

I did run as high as 1300mhz on core and 1625 on memory and still only get 700kh/s with an intensity of 13.

The system performs flawlessly when gaming. Not sure if it makes any difference, but the cpu is a 4770k @ 4.7ghz and 16gb 2133mhz memory.

 

[Silverforce11]

Your problem is the I 13, thats forcing it to run in low mode. Set it to 20 if you're on water. On air, 18 is enough or its gonna need massive fanspeed.

My R290 settings:
Thread conc: 24,000
Worksize: 256
Vectors/Threads: 1 (setting it to 2 doesn't do anything but use more vram)
Intensity: 18

75% fan speed will yield ~826kHa/s since it wont throttle.

 

[Accord99]

the difficulty have increased much for BTC since April? I don't remember what it was back then, but it's when the 5850 made 0.25...

It's almost 100X more difficult.

 

[zhuks]

Running the intensity at 20 makes gpu usage jump up and down from 100% to 0% and seems to give poor results. Highest I can go is 19. I tried using the settings you have and I am still only getting about 700kh/s. When I set it to 19 I get the same results. Maybe just a tad higher.

I have a feeling it has something to do with why I can't run it without -T.