Ethereum GPU mining?

[DrMrLordX]

A year ago, I would have made 5x (or more) ETH in a day that now takes a month to mine.

That is why we HODL.

 

[Erithan13]

A year ago, I would have made 5x (or more) ETH in a day that now takes a month to mine. Granted, the price per ETH has increased quite a bit, but not quite as much as the difficulty has.

When I first started with nanopool it had only a few hundred other miners, now it's past 36,000, basically 100x increase in not much longer than a year. It's a bummer for folk jumping on the bandwagon too late but on the other hand it might mean I can pick up a GPU for gaming (crazy, I know) at a not so ludicrous price.

Eyeing up the ledger hardware wallet for better peace of mind with my hodlings (sic), current ship date is 15th September for anyone else interested in it.

 

[Sonikku]

Though I'm fashionably late to the party, (like, mopping the floors late) I am now officially a miner.

Thanks, Larry.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Good luck! ETH is rising slowly, so if you mine it, you may still be able to make some profits.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Welcome!

 

[Pneumothorax]

I've got SLI 1080Ti in my main rig that's running claymore while I'm at work. I'm getting about 72 mh/s while pulling about 370 watts at the wall. (4790K, several HDD/SSD/16gb ram) Are my cards pretty optimized? or should be able to tweak a bit more performance? They're EVGA 1080ti SC2's power limit 55%, running at around 1.5ghz, Memory at 11700.

 

[thilanliyan]

^That's pretty good for that power level. I'm getting about 55MHs with 2x290 at ~500w.

 

[thilanliyan]

Anyone thinking of a Vega 56? I'm hoping it can undervolt reasonably well to bring power down.
I pre-ordered one (I cancelled my Vega 64 order)...let's see how long it takes to actually come lol.

 

[Yakk]

Anyone thinking of a Vega 56? I'm hoping it can undervolt reasonably well to bring power down.
I pre-ordered one (I cancelled my Vega 64 order)...let's see how long it takes to actually come lol.

I'm not at this point.

You can get it now and cross your fingers Claymore will be optimized sooner than later. Or skip it cause if Claymore does get optimized it'll be impossible to buy later.

With the difficulty curve, even if ETH prices double, ROI will be difficult to attain Imo.

 

[Aikouka]

I've got SLI 1080Ti in my main rig that's running claymore while I'm at work. I'm getting about 72 mh/s while pulling about 370 watts at the wall. (4790K, several HDD/SSD/16gb ram) Are my cards pretty optimized? or should be able to tweak a bit more performance? They're EVGA 1080ti SC2's power limit 55%, running at around 1.5ghz, Memory at 11700.

Are you vastly dropping the power limit?

 

[thilanliyan]

I'm not at this point.

You can get it now and cross your fingers Claymore will be optimized sooner than later. Or skip it cause if Claymore does get optimized it'll be impossible to buy later.

With the difficulty curve, even if ETH prices double, ROI will be difficult to attain Imo.

Haha yeah I don't expect a ROI tbh. I've just had these 290s for ages, so looking to sell them off and get something newer.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Anyone thinking of a Vega 56? I'm hoping it can undervolt reasonably well to bring power down.
I pre-ordered one (I cancelled my Vega 64 order)...let's see how long it takes to actually come lol.

No, it makes zero sense to get Vega purely for ETH mining (since this thread is about ETH). Amazon briefly had 1070 for $399 yesterday, since then it's up to $459. However, Newegg has some basic two fan models (still much better than AMD blower) for $440 all day long. 1070 will mine ETH at 30'ish MH/s. You may or may not be able to undervolt Vega, but most likely scenario is that Vega56 will still consume more power, will hash at about the same rate as 1070, will be much louder with stupid AMD blower fan, and in the end it'll be more expensive than 1070 (unless you managed to snag one at $399).

I can see some reasoning behind buying Vega as a decent all-around card for mining and gaming if you already have freesync monitor. But not at the current inflated prices and not for pure mining.

 

[thilanliyan]

Yeah, a Vega 56 would definitely not be a good pure mining card right now. It will be a mining/gaming card for me (I do have a Freesync monitor). And mine will be custom watercooled so I don't have to worry about noise, but I will still undervolt to bring power down.

 

[LightningZ71]

I asked a similar question over in the VEGA thread, but figured that I'd ask a closely related one here. Where is the VRAM cut-off for ETH right now? I've read that 2GB cards are fairly useless now, and that 4GB is either getting tight or past where it starts to cost performance. With respect to VEGA, with the VRAM usage of the coin mining software continuing to grow, does it's implementation of HBCC providing what is essentially a hardware administered flat memory space for VRAM that extends beyond the card's local VRAM to include the rest of the system memory heirarchy, represent something that can keep GPUs relevant in coin mining as the VRAM usage continues to grow from difficult inflation? Or, have I read that entirely wrong and the VEGA is just as limited as all the rest of the cards that are out there?

 

[Pneumothorax]

Are you vastly dropping the power limit?

Yes, I'm Power Limit of 55%. If I go lower, the performance starts to drop a bit, If I raise it, it's not much of an improvement with more power draw instead.

 

[DrMrLordX]

If you are going to mine ETH, at this point, I would not recommend anything less than 8 GB of VRAM. Not that I recommend buying into ETH mining hardware at all, but hey, some folks are gonna do it anyway.

Vega 56 might be okay for mining something other than ETH. I'm still thinking Vega will come through on XMR, but I'm not aware of anyone making software publicly available to take advantage of that fact.

There's probably some private software mining packages out there making very good use of Vega, which might explain the people buying them up at prices of $700 and higher.

 

[Aikouka]

Yes, I'm Power Limit of 55%. If I go lower, the performance starts to drop a bit, If I raise it, it's not much of an improvement with more power draw instead.

Hm, I do NiceHash instead of running a specific miner, but when I was messing with my power limit on my 1080 Ti, I saw some fairly sizable reductions. Did you also tweak the memory settings? I wouldn't mind reducing my power usage a bit... especially during the warmer months.

 

[Accord99]

Hm, I do NiceHash instead of running a specific miner, but when I was messing with my power limit on my 1080 Ti, I saw some fairly sizable reductions. Did you also tweak the memory settings? I wouldn't mind reducing my power usage a bit... especially during the warmer months.

For purely Ethereum, the Ti is pretty much memory limited so you can lower power usage a lot. The most profitable coins for the Ti though (things like ZCash, LBRY) are more core limited though so that's probably why NiceHash showed a noticeable decrease.

 

[Yakk]

Haha yeah I don't expect a ROI tbh. I've just had these 290s for ages, so looking to sell them off and get something newer.

Yeah I'll probably get one too, but I admitted to myself it won't be for mining . Since it'll be just for gaming I'll go for an AIB Vega 56 even overpriced like they are, is still cheaper with a Freesync monitor combo.

 

[IntelUser2000]

HBCC providing what is essentially a hardware administered flat memory space for VRAM that extends beyond the card's local VRAM to include the rest of the system memory heirarchy, represent something that can keep GPUs relevant in coin mining as the VRAM usage continues to grow from difficult inflation?

Even if that's the case, system memory is far slower than VRAM so you'll get slowdowns once DAG is larger than VRAM. If it uses system memory 100% you'll get 5MH/s.

You shouldn't worry about the size of VRAM, even as a 4GB user. You still have like a year left. Nevermind Vega GPUs. The latest AMD drivers also fix the slowdown issue with Vega/Polaris cards with increasing DAG size.

But with Vega you should mine Monero.

I've got SLI 1080Ti in my main rig that's running claymore while I'm at work.

Equihash algorithms and LBRY are far better than Ethereum in terms of profits for a 1080 Ti. Why not ZCash or LBRY?

 

[bob4432]

OFF TOPIC: Any reason to get into mining at this point? Where to look for a good intro and what exactly to mine? I do get cheap electricity for a good portion of the day, so that part is not an issue and since it is all gpu(?), I can build the rest of the rigs cheap. I did a bit of litecoin mining but lost the wallet and will need to go back through emails and some old hdd images to retrieve what was on there. I looked on the main forum page and couldn't find a mining sub-forum, so I apologize if I mixed it, but if some ROI could be had, I would be down to get a couple setups going. I thought it had turned to all dedicated ASIC setups, but apparently not 100%. Please advise,
Bob

 

[casiofx]

I asked a similar question over in the VEGA thread, but figured that I'd ask a closely related one here. Where is the VRAM cut-off for ETH right now? I've read that 2GB cards are fairly useless now, and that 4GB is either getting tight or past where it starts to cost performance. With respect to VEGA, with the VRAM usage of the coin mining software continuing to grow, does it's implementation of HBCC providing what is essentially a hardware administered flat memory space for VRAM that extends beyond the card's local VRAM to include the rest of the system memory heirarchy, represent something that can keep GPUs relevant in coin mining as the VRAM usage continues to grow from difficult inflation? Or, have I read that entirely wrong and the VEGA is just as limited as all the rest of the cards that are out there?

On my cards it showed memory usage around 2.3GB for ethereum right now.

 

[dajeepster]

Anyone thinking of a Vega 56?

and yes... just because i can

i haven't tried undervolting my two vega64 yet... i'm just letting them run 24/7. to many other projects to take care of first.

 

[Elixer]

OFF TOPIC: Any reason to get into mining at this point? Where to look for a good intro and what exactly to mine? I do get cheap electricity for a good portion of the day, so that part is not an issue and since it is all gpu(?), I can build the rest of the rigs cheap. I did a bit of litecoin mining but lost the wallet and will need to go back through emails and some old hdd images to retrieve what was on there. I looked on the main forum page and couldn't find a mining sub-forum, so I apologize if I mixed it, but if some ROI could be had, I would be down to get a couple setups going. I thought it had turned to all dedicated ASIC setups, but apparently not 100%. Please advise,
Bob

From what I have been reading now, you can still mine Etherium at OK levels, but, for bitcoins, it might be better to just outright buy them instead.
The major problem I see is, there is no logical explanation why these things have hit such a record high. There isn't anything you can follow that would have shown you which direction bitcoin will go, so, it is one huge gamble, so, can't really say how good of a ROI it could be.
There is other mining out there that can't be done with ASICs, which is where everyone is going to. You also got to consider the cost of GPUs have almost doubled in price, so, in the end, I doubt you should make a mining farm without expecting losses for at least 6-12 months, unless the price goes up.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Bitcoin mining in any form is dominated by ASICs. I do not recommend it at all. You can try mining ETH or ZEC or XMR or uh DCR or LBRY or . . . whatever. Not sure if I recommend it since ETH difficulty is spiking so much, pushing hash power into other coins. You would have to do a lot of research on hashrates to see what is possible and what are the probable profits.

It is still possible to make a profit mining ETH since the price is going up. We're over $350 now. A single 8GB R9 390 running 1010 MHz core/1500 MHz VRAM can push ~28.5 MH/s earning ~$55/month before taking power into account. That's running 24/7 on nanopool. Mine will do that undervolted -125 mv from stock. Run enough cards like that and you could do okay, for awhile. Difficulty is only going to get worse.

I think you can get better MH/s per W with Polaris, but Polaris is still terribly overpriced to the point that RoI might take more than 6 months. Not 100% sure on 1070s.