Do you Crypto-Mine?

[eclark5483]

I do it for fun. I have a couple of side project rigs I am working on. Usually you will see a 6 GPU rig. On mine, I am using a Dell T-610 Server motherboard running 2 Xeon x5675 CPU's. So my rig with be GPU & CPU mining on a rock solid motherboard, cpu and ECC memory setup to work in conjunction with the PCI-E risers for the GPUs. Initially I am gonna start with a couple of GTX1060 6gig cards and expand as funds permit. Right now with winminer I'm pulling in about $8 a day with my other rigs.

Here is a screen shot of the T-610 hashing with just CPU, no video card.

P.S. I picked up this server PC for FREE! I just upgraded the stock CPU's to the x5675's, gutted out what I didn't need, running redundant power supply.. WIN!!

[90GTVert]

Don't know a ton about crypto-currencies, but I thought today the mining was dominated by companies (largely in China) with rooms full of the latest and greatest mining rigs. Considering the cost of the PC and electricity, I'm not sure that it's worth it. Even if it does work for a little while with some currencies, my understanding was that anything worth doing will get taken over by the big miners sooner or later and what you can mine could decrease rapidly. So you could spend a bunch on a dedicated miner and run it all day/month/year and recover next to nothing of your expenses. Makes it seem like something that you'd have to enjoy doing... either like building the machines or get a thrill from collecting.

That said, I'm sure the people that mined early in the BitCoin days don't regret it with what they're worth today. If you could have only mined one BitCoin back then, it would be worth $12,000 ATM. I figure that whole deal opened people's eyes so any new currency would quickly have some serious rigs working against you and you won't get the "easy" pickings even from day 1. I suppose most investments with any chance of high gains are big risks though.

If you can get free PCs and parts and utilities are included in your rent, I guess there's not much to lose. The only free PCs I run across are the ones that no one wants, like 15 year old laptops that take a while to do basic tasks. Have one of those here now with a crashed hard drive that I don't even think is worth the time to mess with, but I told the owner I'd make sure no data could be had from it if I disposed of it and I've been too lazy to take it apart.

Again, I don't know much about it. Just my take from my limited understanding of it all.

[eclark5483]

My boss at my side job runs his business on 100% Solar, we've been talking about setting up my rigs at his mall (he owns a small strip mall), and letting them do their thing in a dedicated space.

Personally, I don't think anybody should do it if they are looking to invest. Especially since the ones who are doing it now have caused the cost of GPU's to spike. You can go on YouTube and see all these elaborate rigs with 12 graphics cards pulling in big bucks a day and think.. WOW HOW DO PEOPLE AFFORD THAT!!

You have to factor in your rate of return, how long it will take to get your investment back, cost of hardware. Aside from the video cards, the rest can actually be super cheap.

Take for example, my other side project rig, It's a 5 year old, FREE, Outdated Dell Vostro 260s PC used in an office environment. Low end Intel Core i5 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, using a slow laptop hard drive. What good is that?? Well, the board happens to have 4 PCI-E slots. 1 8x and 3 1x as shown in the arrows. With the proper investment into a beefy power supply, PCI-E risers, and some higher end cards like a GTX 960'S or better, you could use it to mine cryptocurrency. You wouldn't need the added expense of having to buy a CPU/Motherboard, memory or hard drive. All of which don't mean much when mining as the graphics cards/GPU's do.



Saw a pretty cool video a while back with an Aussie dude who had the same idea I had recycling an old PC like this one.

[eclark5483]

Here is a bit of number crunching data for mining coins using just your computer's CPU. I tested 3 of my computers to just mine using only the CPU. The x5675 Xeon chip pulls in an impressive .66 cents a day all by it's lonesome. I hadn't installed the second x5675 yet because I was waiting on a heat sink, but clearly my Xeon rig can do $1.30+ a day once I complete it's build. Next one is an AMD A10 machine. These would be the typical types of machines I sell to users on a budget who want best bang for the buck. They are good at moderate gaming, 1080p Youtube, netflix, etc, etc.. but clearly NOT made for mining The CPU squeezed out .17 cents a day, 32 cents total with the integrated ATI GPU, not profitable enough for energy used unless you are running it on solar. And last, we have my personal CPU that I use on my main PC. It pulls in .90 cents a day just on it's own. So the potential for just CPU mining on my rigs, is roughly $2.37 a day or $865 per year ($72 per month). As for the 260s Dell (not shown).. forget it, a measly 10 cents a day.



And here is an image of what I got my GTX 960 and GTX 1050 Ti rigs to peak at.

[90GTVert]

Just out of curiosity I checked and my PC is guesstimated at $1.65/day, mostly through the 1050Ti. Def not worth it. It wouldn't even cover the cost of the extension cord to the neighbor's house for a while.

[eclark5483]

Yeah, at minimum, you'd want to use a GTX1060 6gig card which has a better draw. I can average about $2.00 a day off of mine, or $60 a month, so it would take around 6 months to get your money back on the card, not counting electric use, which would take you to more like 7 or 8 months before you start turning a profit. Alot of miners will start with lower end cards, work them till they have the investment back, then turn around and add another card. That's 1 way to build a rig cheap, but still not profitable for quite a while. Since I went with older free components for the PC and focus my investment on the cards, my turn around is about 4 months each card. Should net me after power consumption, around $3,000 a year. But again, I'm doing it as a hobby and for fun, not to make money. Worse comes to worse and the whole crypto market tanks, I have some beefy GPU's for all the computers to game on. I can't see myself investing any more unless my ROI gets to a point where building a rig only costs me what I withdraw from my bitcoin wallet from mining, and not out of pocket.