ETH mining 101

[anxious_ant]

So I have a relatively powerful GPU doing only gaming and I am thinking of mining ETH.

I’ve used a simple online profitability calculator and it’s estimated at about £6.50 daily after taking out electricity costs (~12p/kWH for me). This roughly equate to £2,300 a year.
Nit a bad profit but not that much considering that the rig needs to run 24/7.

Would appreciate some thoughts as a newbie from those who has more experience.

[Magnum 475]

One word of caution - values can go down, rapidly. I've be mining ETH for a few years with a GPU farm, so I've watched the market carefully. The market is currently at an all-time high. If you don't mind mining 'long-term', as I have, and converting to cash when the market is high, it's not a bad thing to be doing. If you're looking for quick profit, it can evaporate fast when the market falls. Take a good look at the swings from 2016 to 2019 to see this in action.

No-one knows where it's going medium - long term. There are bitcoin predictions for the future ranging from > $100K, to zero. The future value of crypto currencies that aren't backed by a government / national back is currently unclear.

[anxious_ant]

Magnum 475 said:

One word of caution - values can go down, rapidly. I've be mining ETH for a few years with a GPU farm, so I've watched the market carefully. The market is currently at an all-time high. If you don't mind mining 'long-term', as I have, and converting to cash when the market is high, it's not a bad thing to be doing. If you're looking for quick profit, it can evaporate fast when the market falls. Take a good look at the swings from 2016 to 2019 to see this in action.

No-one knows where it's going medium - long term. There are bitcoin predictions for the future ranging from > $100K, to zero. The future value of crypto currencies that aren't backed by a government / national back is currently unclear.

Thanks. I can’t afford a serious GPU mining rig, so only thinking of utilising what I have now to try and make some money if possible.

I did some research on ETH 2.0 and it’s looking promising, even with PoS. Some nice investments backing DeFi as well so should be stable, for at least 2-3 years I would think.

Anyone here mining on their PCs? I have a AMD 3900XT PC running RTX3090.

[Sheets Tabuer]

Wouldn't believe those calculators, my true figures over 24h was nearer £1.50 mined and £1.20 of leccy used.

[Steven_RW]

I have just started mining Etherium.

I had a spare pc with a GTX 1080 sitting here, so I put that to work first. Tuning up memory speed and down the power usage. It is doing 25.84 mega hash per second. It has run between 106watts to 124 watts, so you get 235 kilo hash per watt down to 207 kilo hash per watt.

My gaming rig is all custom waterlooped with a 2080ti in there, so a day after setting up the spare pc, i turned this rig into mining as well.

The 2080ti does 61 mega has per second at around 230 watts, so 258 kilo has per watt of power.

I have just been using what I have and tweaking them accordingly. The memory on the RTX 2080ti is now running at 8011mhz and the memory of the GTX 1080 is running at 5514mhz which is the max overclock that MSi goes to for that card.

I have a stock checker thing looking for a 3090 becoming available and whilst it isn't the most profitable card for strict mining, I would quite like to see if I could buy one and mine my way to the card essentially being paid off from the profits. £1399 is the cost of the card.

If the market sits down then it will take years to earn the £1399 even with all three cards (1080, 2080ti and 3090) but the worst outcome I can see is that SOME of my 3090 will have been paid for by the mining experiment/fun.

It is important to tweak the card settings as stock settings are not as fast as you want for mining and also are Wattage heavy. It is a fun tweaking project.

I have taken to leaving my study window wide open to let in this freezing cold winter air as the colder the cards run the less watts they need to hold a certain performance level.

Another random interesting fact is that my 2080ti gaming rig, loses around 5 MH/s when I use it for other things like watching twitch whilst it mines. Another random one is that u get to the point u don't want to disturb the mining so don't want to put it on hold whilst you game hehe. Quite weird. Like owning a Porsche and just leaving it in the garage to save on the mileage.

RW

[Rojibo]

I've been mining it for years, have recently decided to scale out my mining though, given I now have a nice cool garage I can lump everything in.

I see it as a low risk option to scale it out now, given the scarcity in supply of GPUs, should the market nosedive I'm pretty happy I could sell the GPUs on at cost. Shall we all go in for a pallet of cards from a distributor or shall we continue to scramble over those bot alerts?

[Steven_RW]

Rojibo said:

I've been mining it for years, have recently decided to scale out my mining though, given I now have a nice cool garage I can lump everything in.

I see it as a low risk option to scale it out now, given the scarcity in supply of GPUs, should the market nosedive I'm pretty happy I could sell the GPUs on at cost. Shall we all go in for a pallet of cards from a distributor or shall we continue to scramble over those bot alerts?

Haha - give me an indication of quite how many cards come on a pallet. Maybe we could get them shared amongst us.

I was thinking of taking my secondary PC and putting it in the garage to sit there and mine away in peace with as much cold air as it wants.

RW

[LP670]

I run nicehash on my RTX3080 FE. ive created a specific profile in MSI Afterburner that's suited to mining. getting 92 MH/s and an efficiency of 440+ kH/J. After electricity costs im making about £7 a day. A nice little bonus as i only built the machine to play DCS world and MS flight sim.

[anxious_ant]

LP670 said:

I run nicehash on my RTX3080 FE. ive created a specific profile in MSI Afterburner that's suited to mining. getting 92 MH/s and an efficiency of 440+ kH/J. After electricity costs im making about £7 a day. A nice little bonus as i only built the machine to play DCS world and MS flight sim.

That is not bad at all. I’ve been advised to have a look at NiceHash. I wonder what other mining softwares are good.

I have RTX3090 so could be a bit heavy in the juice. Might over-volt by setting the max power to 80% and slightly boost the memory clock.

I also have 3950xt cpu, shame can’t put all those cores into some use.

[Rojibo]

Nicehash is great for new miners as it's basically next next finish, press start, off you go. Also the payout threshold is much lower meaning you get to see the fruits of your "labour" much sooner, they pay you in BTC (despite the fact you're running ETHhash of some variety), and you can transfer to coinbase for zero fee. They also have a handy overclocking guide for you (results may vary).



https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/nvidia-and-amd-...

My little 3080 has mined about £380 worth of Ethereum since the 1st of December

[anonymous-user]

Suprised not duel mining as there is little drop off and increased reward.

[Rojibo]

Dual mining ETH and another? Wasn't as profitable last time I checked, has that changed?

[anxious_ant]

How's the thermal throttling on the memory chips for those mining on RTX30xx series?
I see the proposed solution is to set fans at max, or consider upgrading to liquid cooling.

I am a little concerned about running the fans at 100% for prolonged periods, any thoughts?

I currently pay about 0.1324p/kWH for electriciy and according to NiceHash calculator that is about £8.40 profit daily or £280.42 in a month.
Now whilst that sounds a lot, this is based on 24/7 mining without stop and assuming the current bull-ish prices of BTC.

I don't think I wlll by mining 24/7. I'm tempted to casually mine, as the idea of using my rig to make small amount of money is interesting.
Do you need to ensure that the mining runs continously to ensure a pay-out? What if I run it for say 12 hours then stop?

Apologies for the noob-ish questions, genuinely interested but at the same time a little wary.

[Rojibo]

Why don't you just download the application and give it a go?

I know some cards had a lack of thermal pads on the memory chips making them suffer when mining, worth checking if that is the case with yours. My 3080 is water cooled and I know the memory is accounted for, so haven't had any issues. If you have decent contact between the memory and heatsink, undervolt the card I don't think you'll have to run the cooler at 100%...

[Steven_RW]

anxious_ant said:

How's the thermal throttling on the memory chips for those mining on RTX30xx series?
I see the proposed solution is to set fans at max, or consider upgrading to liquid cooling.

I am a little concerned about running the fans at 100% for prolonged periods, any thoughts?

The fans will still last years I expect and even then they will be replaceable.

My friend is ETH mining with his 3090. 300watts and 125 MH/s. He has fans on 100% and you can monitor the memory T-junction temps. It is the limiting factor with the standard card unmodified. Sitting around 100c I believe on the Mem t-junction.

I think I have my 2080ti running at too high a power usage (231w) currently when compared with that table (which suggests 150w). The card is doing 61.x Mh/s but I have only mildly under clocked the core. So maybe I need to pull my core clock speeds down.

Last night was the first time I left both PCs running over night. I just wanted to build up my confidence in them before I did that with the kids bedrooms either side of this room. Safety first compared to mining a few ££

[anxious_ant]

Steven_RW said:

The fans will still last years I expect and even then they will be replaceable.

My friend is ETH mining with his 3090. 300watts and 125 MH/s. He has fans on 100% and you can monitor the memory T-junction temps. It is the limiting factor with the standard card unmodified. Sitting around 100c I believe on the Mem t-junction.

I think I have my 2080ti running at too high a power usage (231w) currently when compared with that table (which suggests 150w). The card is doing 61.x Mh/s but I have only mildly under clocked the core. So maybe I need to pull my core clock speeds down.

Last night was the first time I left both PCs running over night. I just wanted to build up my confidence in them before I did that with the kids bedrooms either side of this room. Safety first compared to mining a few ££

Thanks for the feedback. Safety first indeed. My gaming rig is in the bedroom so need to keep eye on temps. 100C with fans at 100% seems tad high in the memory chips, although that’s a very good mining rate

I will have a play around to see what’s best. Already gave CoinCorner wallet so would work well with NiceHash with the free transfer.

[LP670]

GDDR6X memory runs very hot for some reason. Im seeing memory temps of 100 degC with a +500MHz overclock, GPU core temp is only 50 degC however. Ive made a slightly steeper fan curve in MSI afterburner to boost fan speeds but i dont get anywhere near 100% fan duty, more like 65% as a peak. Ive ordered some thermal pads from Aliexpress to surround the memory chips, hoping to drop the temps by about 6 to 8 degC. Those in the know suggest the memory chips wont thermal throttle until 110 degC but id still prefer them to be cooler than they are.

[B9]

Steven_RW said:

The fans will still last years I expect and even then they will be replaceable.

My friend is ETH mining with his 3090. 300watts and 125 MH/s. He has fans on 100% and you can monitor the memory T-junction temps. It is the limiting factor with the standard card unmodified. Sitting around 100c I believe on the Mem t-junction.

I think I have my 2080ti running at too high a power usage (231w) currently when compared with that table (which suggests 150w). The card is doing 61.x Mh/s but I have only mildly under clocked the core. So maybe I need to pull my core clock speeds down.

Last night was the first time I left both PCs running over night. I just wanted to build up my confidence in them before I did that with the kids bedrooms either side of this room. Safety first compared to mining a few ££

If you haven't already, I'd consider a £20 heat/smoke alarm - just for that absolute peace of mind.

I wouldn't think the same of leaving a TV on, but these things do run hot.

[B9]

On the subject of mining, and not wanting to thread detract, is there a viable alternative coin to mine other than eth for non-GPU focussed hardware?

I have a fairly powerful CPU for databases, but only a basic integrated GPU.

[stevesingo]

Rojibo said:

Why don't you just download the application and give it a go?

I know some cards had a lack of thermal pads on the memory chips making them suffer when mining, worth checking if that is the case with yours. My 3080 is water cooled and I know the memory is accounted for, so haven't had any issues. If you have decent contact between the memory and heatsink, undervolt the card I don't think you'll have to run the cooler at 100%...

We (my 14yrold son and I) recently built a new gaming pc. To that end, the old one is sitting idle.

A320 MB
Ryzen 1400
RTX2060 Super

So, where can I find an idiots guide? Software, wallet etc?

Happy with tuning the GPU and such like.