ETH mining 101

[Steven_RW]

It is worth doing the calcs of the cost of running your machine in mining mode. Then work out what your production rate is and work out if you are profitable.

Right now Etherium is abur £1300 and that makes it relatively easy to be profitable but that isn't a regular and consistent figure if you look at the relatively recent past.

I produced a spreadsheet that looks at the power draw of each GPU (you can massively reduce the power draw compared to just firing it up) and the cost of electricity and the production rate (Mega hash per second) and the current value of Etherium.

The risk is you do all the mining and actually lose money. Of course you could work hard to produce one Etherium and then just hold on to that Etherium and do the speculation thing, but rather than just diving in head first, it is worth doing your calcs. You can then reduce the value of Etherium and work out where you break even/make profit.

RW

[anxious_ant]

Steven_RW said:

It is worth doing the calcs of the cost of running your machine in mining mode. Then work out what your production rate is and work out if you are profitable.

Right now Etherium is abur £1300 and that makes it relatively easy to be profitable but that isn't a regular and consistent figure if you look at the relatively recent past.

I produced a spreadsheet that looks at the power draw of each GPU (you can massively reduce the power draw compared to just firing it up) and the cost of electricity and the production rate (Mega hash per second) and the current value of Etherium.

The risk is you do all the mining and actually lose money. Of course you could work hard to produce one Etherium and then just hold on to that Etherium and do the speculation thing, but rather than just diving in head first, it is worth doing your calcs. You can then reduce the value of Etherium and work out where you break even/make profit.

RW

Great advice here. As a beginner I’m doing lots of research and approaching this cautiously. Bitcoin is very volatile, and need to be monitored against electricity costs.

I am buying a plug which will tell me the consumption of the PC to closely monitor margins.

[Rojibo]

Personally, I would disagree, applying the same logic and not mining BTC back in 2010 because it was unprofitable doesn't age particularly well today. ETH Values can rise and fall, Gas fees can change, I'm still going to keep mining regardless because ultimately I believe decentralised solutions, and cryptoassets are the future.

[dalzo]

What sort of wear would this have on your rig/gpu in the long run?

I’ve got a 3700x/2070super and it seems and interesting thing to do, I’m generally out all day so firing it up and making a few quid sounds good

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dalzo said:

What sort of wear would this have on your rig/gpu in the long run?

I’ve got a 3700x/2070super and it seems and interesting thing to do, I’m generally out all day so firing it up and making a few quid sounds good

Look at it the same way as getting a 911 GT3, then leaving it in the garage as you don't want to add miles or wear

Take a look at Nicehash, it's soo simple. Their new Quick Miner literally does it all for you, plus you can use the inbuilt OCTune to tune your GPU for best performance (low gpu clock, higher mem clock), then drop the max power to the card to make it more efficient. Have a read on the nicehash site and it'll explain all.

[Rojibo]

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-c...

Nvidia halving the hashrate on the 3060 cards with a software limit, I can't say I agree with this, it's your right to do with the hardware as you'd wish. That said, they also appear to be launching a dedicated line of mining cards using GPUs that otherwise don't meet gaming specs:

[Durzel]

As an outsider to this, I'm curious - do people even attempt to rationalise the energy consumption, etc? is it purely about the crypto gravy train or is there a sizeable part of the community that actually believe in the notion of decentralised currencies being a real thing?

It feels and smells at the moment that the more ridiculous the speculation is, particularly now where its in the mainstream media, the less likely those involved in mining etc are "true believers", instead are just burning masses of energy to makes themselves rich, or attempt to, purely and simply.

it seems like an incredibly selfish endeavour to me, particularly given the quantifiable effects of power consumption, etc. If it was in service of something greater, I could understand it - but I wonder if that ideaology been lost?

[Rojibo]

I'm a big believer in it, It's not just decentralised currencies but also decentralised compute, smart contracts, code that can't be taken down when it's out there. It's the next evolution in computing, especially as we see more and more censorship from big tech.

I must admit however I pay about as much attention to my electricity consumption as I do my MPG.

[Durzel]

Rojibo said:

I'm a big believer in it, It's not just decentralised currencies but also decentralised compute, smart contracts, code that can't be taken down when it's out there. It's the next evolution in computing, especially as we see more and more censorship from big tech.

I must admit however I pay about as much attention to my electricity consumption as I do my MPG.

Fair enough. That attitude I can understand and respect.

[Rojibo]

Durzel said:

Fair enough. That attitude I can understand and respect.

You're always going to have speculators doing.. speculator things, and I will admit that was me at first, but then I got more drawn into it. I think when I started looking into IDEX it really clicked, a decentralised asset exchange that can't be taken down, with everything guaranteed by smart contracts. There are people that like to argue about the value and such, without considering the wider implications of what the technology does. I'll admit I find that quite tiresome and have given up with the cryptocurrency thread on here, except for the occasional wind up post

I'm excited to see what the future will bring, and you do raise a valid point around energy consumption, one not strictly linked to consumption by miners either.

[Steven_RW]

It is also FUN. The project of building your rig, tweeking it to be as productive as possible (overclock the memory to the sky, underclock the gpu core, pulling down the power limit to the bottom stable figure) is great fun. Monitoring it all and looking at your cooling solutions (cooler requires less watts to stable/reliably produce the same MegaHash) and so on. As a geek that has built my own waterlooped 2080ti with i9 9900Kf it was fun to try a different challenge other than higher frames per second. I am really enjoying it.

I have leaned off my rig to the minimum power consumption with an efficient power supply and so on. Also leaving the window open and letting the cool air outside do some of the cooling of the PC radiators and heat sinks for free rather than jacking up my fans. It is good fun to mess with and look at the spreadsheets to work out your numbers too. What gpu works best? It isn't always the fastest one as you also need to consider the amount of Kilo Hash per Watt. My 2080ti is much more efficient than my 1080. The 1080 takes 100 watts to produce 25.9 Mega Hash (259 kilohash per watt) and my 2080ti takes 140 watts to produce 61.3 Mega Hash per second (435 kilo hash per watt).

You can also work out how much return you get from a new card and how long it would take for it to complete its return on investment (pay for itself).

Also dreaming of becoming rich is fun to. As much of a dream as it is. I am currently working out if I would take my payment and turn it into £ or $ or leave in Eth and speculate. All good fun and a new project.

I am not contradicting all the other good points of view that others said above, just adding my lens.

RW

[Jim1064]

I'm new to mining and managed last weekend to get it started. I've no idea if I'm using the best miner, pool etc. any advice? Here is how I do it:
Minerstat worker management (one worker so far)
Miner: Phoenix-eth
Pool: eu1.ethermine.org
Wallet: MyCrypto
I can see on ethermine.org Dashboard how my earnings are developing

Am I doing this right or is it unnecessarily complicated?

Edited by Jim1064 on Friday 19th February 00:20

[Jim1064]

I'm using a new PC with an MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. I'm new to high end graphics cards as well as to mining.

As standard (untuned) it is making around 85MH/s, and the temperature as indicated by MSI Afterburner is in the mid-50s centigrade which seems quite cool, having read the various posts above.

I get the feeling there is quite a bit of tuning possible, but I have no idea how to begin. Can it all be done in Afterburner?

Other question: the CPU is sitting there doing nothing - and it's an i9 10850K so quite powerful. Is there any way to use the CPU to add to the MH/s rate?

[anonymous-user]

Jim1064 said:

I'm using a new PC with an MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. I'm new to high end graphics cards as well as to mining.

As standard (untuned) it is making around 85MH/s, and the temperature as indicated by MSI Afterburner is in the mid-50s centigrade which seems quite cool, having read the various posts above.

I get the feeling there is quite a bit of tuning possible, but I have no idea how to begin. Can it all be done in Afterburner?

Other question: the CPU is sitting there doing nothing - and it's an i9 10850K so quite powerful. Is there any way to use the CPU to add to the MH/s rate?

I used to play with settings until a good compromise, there are loads of setting already online foe graphics cards, but i always ran cooler and remember in the summer to either turn them off or invest in aircon.

you can't use the cpu to mine the same coin as GPU, but you can duel mine different coins.

I was lucky a few times mining pools went down so ended up mining with very few other people, solo, and made more in weekend than a month, but doesn't happen a lot, and was an alt.

One thing people forget is there are hdd miners as well, not a lot but you can also mine them with a few tb hdd, and adds to roi.

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 19th February 00:32

[audi321]

Could I ask some advice? I have a chance to buy 5 x 1080ti rig mining ETH. The current owner reckons £500/mth is reasonable expectation.

1. Is that right as far as amount is concerned - seems a lot
2. How loud are the fans (I think 3 per card, so 15)
3. What's the chances of failure? I think they're 2 years old already
4. What is 10x and the chances of ETH going that way?
5. How much heat will they generate? Will I need aircon in summer?
6. Can these things be overclocked or is that just not possible/feasible?

New to all this sorry for the dumb q's.

Cheers all.

Edited by audi321 on Friday 19th February 00:56

[anonymous-user]

i was mining with gtx 1070 and a 1080ti 4 years ago, and now the returns are the same, how long, well as soon as the chinese build more asics.

https://whattomine.com/ to work out costs it is pretty accurate, just put in electricity cost, but looks like 20 quid a day profit from my looks.

So 400 quid on Eth a month. The issue is for how long but mining is more for fun.

i think the 1080ti run quite hot so i used to turn them off in the very hot days.

The bigest issue i had was drop outs randomly and having to reset, so keep eye on that. It all depends how much it costs really.

Just checked ebay they are selling each for 450-500 quid, ffs.

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 19th February 01:39

[halo34]

Jim1064 said:

I'm using a new PC with an MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. I'm new to high end graphics cards as well as to mining.

As standard (untuned) it is making around 85MH/s, and the temperature as indicated by MSI Afterburner is in the mid-50s centigrade which seems quite cool, having read the various posts above.

I get the feeling there is quite a bit of tuning possible, but I have no idea how to begin. Can it all be done in Afterburner?

Other question: the CPU is sitting there doing nothing - and it's an i9 10850K so quite powerful. Is there any way to use the CPU to add to the MH/s rate?

Afterburner can be used. If you google it, there are nicehash settings to give you a ballpark. I think its memory increase, core clock decrease and to lower power consumption the power limit is reduced. Might squidge you up to 90s?

Best thing to do is get afterburner, reduce the voltage and the core - then start bringing the memory up slowly until it starts to complain or the rate decreases.

NB watching temps - but you can set custom fan curves in afterburner too for extra cooling.

Edit - Nice has a good guide on clocking and some tables to get you started.

[B9]

The Spruce Goose said:

One thing people forget is there are hdd miners as well, not a lot but you can also mine them with a few tb hdd, and adds to roi.

Edited by The Spruce Goose on Friday 19th February 00:32

Can you expand on this please? I have a rather sucky GPU but a meaty CPU. Happy to mine anything if profitable.

[anonymous-user]

B9 said:

Can you expand on this please? I have a rather sucky GPU but a meaty CPU. Happy to mine anything if profitable.

You need Hardrives.

Burstcoin is one, https://burstcoincalculator.com/

You can mine with a CPU, Monero and Dogecoin. I've never done it myself but should be straightforward really.

[paulrockliffe]

The Spruce Goose said:

You need Hardrives.

Burstcoin is one, https://burstcoincalculator.com/

You can mine with a CPU, Monero and Dogecoin. I've never done it myself but should be straightforward really.

NiceHash just gives you a tick box to turn CPU mining on and off you go. But a comparable era CPU is pissing in the wind compared with it's comparable GPU.