This week has not been as profitable as last but still OK. Antminer L3+ and S9 had 2 batches each in stock from Bitmain this week, I secured another L3+ from the first batch but missed out on S9 first batch then got one on the next batch. They are both still available from the second batches:
https://shop.bitmain.com/main.htm?lang=en Plenty to think about where and how I am going to locate and power them, some power and ethernet cabling to do, I have also asked Western Power Distribution to fit isolator switch and upgrade my supply from 60A to 100A.
After disappointment missing out on S9 from the 1st of this weeks batches I was looking at alternative ways to blow money
and decided to go for RX Vega 56 video card to power from my Microserver as it did not handle 2x 1080Ti's well and I thought it's the PCI-e multipliers fault and that it should run 1 card OK. Unfortunately it does not even like running 1 card. Anyway I have received my Vega card, I went for the cheapest one I could find which is this one
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/power...gx-18y-pc.html , currently at £430 but it was £390 when I bought it.
What made me consider it was this article
http://www.gandalph3000.com/cast_xmr...onero-rx-vega/
It's supposed to do 1100H/s CryptoNight with stock driver and miner but mine was only doing 800-900 using NiceHash built in miner and stock driver. Changing to the XMR miner in the previously linked article made slight improvement but in combination with the linked blockchain driver it was 1500-1700, after some overclocking tweaking it is now running solid 2000H/s+ so more that 100% increase with 280W total power consumption for whole PC from the socket. I am still pointing it to the NiceHash pool for now, at the current rates it's earning about £130/month with about £18 month power costs after I recently switched to yet another electricity provider. Not bad at all for GPU, at the current rate it should pay back in less than 4 months, of course this can change and go down but the card should still hold resale value well, when I was looking on e-bay for one they were going £450 for second hand ones.
Looking at the miningrigrentals prices for Cryptonight they are some 50% higher than NiceHash so probably need to set up a rig there with a fallback to NiceHash when not rented out.
Also tried blockchain driver on my RX480/570/580 rig with the NiceHash miner but it did not make any difference, need to try out XMR miner, not sure how much but it should give some improvement for all RX cards with Vega definitely benefiting the most. Will see how it works out and then combine them all up as one rig on miningrigrentals. Another thing to mention is that for RX4**/5** cards CryptoNight has about 30-40% lower power consumption than Ether mining with the same settings.
Bitcoin Gold network will be publicly released Sunday morning, that should drive up demand for Equihash algorithm and hopefully raise the payout for it and and as more GPU's switch to Equihash there will be less mining power for others so other algorithm payout may increase as well.