Crypto currency mining

[ainarssems]

In my experience, it's the other way around. Using NiceHash, both AMD and Nvidia cards will usually show about 8-10 compatible algorithms, however, it seems that most of the time NiceHash chooses to mine Ethereum on the AMD cards, occasionally switching to Zcash. With Nvidia cards, switching algorithms seems to occur much more frequently, with NiceHash selecting more algorithms/coins such as Lbry.

That's just something I found on web so could be wrong or could be out of date. Also apparently latest generation Pascal cards can do more than previous generations so best to stick with GTX10xx cards if you are going nVidia and not lower that GTX 1060 6GB version.

When I do benchmark with NiceHash there is only 1 algorithm for CPU in my HP Micro Server Gen 8, there was 4 or 5 on GTX 760 and 13 on RX480. Oh well I forgot to say that I received my first RX480 this morning and have been doing some testing. That thing is massive, I had to cut out HDD cage from the case to make it fit.

It turns out GTX760 was very power hungry at idle PC using 150-160W, with RX480 it only uses 90-100W but a bit more while mining. PC with GTX was 270W, RX is using 306-308W while mining. I might tweak clock speed and voltage settings to see if I can reduce power consumption. Very interesting considering that GTX had 2 power connectors 8 pin and 6 pin but RX only has 1x 8 pin connector beven if RX is using more power at full load. It could also be that be that CPU is using more power and not the card itself as with GTX it was only about 5% but now is about 15% CPU load. RX is also generating a lot more income, GTX was about 0.0002 BTC/day, RX is 0.0016 BTC/ day so x8 more while using 1.14x more electricity. I might also get away with my current 550W PSU and adding second card. PSU does gives 41A on 12V single rail but it might get loud at that load due to fan speed. I measure power consumption at the wall while it looks like that power stated on PSU specifications is output power 550W and online reviews show it consuming 640W at full load outputting 550W, 492 of them on 12v rail while providing stable voltage. I think with 2 cards at full load I will be about 500W from wall.

With single card I am looking at £65-80 per month at current BTC price while the PC is consuming about £24/month. With 2 cards it should be around £130-160 per month with £39 in electricity costs.

Another issue to address is how to wake the second PSU. You'll either need a relay driven by the first PSU to connect the appropriate terminals or you'll need an adaptor like this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dual-PSU-a...-/191568455861

You just connect green wires on 24 pin plugs, it just gets connected to ground when you switch on PC. I suppose PSU wake up time could be issue when using 2 different PSU's so maybe best to stick 2 identical which should fire up in similar amount of time.