XMR has made my Vegas profitable to run again!
...at least for the next few days.
...not yet at the ugly $0.16/KWh I'm dishing out for power, but if it keeps going in the right direction, it might just fairly soon!
There's no secret though. Prices need to go up for profits to rise as well. Wonder how long it'll take for Asics (and FPGAs) to kick into gear and up the diff on CN/r.
Oh btw have any other coins forked to CN/r yet, or only XMR thus far?
Is it still true to say that Cryptonight algo (including the forks) is still lowest in power consumption compared to all the other algos?
Yes it's the lowest power usage mining algo out there. I am actually trying to build a enclosed rig which is more living room friendly when the guests or family arrive. Seems with adequate cooling you can easily do 5-6 GPUs in a server chassis without the temps going up or without the fans going max speed.
XMR however is not as easy as ETH to set up properly. The bios needs to be difficult and if you take the time to tune each GPU individually you can get decent power efficiency.
So it's a good thing that it's hard to tune because most lazy miners might just stay on ETH using Claymore. Should keep the difficulty low temporarily.... until the FGPA arrive again that is.
I would say XMR mining is consuming less power only by a small margin now...
Here is some numbers from my test rig with 2 x Sapphire Pulse RX 574 cards.
Here goes
system idle 43 Watts
XMR mining: 240 Watts, Hashrate: 1870H/s 1150/1975
ETH mining: 255 Watts, hashrate: 61 MH/s 1100/2000
The XMR power usage is average figure since it fluctuates between 230 and 260 Watts. I probably need to tune the GPUs more with XMR..
Even rebooting the rig with the same GPU config will yield a different hashrate/power figure. With ETH mining it is really easy...
My other rigs are all mining just ETH, just for the of configuring..
You know, the "this or that algo is consuming less power than xyz" is a bit of a fallacy.
It all depends how much you want to achieve.
Whilst I agree that ETH doesn't gain much from upping core clocks and voltage, XMR scales better. Nobody says you should run your Vegas at 1408/1100 to mine XMR. You could achieve quite a lot more hashrate for 10-20% more power to the core.
On the other side of the spectrum, ProgPow sucks everything out of your cards, but you don't have to run them at these speeds. You can underclock/-volt them and they'll certainly draw less power.
Lyra2z was a prime example. Remember in early 2018... The GPU miners we had available achieved crap hashrates... but everyone was claiming "oh but it's so power efficient". A year and a few "optimisations" later and that efficiency is completely gone. You've got a lot more hash out of your GPUs, but they now draw at least as much as any other algo.
Much respect to that man. 
