What are your goals?
I would aim to run for 12 months at least with these cards mining Ethereum if possible, if PoS happens before, I'll have to move to another coin...
I guess the question should have been more qualified. Why Ethereum specifically? Are you going to be keeping the coins, or selling them? If you are planning on keeping them, is it for price speculation?
What happens after 12 months? Why not diversify your coins now?
What are your expectations for capital expense recovery? (some people call it ROI erroneously)
Calculating the hardware cost, and electricity, I'd assume that the capital would be recover after 7 to 8 months, assuming that ETH prices stay the same. But I'm certainly not planning to sell it quickly.
That would be a bad assumption. Difficulty will eat into your Eth rewards over time, especially if you aren't upgrading your equipment to keep up. Also, when POS is finally given a date, expect a giant surge in network hashrate and difficulty on Ethereum to happen from that moment. People will be scrambling to get the last bits of Eth that they can mine before POS hits.
What kind of expectations do your investors have?
I'm starting this on my own to be honest.
Very nice! It's best not to owe someone a cut of your proceeds.
Where are you going to be setting up the rigs?
A flat with proper connection, security and AC, with proper ventilation.
10 rigs will test your patience with the amount of noise and heat they will generate. I wish you good luck here. You will have 60 RX 580s running at say 120 Watts each... that's a 7200 Watt heater. It's certainly doable, but you will need some good ventilation, as air conditioning in a typical flat will struggle to keep up. 7200 Watts is like turning on your oven and leaving the door open. Ventilation will need to take into account the incoming air and the outgoing air. You don't want fans pulling in cool air from your air conditioned house just to ventilate it outside.
Do they have appropriate power and ventilation?
So far I didn't have any problem with one rig, and there's enough space, I'm not sure about the power/electricity instalation, it's worth to take a look at this.
You definitely have to look at this. After the efficiency loss on the PSUs, and the addition of watts from your motherboards and CPUs, you will probably be pulling more than 8000 Watts. You'll be using 36+ amps. Many apartments don't have that kind of power available to them, especially at 220V (depending on what country you are in.)
Do you have proper internet, networking and other infrastructure available?
Yes, that shouldn't be a problem, I believe.
Yes, in a flat, you could do this, I was assuming you would be looking to build in a warehouse space or something. Sometimes, it's hard to get internet, enough power, ventilation, and security at these locations. Plus, you need to have some sort of control over the rigs, since they aren't just in the next room. You will have problems, rigs crashing, etc. You need a way to automate getting them back up and running... even if it's just a VPN connection, and RDP, or something like Simple Rig Resetter, or a Raspberry Pi and some relays. You could even go with networked PDUs to reset rigs... though those are a bit more expensive. Smart outlets might work too, like a Weemo.
But since this is going to be in your flat, then some of these problems aren't too bad. But things always seem to happen when you are out of the flat, or out of town. So it's important to think about these things.
Do you have any plans for expansion?
Certainly not... like I said before, I started with one, and it didn't go bad at all, so I'm willing to increase a bit more the bet. The worst thing that could happen, might be running out of coins to be mined with these GPUs, but I don't have any information to make me think it might happen any time soon...
Like I said... there are hundreds of coins. Some are better than others, and I think there will be a market for miners for a very long time.
Hi Puwaha, and thanks a lot for your ideas! I've been mining ETH since 8 months already with the same hardware and without any problems. I'm aware about the Vega 56 and Vega 64, but prices are about twice here, compared with the Rx580 8GB, and the hashrate doesn't seems to change that much.
Vega 56 does Cryptonight at 1900+ hashes per second. They make a ton of money on those coins right now. An RX 580 only does about 700 hashes per second. Huge difference. Vega doesn't have that great a difference on Ethash, but it is significantly better. But like you said, Vegas are expensive, and very difficult to find at decent prices right now. But once they do start to come back on the market, you will see difficulties on the coins it does well erupt.
Also I thought about Nvidia 1070, as I know they have better performance in more mining algorithms, but the price is +30% compared to the Radeon once again...
Don't just look at one coin. There are coins that the 1070 mines very well, and will return a lot more money than an RX 580.
But, ultimately, it's your strategy, and you have to justify your purchases, and follow your plan.
But also a damaged gpu could be.