Topic: AMD FirePro S10000 Server Graphics Card (Read 22288 times)

Have you even checked the prices? You pay 2400$ for 5 Mh/s and they aren't even in production yet...

Don't throw away your rig man. Those asics are not going to rape scrypt coins like bitcoin asics did.

Anyone know where I can look at sample configuration files for FirePro cards?  I havent seen much out there for FirePro cards.  I know they're not ideal, but I got one for free and its not being used for anything else.

- VR

I think the hobby aspect is a big reason that a lot of people got into it.  The problem is that it's starting to get to the point that you really can't just have a video card or a CPU running and expect to make anything significant.  Could you make a few bit cents every month?  Sure, but there's a few things you (and anyone else that's new to BTC) needs to understand.

1 ) The amount of BTC your mining equipment will generate will go down over time as more people get into mining and the difficulty goes up.

2 ) The cost of power your mining equipment will use will stay the same, or even go up over time.

3 ) The reward is about to be cut in half to 25 BTC.  That happens every 210,000 blocks (which takes about 4 years), and is probably going to happen in the next two weeks, so the amount of BTC your equipment will generate will automatically be cut in half.

4 ) There's a very good chance that ASIC's will arrive soon and pretty much blow GPU/CPU mining out of the water.  A really good/efficient CPU can generate .1-.2 Megahash for every watt of power it uses.  A good/efficient GPU can generate 1.5-2.5 Megahash/watt.  FPGA's are up next with 20-25 Megahash/watt.  The next evolution are ASIC's and there's estimates that they will be able to generate upwards of 1000 Megawash/watt.  If they do hit, difficulty will skyrocket over a month or two and could easily end up 20-50 times higher than it is now.

5 ) The $ / Bitcoin exchange rate may or may not increase in value as the difficulty goes up.  Honestly, this is almost impossible to accurately predict.  One would hope they would increase in value since it's harder to get them with the reward cut and difficulty increase, but you never know.  There's very good arguments that BTC could be a $1000 per coin in a year, and there's very good arguments that they could be worth $0.01 per coin in a year.  

6 ) Do not spend any money on mining equipment or buying BTC that you can't afford to live without/lose.

7 ) You can easily approximate what your cost to mine and what you'd receive in bitcoins will be right at the current moment, but never assume that will be what you can do long term.

8 ) The next 2-3 months are going to be a wild ride if ASIC's do come into play and it's anybody's guess where things will end up.

So, for the calculation part, here's a simple example that you can run through.

First, check and find out how much you pay per kilowatt hour for electricity from your power company.  Once you have that, determine how much wattage your 'mining' equipment will be using.  You can get a cheap Killawatt meter and see exactly what you are drawing from the wall, or you can just guesstimate by looking online to see what your mining equipment will use at full load.  Once you have those pieces, it's a simple matter of math.


Multiply your Kilowatt hours per month times how much your power company charges per kilowatt hour and there's your power cost per month.

So, for our example, say you are mining with a Radeon 6770 which can be found online for about $90.  That card will hash about 200 MH/s and draws around 110 Watts, so...


Now let's say your power company charges 10 cents a kilowatt hour (which is actually pretty low).  


At the difficulty/conversion rate right now, those 200 MH/s will mine approximately 1.82 BTC/Month worth about $19.97


Assuming nothing changes (which as we know, is not going to happen), your payback on that card would be 7.5 months, and it will likely be much longer as you will be generating less BTC over time.

When the reward cut hits in the next two weeks, that card will still use $7.92 worth of power, but only generate .91 BTC/$9.98 worth or a whopping $2.06 in profit, making your payback on the card now 43 months+

To make matters worse, if ASIC's hit and difficulty jumps by 20-50x, your BTC generation drops by 20-50x as well.  We would hope that price of BTC/$ goes up and the BTC you do generate are worth more (hopefully enough to cover your costs), but it's relatively easy to see how you could end up spending more on power than you are generating in BTC.  And while it might still be a fun hobby to mess around with, even if you are losing money, at that point you would be much better served to instead buy BTC directly than attempting to mine.  If it costs you $5 to mine $1 of Bitcoins, you have $1 worth of Bitcoins.  Had you taken those $5 and bought $5 worth of Bitcoins, you have $4 more in Bitcoins that if you had mined.

Sorry if this comes off as condescending or being crotchety, as it's not meant to be that.  I'm just seeing a lot of people not doing any research and coming in thinking, "I can print money with my computer and become rich, sweet!"  Unfortunately, mining Bitcoins doesn't work that way, at least not anymore

So a lot of it is about knowing what to watch?  I'm all for the hobby aspect of BTC, but I would like to make some money with it.  I have a feeling there is rumor going around that the people who got involved earliest and stored the most BTCs are the only ones who will be successful with it.  While it 'may' be true, after seeing what Knight did with all of his BTC, I don't know if I believe it.

I'm a practical guy myself.  I make some mistakes, but I try my best to look forward.  I'm not about to dedicate time, hardware, and energy to a bunch of fat hackers who live in their mom's basement and crack facebook profiles all day.  I'm not trying to be mean, but I've already seen what BTC can do to people.  I just have to make sure it doesn't happen to me.

Good advice!

Yeah, what Crazy said.  Whatever you do, do a bit of research before you pull the trigger and do some basic calculation on what you are going to spend on equipment/power vs. what you expect to make on BTC.  Assume that difficulty will continue to increase and what you make today will be a fraction of what you'll make in 1, 3 or 6 months, especially with the reward half and possible ASIC's on the horizon.  Also, don't order/pre-order anything with any money you can't afford to lose.  Assume anything you spend on Bitcoins is basically put in a shredder and then if you profit, awesome.  Too many people spend money they don't really have and then get pissed off when BTC takes a 20% dive or they slowly watch their income dwindle as difficulty ramps up.

#1: Don't panic. The market WILL go thru some rough patches here and there, esp when both the reward half AND the ASICs hit at about the same time. Uncertainty breeds fear, and fear breeds panic, and panic breeds sell. Just keep chugging along, and when the market stabilizes, you have all those coins to spend.

That's a good point.  I'll look into getting a nice single SC instead of mining my brand new GPU. 

Seeing as how you know so much about BTC mining (ie the change between CPU and GPU mining and how it affected the market), what tips would you give to a brand new miner?

It's no different than when everyone who was CPU suddenly had to deal with the influx of GPU miners.  Bitcoin will not tank long term due to ASIC's flooding the market.  Miners will need to adapt to survive, like they have been for the last 4 years, or get left behind, it's as simple as that.  Anyone that's made a serious investment in GPU mining has long ago made up their mind whether to pre-order ASIC's and stay in the game, or sell off their farms.

Once again though, I wouldn't spend a dime on any new GPU mining hardware for the next few months until we see if ASIC's shake out or not.  Unless you're buying it for gaming purposes, you may very well just be throwing money out the window.

I think that the difficulty will either go up or BTC will crash if ASICs flood the market.  Too much time and money has been invested in GPU rigs for them to just go out the window.  The speeds BFL are predicting are huge, but perhaps not market feasible.  There has to be some sort of threshold for miners; otherwise the next line of ASICs may hit 1000 GH per unit.  Maybe even a TH (basically 1,000GH).

I may be influenced by having ordered my first mining reg recently, and it does only have a 7970.  I'm just hoping to get a nice start in the mining industry.

I never said it's 5x faster for mining. I said it's 5x faster in professional applications, which is what this card is designed for.

You don't need support for mining, if it doesn't work it's because the card is broken and you have to RMA it.

And it's not 5x faster in mining, it's impossible, it would have to use 5x power

Look up benchmarks in professional applications, tho. It's 5x the price, but >5x faster! And you get way better support.

AMD and Nvidia have a racket going with these 'Pro' cards.  They're usually the same GPU's as consumer chips with some extra memory, bandwidth or driver tweaks thrown in.

I would like to add that this is a SERVER card. It has tons of features useful for servers and their applications etcetcetc

But for mining all these features are happily useless. So a normal 7970 is much much cheaper and do the same.

(also, the next month ASIC should be released, wich will make GPU mining useless)

Well it is a server case, not a PC one.  I imagine they are pretty fine with 27 fans it has in there.

Thanks for the tip on crossfire too.

Holy hell, that looks like such a cluster f**k. I wonder what the temps are on that thing.

Crossfire is for gaming, it's useless for bitcoin mining 

Weird, no crossfire?

3599 vs 999