Topic: Are GPUs still relevant and for how long - page 5. (Read 10835 times)

Yeah. I said this in another thread. Mining scrypt really does help. 100 day ROI on a 7950!

according to my girlfriend there is no "cool factor" lol

Why dont you mine scrypt?  Ive almost paid off my 3 7950s in two months.  I made a big gamble on wdc that paid off though.

Hah, mine asked me last night if we'd even reached 1BTC mined in the 7 or so weeks I've been mining. She was quite suprised and relieved I said we're up to about 3½ so far. 1 card paid off, about ¼ through the next one. Well on track for my 6 month ROI estimate for the 4 cards and 2 power supplies.

I completed my first mining rig about a month ago (4 x 7950) and have been mining 24/7 since I got things going. I'm right at 2.4 GH/s, and to be honest, I'm fairly underwhelmed with my payouts. I've been mining in Slush's pool and the dramatic hash rate increase has really slashed my per block earnings. It's not just Slush though. The worldwide hash rate has gone up a dramatic 40,000 GH in the past 30 days, and Slush's pool is up 50%.

http://blockchain.info/charts

I would do some serious pondering if you are concerned about investing in a GPU rig. I have no doubt you will make your money back, it's just a question of how long.

You could, of course, try my approach. Just keep telling yourself it's a hobby until you're out of the red.

Then you can tell your spouse or friends how invisible coins paid for your computer.  

I got in by treating it as a hobby that happens to return a bit of investment back. I've dropped about $5k into model helicopters and got nothing back except the fun of flying (and needing to put more money in whenever I crash).

With bitcoin, I've dropped about $1500 and so far gotten about $500 back from mining, and love the cool facter as well.

yes OP, read the thread linked above, but just incase you're lazy 


This!  I have been mining altcoins with my rig and to say that they are dead when some of them are consistently more profitable than btc to mine screams 'i have ulterior motives'... Historically LTC has been ~30% more profitable to mine than BTC, and I will admit that it was a wash 2 weeks ago when this thread was posted, but look again and you will see that it is back up to 30% more profitable today.  Some alts even better than that.  I have made 1btc in the last week on a single rig with those 'dead' altcoins....


lol, yes, FB... why exactly do you care enough to start a new thread warning everybody to stay away from gpus?  Are we all buying them on your credit card?  I must have missed the memo, I will take some free 7950s please.   



and here is an example of it working out for another newbie...


The real point is that FB here can't see the future any better than you or me.  Read up and do what you want, don't put anything not expendable 'hobby money' into btc and don't expect to get rich ....  you'll be alright and might even have some fun doing it.

IMO, no. See https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/do-not-buy-gpus-to-mine-you-will-not-get-your-money-back-204322. With difficulty now at 15.6 million, I think it's a very bad time to buy GPUs strictly for mining. You may be able to mine some BTC and then sell them to make a tiny profit, but I don't think it's worth the risk.


I discussed that in the above linked thread--current GPUs will hash scrypt altcoins while ASICs will not. However, my theory is that GPUs will shift to scrypt coins (mainly LTC), keeping it roughly in line with BTC, until ALL GPUs have shifted over to LTC. There may be a period at that point where LTC mining is somewhat profitable, but FPGA development is already underway for scrypt, and that will doom GPU mining in the same way.


I don't really think so. They are either too expensive (e.g. ASICMINER), unavailable, or delivery date too uncertain.


Well, you could always look at stocks on btct.co, but the options are pretty limited.


The numbers have gotten even worse after the 28% jump in difficulty. A 7970 put to work today will likely make less than 1 BTC over its useful life--which is probably only until mid-October before it costs more to run than it earns when difficulty hits about 60 million (this is for 650 MH@250W). Currently, you will start at only about $2 per day, and that likely drops to $1 by the end of July.

Don't start a GPU farm!

Maybe true, but I know some folks who absolutely will not buy nvidia or vice versa, for whatever purpose.  I know plenty of gamers who have 'good enough' gaming rigs and who don't need/want to be on the bleeding edge of new tech.  The newest stuff is expensive    For example, I have 7950s in my mining machine and a 6770 in my gaming pc.  Could my games be a little bit prettier with a 7xxx?  Sure.  Does it really affect my gameplay? Nope.  I wonder how many people are waiting for the next series of cards to come out so they can grab a cheaper 7xxx card to game on?

My point is that there will always be a market for older hardware.  I really don't care who buys it or for what, just as long as people will still buy it.  You may not be getting close to what it originally cost, but it will sell.  I used to sell 10-20 year old computer parts on ebay in my old job, and always thought 'why the hell would anyone buy this??'  My boss at the time even got mad at me for trying to sell some new(er) obsolete parts for a few bucks more than I could find them anywhere else, because it was less than half the original price (they were 5+ years old).  Couldn't explain that they weren't worth that much anymore to the guy.... those parts probably still gathering dust and losing value in his office today lol

GPUs for Bitcoin mining will still make BTC, but at current prices, will stop being profitable by about 22 million difficulty.

This depends on your power cost as well. At 15 cents a Kwh, they stop being profitable closer to 19 million difficulty. If you have cheap power, you could probably extend that to 22 million, roughly.

When they stop returning significantly over power cost is a question that each individual miner has to answer for themselves.

You can also mine other scriptcoins, not just BTC. Most of the BTC mining will probably be going over to ASICs in 6 months tops.

Yeah, I would think so... it may be at a lower price point, but our GPU's , I would highly doubt will be useful in mining till that time(9xxx)...so most likely the 7xxx from miners would hit months before any new product comes out.
Worse case is one can only get 50-60% what they paid for a 7xxx GPU when done mining...but as long as your mining made up for the rest of it and had a little profit in addition then its still worth it.

exactly.. ask how many 'photographers' ever make anything back from all the lenses, etc they throw down on

And since they're twice the price of equal games wise performing nVidia cards, one could probably deduce they are bid on by hobbyist bitcoin miners, eh?  
(The ones on eBay that is)

Best Buy still sells 6xxx series cards and lower.  A quick search on ebay shows several 4xxx, 5xxx, and 6xxx series cards currently being bid on.  So, yes.

Here's my take:

Do you think there will still be a market for resale to gamers when AMD releases the 9xxx series later this year (they are skipping 8xxx)? It is not officially announced by AMD, but seems to be widely reported that its coming in late 2013.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/amd-confirms-new-volcanic-island-gpus-for-2013-launch/0115398

they are relevant as long as you can turn a profit from them over power. They can always be sold for nearly what you paid, given they are 7xxx series...gamers will always eat em up.

You have to treat it as a hobby.  Less stress.

Besides, mining it is not that expensive comparing to other hobbies. 

Not too many hobbies let you earn back a bit and in most cases, pay for themselves.

If you're starting from scratch like I was a couple months ago, here's a roadmap I've been following:

-Utilize your current machine while you wait on orders. Your current machine can probably mine a little, sometimes.
-Choose which route you'll take, and how fast you want to start. Videocards... you can have them shipped with Amazon Prime and overnighted if you so desire. FPGAs, I can't seem to find anyone who is actively making them and shipping within 1 week from order. ASICs, again, no one seemed to be actively making one for a week order when I started... now there's Block Eruptor USB's, but they are minimum batch 100*2BTC=20 thousand bucks, or get in on a group buy and wait for them to be distributed.

I decided to go video cards, since I had a spare older machine hanging around collecting dust that had PCIe slots, and since at the time FPGAs were rare to find, and ASICs were still on horizon.

Mining Rig
----
-Make a spare miner machine. Tried mining with my active everyday desktop machine... and its not really the best option to make a profit when you're NOT mining more often that you ARE.
-Grab an old motherboard with a few PCIe slots. I had an older one hanging around, Core Quad processor, 1x PCIe 16x, 2x PCIe 1x. Its 5 or so years old.
-Buy as many video cards ASAP that you can to populate your 16x slots. My suggestion would also be to start with 7950s, but theres 17 different arguments about who/what to start with. If you want, place your order for the ones in the 1x slots, but know you're also going to wait a while for those to run as you'll have to wait for...
-Buy as many riser cables as you need, INCLUDING 16-16's. My board, one of the 1x slots was obscured by the fan shroud of my 16x card... couldn't use it until my 16-16 riser came along.

For your first couple months, if your outside world can afford it, mine as a hobby, and just record your extra electric costs, the cost that you sunk into your cards, and the cost you sunk into your hardware.

Mine some coin. Use dustcoin and coinchoose to determine which at the right time, unless you're morally opposed to Scrypt, and morally opposed to any other SHA256 than BTC. Actively trade it toward BTC at Vircurex/BTC-E/Cryptsy. Invest some to buy dividend producing securities at Bitfunder or BTCT. I'd probably suggest looking at one of the partial ASICminer stocks like TAT.asicminer, until you can afford a full asicminer stock. This will give you some additional income, but not necessarily as much as your card gives you. More importantly, its relatively constant income that you aren't paying any electricity or hardware cost to... I look at it as that my already sunk card investment is averaging a few more hashes each week, for the same electricity as I pay.... and moreso that when I get a week outage from a East Coast hurricane, that I'll still make some income.

I did this until I had a full Bitcoin into stocks, and am now saving up enough crypto to pay myself back for electric bills [I've been paying the increase out of pocket, but want the whole thing to be self sufficient over time]. My goal after that is to save some up for an actual BlockEruptor USB so that my average hash/W is better (compare 1100hash/400W, and add 300h/2.5w to make it 1400hash/402.5w.) Then, throw a little more into ASICminer shares, then start paying down my initial hardware investment.

Just my roadmap... Yours will be different.

this is a bad choice, buy klondike boards