I played a little bit with mining here and there. Right now I do a little bit of ZCash mining. For me this is more a hobby than actually a second income. But the small outcome from mining is actually enough for me to go on with it.
I'm actually searching for a graphics card which is cheap and has a very low energy consumption so that my engery bill isn't exploding after one night of mining
So, does anybody has experience for e.g. with the AMD R5 models? I'm a little bit afraid because these type of GPU is normally not designed to be at 100% load.
Thanks in advance
At the moment Nvidia is killing AMD in zcash mining, they are also more power efficient than AMD. If you're just doing it as a hobby, even a GTX 1050 is going to get a little bit, but I'd go at least the 3gb version of a GTX 1060. Use MSI afterburner, turn down the volts to about 80% and turn the memory clock way up. They can hash at 300 sols/s like that and draw less than 100 watts. They are around $200, you won't get a decent rate any cheaper than that.
I wouldn't say Nvidia is killing AMD in raw hashrate at all, a fury is about the same speed as a 1070 and also $120 cheaper, 470 is like 30mh/s slower than 1060 but costs $50 less. Your second point regarding efficiency is true, though.
If you don't count electricity when you mine, then you're doing it wrong. That's why Nvidia cards blast AMD's one on a large array of algos, it's because they're alot more power efficient. If you don't pay for electricity then hand's down price/performance for AMD's except on a very few select algos