Topic: Is buying used R9 290X worth it? - page 2. (Read 539 times)

my advice is you better buy rx 580 than the old type like r9 290 ..
because the diff coins will go up every once a month, you still have to know that. in the next year your r9 290 may no longer work, almost every country has its own mine at home, so soon the level of difficulty to mine will rise.

Better to wait a couple of weeks and see what will be going to happen with the market. Market condition at this time plus many issues about new devices might give you a chance to get a card with better speed/power (cheaper also).

Personally, I'm also an R9 user. A few of my rig use 290, 290X, 390, 390X. My electricity cost higher than yours. Still, I can pay my electricity bill plus a box of pizza. 

With hardware and electricity cost that was cheap, it is still worth to use that rx290 for mining the only downside is the longevity of the hardware of how many months of year can it stand, the only way to make profit is to hold the coins, don't sell it immediately after mine. Consider also the electricity is still part of the investment and not part of the operation cost for short term goal.

I don't know where you are getting the RX 580 is a 'one trick pony' compared to the 290X. The RX 580 does better at ETH and about the same on the other algorithms you mention. It also does it at half the power consumption.

RX 580 4GB Neoscrypt ~970 KH/s:



RX 580 4GB Equihash ~333 H/s:



RX 580 4GB Cryptonight ~935 H/s:

Wait a week or two and try to get a RX 470/570 for that price.

It's a good GPU however they are crazy loud and bad power consumption.

You can forget dual mining on them.

If profitability doesn't change and you're mining with Nicehash (or just plain Ethereum as it's currently one of the most profitable coins you can mine with the 290X), you'll break even in around 11 months. Whether or not you think that's good is your own interpretation, though I will say that if the card does last that long then it's a good investment (considering most other investments aren't as lucrative as mining), even though profitability may have been greater in the near past. When you're buying a used GPU from pretty much anywhere (but especially eBay) you're taking a gamble that the card wasn't overclocked, even if the description says it hasn't been. eBay is buyer sided, but I often see people with broken GPUs shortly after the return period ends.

everything you write is exactly how the things are

myself i have several series of AMD cards, R9 280,280X, 390, HD 7950 and RX 480, 580
The smaller ones i got them used since 8-10 months (from gamers) ago at about $120 each and they are
still working fine, for sure they made me profits

the 390, which is like yours, i also bought it from a gamer at $300. It's a beast!
i had it rebulling once and it works great, 30H/s for ETH

My opinion regarding your thoughts
i bought those used cards before the panic in the GPU market, in which every card disappeared. People wasn't aware of the mining staff yet and the cards i bought were "clean", just used only for gaming.
nowdays how can be sure if this 290x that you saw on ebay wasn't mining 24/7 with overclocked bios and probably it's life is coming to an end near soon...?

Hope that helped in expanding your thoughts

If you are familiar with the downsides - as it seems you are - then go for it.
I have some mining since 2014 or so and still going strong.
They are beasts as you say, but noisy and hot!

Hello people.

We all know current situation on the GPU market is not exactly bright. So I was thinking about actually buying used R9 290X AMD cards. Now this card is old, but its a beast of a card still. I have one at home mining ethereum at 28.2 MH/s without overclocking. I just have the bios moded for lower consumption. If I OC this beast it mines 31 MH/s but its not stable. It seems my card had not the most quality RAM.

Anyway its not only ETH hash rate that is impressive but also other algos. It does (stock settings):

- Ethereum: 28.2 MH/s
- Neoscrypt: 1 MH/s. Yes it does 1000 KH/s. Very impressive
- Equihash (ZCash): 360 Sol/s
- Cryptonight: 760 H/s

Its a very versatile and powerfull card. Now ofc the bad part. Its a power hog. It can literally use 280-300 W from the wall. It can be optimized but I did not yet try how much low I could get. Now the good thing is I pay around 0.06$ per KWh so electricity is cheap here. The card can be bough at around 280$ on Ebay.

The question I can't seem to answer is: Is it worth it?

I mean with current prices of cards its a great deal looking power / price wise. Also while RX 580 and other newer cards are mostly one trick ponnies this card is very versatile and can mine basically any popular coin efficiently. But yea the consumption is horrible.

Your thoughts on it?