Topic: Is rig building still profitable? - page 4. (Read 41318 times)

The BTC value is going to go down, way down.  Its quite simple, before 2 days ago I had never heard of bitcoin, I have a 6950 sitting idle that is now generating bitcoins, there are millions of people exactly like me who have never heard of bitcoin, there is 0 out of pocket expense for them to start generating bitcoins at a much more efficient rate than you can, and they dont have to buy anything.  As they come online the production of bitcoin will explode and the price will fall dramatically, how much, quite simple, down to the rate at which they are barely profitable from an energy standpoint, for me since it costs me $0.24 to generate a bitcoin, I would guess the value of bitcoins to be $0.25 - $1 in the long term.  Of course as the value drops more people will stop producing bitcoins since its not worth the time or hassle leaving the price somewhere above the raw energy costs.

The higher the temperature, the shorter the lifespan. It's not a matter of drawing a line at a certain temperature.

Remember, we're not talking about the card just dying 10 minutes after you start your miner. It's a question of reduced card lifespan and MTBF.

Voltage is a big killer too, for anyone who might be considering serious overclocking.

I wouldn't look at a mega-rig as a short term lotto, but more like a long-term investment. If it cost $1k to only mine $500 worth of BTC, it doesn't make sense in the short term, but if a year from now that same BTC that you spent $1k to create was now worth $2k in value, then you have a good long term investment.

Anything above 60? pff..no way..radeon cards for example are ok with temperatures way above that.

Where a work the hardware that runs above 65 C burns out faster than the stuff that runs below 55 C at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Then again all the lasers and electron guns don't help much.  I have already wrecked my old HD4850 running constantly @ 73 C so I assumed that the same trend I see at work would apply to mining.

Yes, it will.  Consistent full load will create more heat than normal usage.  Heat is a major factor for hardware failure.  Anything above 55-60C for long periods of time is probably contributing to what manufacturers would call "abnormal wear".

I dont think the OP was positing that mining will burn your shit out tomorrow, but unless you are water-cooled or are otherwise extremely thermally balanced, make no mistake, you are subtracting life from your hardware.

No it won't.

I don't think building a new computer a week from now just for mining will be profitable. I think the value of bitcoins are going down in the near future anyways. If you want to build a gaming computer or upgrade your current nvidia 9600 and mine when you aren't gaming you might not get back your money but you will recoupe some of your investment.  Remember mining will burn out your hardware faster than normal use.

This was my initial thinking, but then I started accounting for predicted difficulty increases and it looked less hopeful; clearly I'm new here, so feel free to point out any foolish mistakes, but here's how I was looking at it:
The $16/day figure applies at current difficulty, which should last for another 10 days or so (probably less, looking at the figures on blockexplorer.com), so that nets you $160 total. A guesstimate based on the previous data would optimistically suggest a difficulty jump of 40% (again, quite possibly more), reducing the daily income to (18.72/1.4)-2.7=$10.67. Say the difficulty levels off somewhat, you might make a further $130 or so at that price, followed by another 20% jump, giving a subsequent daily income of (18.72/(1.4*1.2))-2.7=$8.44. Your daily revenue has halved in less than a month, and break-even might take three months total. Investing in more hardware can't help with break-even time, since Mhash/$ remains largely the same, although it will make the absolute potential profits higher once you do pay off the investment (at the price of a higher risk if the investment is not paid off for any reason).

Of course, the key point left out here is the changing value of the bitcoins themselves - the overall trend seems to be that value very approximately tracks difficulty, so if you're confident that the increases will continue to more or less offset the difficulty increases then my 'diminishing returns' theory is totally irrelevant. It also doesn't account for the resale value of the rig, which diminishes, but may be enough to generate an overall profit once mining itself becomes unprofitable.

Basically, I'm not saying that mining is a bad idea, just that it's a moderately high-risk investment which is inextricably linked to the assumption that the bitcoins themselves will continue to increase in value faster than the increase in mining difficulty.

you can get 5850 for less than $150, and they hash at 250-300 MH/s, even 400MH/s if it's overclocked (convery did it).

yeah, it has always been that way
and you always tell people, they shouldn't invest into new rigs,
yet those that do made profit and probably already paid off their new rigs.

very strange that mining for me has always been like "assuming difficulty rises, but price doesnt, it might become non-profitable in about 3months",
it was like that in october, when i bought my first ATI card, it was exactly the same when i bought the second card in december,
it was still the same when i bought 2 other cards in february and again 2 cards about 2-3weeks ago, everytime i had at least 3month in profit assuming the price doesnt rise at all.

and guess what?
today that same (pessimistic) calculation tells me, that mining might become non-profitable around september,
so the risk to take isn't any bigger than it was half a year ago.

but we all know why you tell everyone not to invest in rigs.  

Two long days to set up a rig?  Good lord, I don't think it's ever taken me that long.  My first build took all of 3 hours to put together, and the most recent ones have been done in under an hour.  Install OS, install drivers, ready to go in under 2.

Anyone who takes two long days to put together a computer really shouldn't be putting them together to start with.