The rigs are mostly AMD R9 290s, and one 390 and a couple of 380s.
I live in Australia where power is very expensive.
I also have a machine which is used as a HTPC and for some gaming which has an Nvidia GTX1070 in it. Obviously I have used it to mine alongside the AMD rigs a lot and it blows me away sometimes to see what the Nvidia Pascal chips can do in terms of hash-rate vs power consumption. For example, today I tried DCR mining just out of curiosity. The 1070 gives me 2.5gh/s at about 130-140W. I haven't tried mining just DCR with the AMD cards but dual mining ETH/DCR one 6 GPU rig does 180mh/s ETH and 1.5gh/s DCR (with the DCR at 20% in claymore) but it's using 2kW.
This got me thinking about maybe selling the old power hungry AMD cards on Ebay and getting maybe some GTX1060s.
Can anyone give me advice about the best Nvidia cards in terms of price, power consumption and hash-rate?
Is it necessary to buy the 6GB version of the GTX1060 or are the 3GB ones enough?
I was thinking about probably mining ETH still, but maybe (depending on coin prices) mining DCR, VTC, LBRY, XMR, ZEC or whatever. Maybe actually taking the time to learn properly and get a CCMINER autoswitching multi-algo setup going.
Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.
I think that after making the calculations of buying brand new 1060 cards vs the power costs you would pay by keeping the old chips would make it a wise decision to keep the AMD cards.
How much is the electricity in AUS?
Yes I know that buying new 1060s is a big investment, but I'm also thinking about the current value of the AMD cards vs. what they will be worth in 6-12 months after another round of releases of new GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. People seem to still want to buy R9 290s and 390s - I recently sold one to a guy from Chile via Ebay. I think that in a year though, they will be worth way less.
I am paying $US0.17 per kWh unfortunately. So power usage is a big deal to me. My 1070 uses about 60% of the power that a 390 uses for the same hash rate. I'm guessing that it will be a similar situation with a 1060 vs a 380.
I don't think buying new 1060s is a big investment for developed countries like Australia. PNY offers it at only 219.99 USD as you can see in their website here. If you check at ebay you will see that the price is higher than PNY.
Here is the link in case you wanna go for the investment.
http://pny.com/geforce-gtx-1060-3gb?sku=VCGGTX10603PB