Topic: Mining with "obsolete" graphics cards (memory<2GB) (Read 5116 times)

It seems to me that there is nothing to discuss in this topic. outdated equipment is absolutely not profitable. Now the profitability of mining has decreased even on new equipment. Why would you reinvent the wheel? You have to buy new equipment or choose another business.

Why would you do such a thing unless you have free electricity (which is almost always fallacious because even if you aren't the one paying for electricity directly, someone else probably is)?

Mining with old GPUs like 5850 could bring in more cost than profit. Remember when dealing with old hardware you expose yourself to more risks. What if your obsolete GPU suddenly gave up on itself and caught fire? A house is expensive.

i usually mine some coins background and hold them for a later surprise.

You can used other mining applications and just point to the nicehash pool addresses.  
For example you can run xmr-stak instead of using the latest excavator or Nicehash legacy miner for even an old HD6870 with a mix of Nvidia cards also.

The lowest card I've gotten to work on Nvidia is compute 2.0 cards that are at least based on the gf100 Fermi chipset or later. Even 1GB cards such as the GTX 460,465, 560, 650, and 590, and Quadros will mine pretty good for cryptonight algo, v7, and lite including the v1 variant.
A good site to check monero hashrates is with http://monerobenchmarks.info/index.php, I have been adding the older cards as I come across them.

The lowest efficiency award goes to is the Tesla s2050,c2050,m2070 cards with the 341.81 driver and then install the older cuda 8 toolkit for Windows 7 x64.
On Windows 10 x64 , as soon as you install a Geforce card of the latest driver 391.01 or later you get cuda support for all the fermi or later cards. Even the older Tesla cards just need the basic driver installed, then the geforce driver for cuda can be installed.  They are cheap, power hungry, but if you are off grid renewable or free power, go for it.
There is a build of genoil's ethminer that can mine 3.8 mh per tesla m2070(6gb ram). use the Nicehash Legacy 1.75 ethminer.
There was redo of that github repository, I think it was called Mist. I will edit if i can find it again.

Retire them to folding@home after not being able to keep up with the AMD boys.  The fpga cards might just damned the lot of GPUs to archaic realms anyway.

If I have these cards I will exchange them for faster ones.

The 7850 and 7870 are the best option to mine with 2 GB memory. They are worth in Zcash and lately in Winminer you can use them to mine Bitcoin gold which is based on the same algorithm. However keep in mind that they are not energy efficient as they consume more power than newer generations and have less hashrate.

NiceHash Legacy is Windows-only up to date. Still need Windows driver. So we are again stuck with 8-GPU maximum for old ADM drivers (ex latest windows driver for HD6990 by AMD is Crimson 15.7).

Older GPUs need to use Nicehash legacy. Latest clients do not support older GPUs

Do you have some real experience or ever try to calculate expected profit for HD6XXX cards?
My hands-on experience prove you are wrong for HD6990. Maybe it's the only exeption, don't know for sure :-)

PS 0.05 $/kW|hour cost for local electricity

No info from NiceHash support. They offered to read FAQ once more, no useful info in it.

100% agree with this no point to mine.The electricity have to be free if you need some profit with old gen cards.

That is pretty awesome and also is nice to see the reuse of older hardware instead of just going into the EOL bins as is the case with most cards under 3gb these days.

4 x HD6990 keep $10 a day. Not bad at all for obsolete hardware.

There is absolutely no point in doing that - even if you score and mine a coin which will skyrocket,
that means you'll be earning $100 per year, instead of 10...

There is a driver specifically designed for mining. They are not very critical to the equipment. The installation of these drivers will help you. I have the same driver works AMD 7990 and RX 580. Try to contact the support NiceHash. They spetsializiruyutsya in such situations.

Is it possible to run more then 8 "obsolete" AMD GPU in one rig? I am running 4x HD6990 in one rig, Windows 10 Pro, Crimson 15.12 driver, Claymore Cryptonight AMD GPU 9.7 miner. Every HD6990 GPU contains two Cayman GPU, so system is up to it's maximum Windows capacity of 8 GPU, modern drivers that remove the limit do not support HD6990. I try to find mining Linux version but so far can't find any supporting Cayman. Please advise what OS may be appropriate for the task.

you can mine HUSH once ETH is no longer an option for those cards.

i have my useless cards 6xxx mining xmr at miniingpoolhub and then switch it to btc

Two R7 260x OC here, with further overclock by me, using MSI Afterburner. Both have 2Gb of GDRR5 Ram and as you've said yourself, you cannot use them for Ethereum Mining.
I'm currently using Nicehash Legacy, however, quite a few algorithms do not function, they crash the drivers, no matter which version I'm using.

I have managed to get reasonable earnings by mining with the Equihash algorithm, now earnings have dropped dramatically, it will only spike every once in a while and that's it.
I suppose you could try mining other Ethhash coins, like MusicCoin, (Was less profitable than Nicehash Legacy when I tried it) or mining other Equihash coins, such as ZenCash.

1 GTX 960 2GB here and several CPUs.  Electricity is included in my rent, so why not flog some older hardware.
I used Nicehash legacy and Nicehash 2.0 rediscovering mining after putting it down in 2015.
The best algorithms for the clock rate and ram available I discovered was:
1. X11 Gost alexa ccminer windows.
2. Neoscrypt via excavator windows.
3. EWBF z-cash miner to nicehash at 170-180 sols/sec (windows) It will run on a 2GB card.
4. Cryptonight via xmrig which take less than 1GB ram on the card to 1.6GB if you go large on the processing array. I am getting about 270-280 H/s at 1495 Mhz , 1024 CUDA cores.

coins 1-3 vary depending on the earnings converted to BTC. Nicehash legacy shows you the rate based on it's benchmark.
coin 4 Stays in the middle on return for time.
However, nothing stopping you from investing in mining your coins on pools to hold the exact coin, but you have to install a wallet for each type of course.
Typical earnings I found was 0.69 to $1.40 a day with nicehash. However, I am banking Cryptonight on a different pool for investment purposes. For the long haul.

For the Nvidia 9xx Maxwell cards, get the techpowerup Maxwell II BIOS tweaker to set your fans, boost, and p0 table for overclock a bit.

cheers.