As a total GPU miner newbie; those are my questions. Any help would be much appreciated:
I do have an old Mobo/CPU combo lying dead for years (AM2+ I believe, having Phenom x3 720 as the CPU but cannot check the Mobo and the chipset right now).
The board does support Crossfire/has 2 PCI-e ports.
- Would it matter if the ports are running 16x or 8x? Is 8x PCI-e already fast enough for mining?
- As mining does not use Crossfire, running a 280x with an 7950/290 is completely fine?
- Of course it does vary greatly depending on the fluctuations and coin choice but is 2.5$ /day with a 280x a decent number? (2.5$ as net profit).
Thanks in advance!
Hi.
Generally mining is as demanding as gaming (actually if you mine 24/7 mining wears down your graphics card a lot more than gaming). I never tested it but I am pretty sure that if your card needs a PCI-e 16x port you will not be able to run it on an 8x port at all no matter wether you use it for gaming or mining. But I guess it would be safe to try. My guess is that windows wouldn't even recognize it correctly.
As far as crossfire goes: You can run multiple crads just fine. for mining you do not even need the crossfire bridges because the cards are accessed independently by the mining software. All that is important is that the drivers are installed and the cards get both recognized by windows.
For the profit I cannot tell exactly since I only mine bitcoin. In my view making any profit at all with GPU mining is decent. Make use of it as long as it lasts because like was said before: When the new scrypt ASICs hit the scene GPU mining will once again be dead.
