Topic: What is a profitable rig to mine with? (Read 1513 times)

Do some research before you buy because a rig that might make some $$$ now will suck in the future, check this site it is better explained there: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

And use the calculator to see how much of a profit you can make with your miner

At the risk of stating the obvious... the hash rate on many networks is growing exponentially, not linearly.  I did the math, and decided not to mine because of it.

Here's an example in Bitcoin (probably the worst choice)

The BFL BF0005G cost $274 + SH totals at around $300

If you could use Star-Trek shipping and teleport it to your office, you could start mining tonight when the difficulty was still at 31 mil.  So lets map that out.

In Aug @ 31 mil diff, you would make 2.201 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Sep @ 53 mil diff, you would make 1.295 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Oct @ 90 mil diff, you would make 0.761 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Nov @ 153 mil diff, you would make 0.448 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Dec @ 261 mil diff, you would make 0.263 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Jan @ 443 mil diff, you would make 0.155 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Feb @ 754 mil diff, you would make 0.091 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Mar @ 1.2 bill diff, you would make 0.053 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
In Apr @ 2.1 bil diff, you would make 0.031 BTC and pay 0.036 BTC in power
{stop here, out of power}

Looks good, If you start tonight with the BFL you will make about $200, BUT, if for some unimaginable reason, you don't get the BFL till next week your profits will drop to about $120, or if it is delayed 2 weeks, you drop to about $75, and if it is delayed 3 weeks, down to $27, beyond that it is a loss.

So in the above example, it is really a product of "how fast can they ship you the rig".

Don't know about asicminer, but BFL was delayed 8-12 weeks last I saw, and had a terrible reputation for delay.

I can suggest you buy a jalapeno at BFL for about 300$, it give 5-7 ghash...  but theyre late on shipping  and you wont received it for september 2014.  I bought one in april.. and they are now shipping the nov 12 ...

Otherwise BTC guild sell USB Block Erupters for about 0.6 btc.. at 300 Mh,low power consumption .. fo 1.8 BTC you get 1 Ghash...  so its about 200$...  for 100$ more you get 5 GHash with BFL  Jalapeno...  im not going this way...

For now i have about 1 Ghash with:
1x ATI 5830 at 305 Mhash
1x ATI 5970 at about 700-750 Mhash

My 5970 is my main gaming card but im looking for a 7950 or 7970 (249$ vs 319$ on Ncix) to upgrade for gaming and ill keep my 5970 mining with the 5830 as long as it runs


Also you could invest in AsicMiner shares... like on Havelock... or mining contract on Cloudhashing.   I just bought some XBOND but it wont give me a fortune

i guess there is a major technical switch right now, like when the GPU took over CPU....  now is Asicminer over GPU ... get on the boat or you'll mine only dust

asic miner is the best i think

I got my 7.5 GH/s Jalapeno two months ago and that thing has already paid for itself like 2.5x over. The Singles and Little Singles will be on order delay for a LONG time, but the Jalapenos should be caught up by October. Maybe. Possibly.

Granted, I ordered mine in September of last year.

One key questions is not: "What is the best hardware in hash/$ terms?", but "What is the best hardware in hash/$ terms that you can actually get now?".
If you have a wait a month (or 2, or 3,...) before a particular piece of hardware would be delivered, that is another month of difficultly rising, and your expected return diminishing.
Every time the difficulty level increases, you will make less money from the same amount of hashing power.

Butterfly Labs is the best.

Asic Miner

I think Avalon Asic

You can also try mining primecoin (XPM) with CPUs. dedicate 20-50 cores to it and sit on the coins as they should be worth something when bitcoin and the 50-60 other alt-coins loose some of the wind in their sails. XMP is the only coin that is still easier to mine with CPUs.

Amazon ec2 cloud may also be a good place to start some XPM mining.

Search this forum for XPM mining and learn more.. good luck..

If you want the hassle taken out of knowing which scrypt coin to mine and when, take a look at middlecoin.com - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-profit-switching-auto-exchanging-pool-wwwmiddlecoincom-259649 - The pool automatically switches over to the most profitable coin that is configured by the pool OP, coins such as LTC/NVC/FTC and a fair number of others are ready to be mined if their profitability jumps up.  On top of that, the mined scrypt coins are automatically traded for BTC on a few exchanges and you receive a payment in BTC straight to your wallet.

I've been mining here for a week now and have consistently made more money than doing it myself or mining a coin such as LTC alone.  I hope the pool OP introduces VARDIFF or changes the diff for mining faster block coins to a lower number than the 512 it is set at, you do see a few stales and rejects with this high diff and I believe that lowering the diff for miners would allow an even greater return for everyone using the pool, operator included.

There is another multi coin mining pool (http://www.multipool.us) which does a similar thing of mining the most profitable coin at the time, but you still have to trade the coins yourself if you want BTC back.

I have a single 6950 and get a pretty steady 400KH/s in scrypt alt coins, but I don't even consider mining BTC. 6950's are going for about $160 now. I bought mine for games, so I didn't invest anything in the hardware just for mining.

For the "little guy", knowing what to mine and when to sell is at least as important as sheer hashpower.

As long as Cryptsy and their traders believe they have value, then they have value.

If BFL was shipping their products in a timely fashion they would certainly be a better value but from a standpoint of not waiting until 2014 given the current TAT over there the GPUs are something that will allow you to start mining right away.

I'm not sure what you mean by most people using AMD and Nvidia as opposed to an offbrand. Are you referring to brands like Sapphire, ASUS, Powercolor, etc? And I don't think anyone still seriously purchases Nvidia cards with the intent of mining.

For $700 you could probably build a single GPU mining rig but I don't think you'd see a ROI. At this point I think a few USB ASICs would probably be a better choice and just plug them into a PC you already have or spend a bit of the budget on a R-Pi and a USB hub.

Don't buy a GPU for bitcoin mining you will lose money. You will even lose money with the ASICs if you don't buy the right one. See http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ for ASIC comparison for bitcoin mining.

The way I see it is that GPU mining is only profitable for the scrypt alt-coins if you believe they have value.

Hi! I'm kind of confused (well i'm a noob so what do you expect lol)... If the AMD 7950s cost around $300 a piece and they only make 600 KH/s then wouldn't the Butterfly Labs Jalapeno be better? It's under $300 and it processes 5 GH/s. Also why do most people use AMDs and Nvidia? On Newegg there's many offbrands for a lot cheaper. I guess the AMD brand works better? Also, due to the increasing difficulty, should I get into this hobby (would it be worthwhile) or should I just forget about it? I want to make a cheap rig ($500-$700 range), any ideas?

I did a bit of research recently for other coins and noticed that for mining the 7950 is a big favourite.
Also the 7950 has just went under a price cut on Amazon, it could prove to be a good investment for altcoin mining.

Regarding ASIC bitcoin mining rigs. Surely the difficultly and BTC value determines the profit/ROI and length required to break even.
I would imagine the Bitcoin difficultly to dramatically increase with Block Erupters becoming relatively cheap and the introduction of other high hash rate ASICs becoming more available (Butterfly Labs), resulting in low end ASICs (e.g. Block Erupter) becoming difficult to break even with.
I'm expecting significant changes over the next year with ASICs entering the stage of becoming unprofitable and BTC (hopefully) becoming more widespread.

Great set of information. Many thanks.

If you have the money to buy AMD 7950's they are the best brand new cards to buy currently, giving at least 600+KH/s.  A cheaper method would be to look at buying some older AMD/ATi cards such as 5850 or 5870.  These still give a decent hash rate and have a low power consumption, the only issue being there is no warranty with the card and it could have been previously used for mining.  You can probably pickup 2 or 3 5850's for less than the price of 1 7950 and get a higher hash rate, but slightly higher power cost.  6950 and 6970 cards can also give a decent hash rate, but they are still quite expensive second hand and also have a reasonable high power draw.

It all depends on your power costs and at what intensity you can get the cards running stable to give the higher has rates.  The following is a comparison site for hash rates on all CPU & GPU's for scrypt mining - http://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison.

This is also a good guide for tuning any cards you have - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/consolidated-litecoin-mining-guide-for-5xxx-6xxx-and-7xxx-gpus-117221

Hope that helps.

I am looking for the same sort of information.

I know that Bitcoin mining requires ASIC to be profitable, however, the alt currencies that use scrypt can only be mined with CPU or GPU. The GPU option appears to be 100 times more powerful.

Can anyone recommend the best graphics card for mining scrypt? I found out that ATI are the best, however, which is the most cost effective?

Many thanks.