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Topic: What's the current opinion on solo-mining Altcoins? (Read 180 times)

full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 174
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I'm still doing solo mining till now, the first thing we need to do is calculating. A few variable needed for profitability calculation except you just solo mining and keep a coin for a few month or years waiting coin price rising. I always look at some coin technical info websites or coins ANN in this forum. This is a few thing that I see as a variable for calculating.

Net Hashrate (Global Hashrate)
This is so important, it can give us estimate how much blocks that we can solve with our Hashrate.

Block Time
Correlated to point one, we can calculate estimations how many blocks per hour that can we solve. Also, check block explorer from those coins to see how accurate this block time info.

Block Reward
With this info, we can calculate how much coin that we can get in an hour or day.

Coin Price
After point one, two and three, we could get an estimate how much profit that we can get with solo mining those coins.
sr. member
Activity: 658
Merit: 253
With such colossal capacities as you would recommend to try the solo extraction espres coin (24 hours), there are high growth prospects, if the solo will be bad to look for blocks, on the pool you too can earn a lot.
newbie
Activity: 32
Merit: 0
Right now I'm just playing with the idea, I've always only considered starting with a  Asus B250 Mining Expert with 13 + 6 GPUs and have it mining two different coins. The idea of having 19 GPUs in one portable frame just seemed better than any other solution with less GPUs.

Considering that, is there nevertheless any benefit going for the Gigabyte B250 instead?
Let me save you the headache. There is nothing wrong with the Asus B250, except that going beyond 12 cards will give you grief.  Don't go beyond 12 cards on any MB currently out now. There are only 12 usable pcie lanes with the B250 chipset. Go beyond this and you will have reliability issues and your CPU will work overtime trying to keep it together. The Asus MB is nice, but confusing and since 12 is the maximum pcie lanes, save the money and get the Gigabyte board. It works right out of the box, you don't need to even hit the bios, just load the OS and start mining. Ignore the directions to plug in molex connectors or more than one PSU to the board. Just use the 24 pin MB and 8 pin CPU connector and that's it. I have two of these fully loaded. One more piece of advice, don't skimp on the CPU like with a Celeron, get a decent one like the i3-7100, otherwise you'll be pegging near 100% while mining and it'll feel sluggish. My i3 is at 60% utilization, 12 lanes is a lot for one chip to handle, night and day from just 6 cards. https://ark.intel.com/products/98086/Intel-B250-Chipset
Thanks a lot for the advice, a completely different approach to look at. Though completely OT concerning my initial question, I have more questions for you:

  • Which PSU are you using for your rig?
  • How much RAM?
  • Did you build the chassis for your rig yourself (any pictures)?
  • What's the off-the-wall power consumption of your rig?

Limiting the number of GPUs to the number of available PCIe lanes totally makes sense of course. I could imagine starting with one such Gigabyte rig and adding another one later.

I have a combination of three Corsair 1050W and five 1200W PSU's that I've been mining with for years. All you need is 4GB of Ram per MB. The chassis is a $60 Home Depot metal rack. There is nothing portable about any rig with 19 cards, let alone 30+, so concentrate on airflow and forget about moving it around, it's heavy as frack. For 18 Titans and 12 1080's it's about 7kw.
https://image.ibb.co/hz8tqn/20180217_005712_resized.jpg
full member
Activity: 238
Merit: 100
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Right now I'm just playing with the idea, I've always only considered starting with a  Asus B250 Mining Expert with 13 + 6 GPUs and have it mining two different coins. The idea of having 19 GPUs in one portable frame just seemed better than any other solution with less GPUs.

Considering that, is there nevertheless any benefit going for the Gigabyte B250 instead?
Let me save you the headache. There is nothing wrong with the Asus B250, except that going beyond 12 cards will give you grief.  Don't go beyond 12 cards on any MB currently out now. There are only 12 usable pcie lanes with the B250 chipset. Go beyond this and you will have reliability issues and your CPU will work overtime trying to keep it together. The Asus MB is nice, but confusing and since 12 is the maximum pcie lanes, save the money and get the Gigabyte board. It works right out of the box, you don't need to even hit the bios, just load the OS and start mining. Ignore the directions to plug in molex connectors or more than one PSU to the board. Just use the 24 pin MB and 8 pin CPU connector and that's it. I have two of these fully loaded. One more piece of advice, don't skimp on the CPU like with a Celeron, get a decent one like the i3-7100, otherwise you'll be pegging near 100% while mining and it'll feel sluggish. My i3 is at 60% utilization, 12 lanes is a lot for one chip to handle, night and day from just 6 cards. https://ark.intel.com/products/98086/Intel-B250-Chipset
Thanks a lot for the advice, a completely different approach to look at. Though completely OT concerning my initial question, I have more questions for you:

  • Which PSU are you using for your rig?
  • How much RAM?
  • Which GPUs?
  • Did you build the chassis for your rig yourself (any pictures)?
  • What's the off-the-wall power consumption of your rig?

Limiting the number of GPUs to the number of available PCIe lanes totally makes sense of course. I could imagine starting with one such Gigabyte rig and adding another one later.
newbie
Activity: 32
Merit: 0

Right now I'm just playing with the idea, I've always only considered starting with a  Asus B250 Mining Expert with 13 + 6 GPUs and have it mining two different coins. The idea of having 19 GPUs in one portable frame just seemed better than any other solution with less GPUs.

Considering that, is there nevertheless any benefit going for the Gigabyte B250 instead?

Let me save you the headache. There is nothing wrong with the Asus B250, except that going beyond 12 cards will give you grief.  Don't go beyond 12 cards on any MB currently out now. There are only 12 usable pcie lanes with the B250 chipset. Go beyond this and you will have reliability issues and your CPU will work overtime trying to keep it together. The Asus MB is nice, but confusing and since 12 is the maximum pcie lanes, save the money and get the Gigabyte board. It works right out of the box, you don't need to even hit the bios, just load the OS and start mining. Ignore the directions to plug in molex connectors or more than one PSU to the board. Just use the 24 pin MB and 8 pin CPU connector and that's it. I have two of these fully loaded. One more piece of advice, don't skimp on the CPU like with a Celeron, get a decent one like the i3-7100, otherwise you'll be pegging near 100% while mining and it'll feel sluggish. My i3 is at 60% utilization, 12 lanes is a lot for one chip to handle, night and day from just 6 cards.
https://ark.intel.com/products/98086/Intel-B250-Chipset
full member
Activity: 238
Merit: 100
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Let's say you want to start with a fully loaded Asus B250 Mining Expert rig (19 GPUs), would there be a point for solo-mining?
Simple answer for most coins, No.
Is there something like an extended answer as well?  Cheesy

Or asked the other way around: When starting to build a mine, at what point (i.e. how many GPUs) does it make sense to solo-mine?

FYI: For starters you would never be able to fully load an Asus B250 with the same brand cards, you would have AMD and Nvidia cards mining two different algorithms. You can't get 19 AMD or NVidia's to work on that board.  I just returned two of those boards after only getting 12 or 13 NVidia's to work. Not enough PCI-e lanes to be reliable past 12 cards, better to stick with the Gigabyte B250 with 12 slots.  No sense in having NVidia and AMD on the same MB anyways, opens a can of worms.
I've read about that, but I didn't think that mixing two different GPUs one one buard would cause additional problems.

Right now I'm just playing with the idea, I've always only considered starting with a  Asus B250 Mining Expert with 13 + 6 GPUs and have it mining two different coins. The idea of having 19 GPUs in one portable frame just seemed better than any other solution with less GPUs.

Considering that, is there nevertheless any benefit going for the Gigabyte B250 instead?
newbie
Activity: 32
Merit: 0
Let's say you want to start with a fully loaded Asus B250 Mining Expert rig (19 GPUs), would there be a point for solo-mining?

Simple answer for most coins, No.  

FYI: For starters you would never be able to fully load an Asus B250 with the same brand cards, you would have AMD and Nvidia cards mining two different algorithms. You can't get 19 AMD or NVidia's to work on that board.  I just returned two of those boards after only getting 12 or 13 NVidia's to work. Not enough PCI-e lanes to be reliable past 12 cards, better to stick with the Gigabyte B250 with 12 slots.  No sense in having NVidia and AMD on the same MB anyways, opens a can of worms.
full member
Activity: 238
Merit: 100
Wanna buy a Tesla? Visit TeslaBargain.com first!
Let's say you want to start with a fully loaded Asus B250 Mining Expert rig (19 GPUs), would there be a point for solo-mining?
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