They said GPU mining was dead! Well, in a lot of ways, yes, yes it is. In other ways, it's still a very profitable and fun venture, although perhaps not as a vocation, but much more a hobby.
This isn't m first venture into the whole crypto world, however it is a much more mature, focused, and efficient attempt. My first stab at all this was back in 2013-2014ish. I was aware that the days of GPU mining bitcoin were long gone, however litecoin was still profitable. Young and impressionable and ready to make some money, I turned my 7870 crossfire to the task, and I think I made about 3 bucks. I had all kinds of stability issues, and realistically I didnt really understand the concepts and market behind crypto at the time. Things were very new back then, no where near as accessible or polished as today. Fast forward to September of last year.
Up until that point I had believed GPU mining to be entirely dead. The ASIC proof coins weren't profitable, and based on my previous experience it was going to be a whole lot of work for a whole lot of nothing. My roommate had made a fair bit of coin day trading with BTC though, and he mentioned mining to me. Turned out that the 295x2 that I had at the time was an absolute beast for mining this new coin Ethereum. So I got the miner set up and started to mine away at night. In a little while I had earned my first ETH. Everything was much easier than I remembered, good guides, stable miners, developed markets and communities, everything was different. at this point I realized that this might be something again. Shortly after I mined my first ETH, my 295x2 died, for reasons unrelated to mining. It wasn't until December that I received my now current GPU (fury x) from XFX under warranty, a lot changed in those few weeks.
Over the next few weeks or so it was business as usual, mining when I wasn't at the computer, trying to accumulate some coins. At this point I had also been CPU mining a small, no name coin called Pascalcoin. Late January, the coin was listed on one of the largest exchanges, resulting in the price jumping from less than a cent to a high of over $1.50!! It seemed like everything had really paid off. I spent some of the earnings on a second GPU, a Rx480, just for mining.
At this point I started to realize that I could make some money with all this. Not just beer money, some significant income, obviously not enough to replace a job, but enough to make it worth it. After successfully working with the card I had bought and achieving great results, I was certain that I could build a mining rig and make money. At the time I made the parts list and ordered everything, the return on investment was at anywhere from 180-240 days, a long time, but not too long. So I bit the bullet and went for it, resulting in the wonderful monstrosity I have here today.
Introducing : Literal Housefire (LHF)
Parts List:
CPU - AMD Phenom II x2 545
Mobo - Gigabyte FXA-UD3 R5
RAM - An old 4gb stick I had laying around of G.skill ripjaws
Heatsink - A stock cooler that the local computer repair shop graciously gave me for free
GPUs - 4 Sapphire RX480 Nitro
PSU - Rosewill Hive 1000w (more on this later)
Case - Milkcrate my buddy got from a local shop going out of business
HDD - Old 2.5" I pulled from my old laptop
Extras - 6 pack of pci-e risers, old broomstick handle from the garage
Not the typical list of parts for a computer! But all in all around 1050 total for the whole rig. As it stands today (4/11/17) literal housefire generates roughly 0.18 ETH per day, or about $8.25. Not bad!
All this being said, there are some serious points that I'd like to make here, disclaimers of sorts.
1- The big one. I do not pay for power, at least not per kwh. Utilities are included with my dorm, therefore power is a non issue for me. HOWEVER, that does not mean that this is not profitable while paying for power. for a number of different reasons, even with power included, this rig is still profitable, obviously not as much so.
2 - Another common argument against mining is that you effectively make less money that investing. This is true, if I had put the $1050 into ETH at the time of the build, I would have more than doubled my investment by now. however, a mining rig offers certain protections that are well worth the additional time to recoup costs. The hardware itself has value, and the value will not dramatically decrease in a matter of minutes/hours/days/weeks/months. I understand the price of hardware does drop quite quickly, however, getting 75% of a $200 dollar GPU a few months later is much better than waking up and seeing -400% on your ticker. Beyond that, the rig can mine more than one coin. A whole handful of coins are profitable now, meaning that if ETH should tank, there is little risk that I will not make a return on my investment. All that happens is that my ROI is pushed back. Finally, its a great thing to know that I'll be able to sell the hardware after and make a little more on top of the earnings, or maybe even hand a card or two down to my brother.
3 - Things don't always go well. Hardware can fail, markets can crash, exchanges can fail, there are a million things that can go wrong. Not to mention the time sink that is getting one of these up and running. This is not free, by any means, even with free power. This will be highlighted later, no thanks to my ingenious idea to save some cash.
4 - I got a lot of my hardware really cheap. I only paid $10 for the CPU, where the typical mining rig CPU (G1830) costs at least triple that. The GPU were all on sale, as well as the motherboard. My RAM/HDD/heatsink were all effectively free. There are typically costs that need to be considered. Again, I'd like to stress this is not a typical case.
5 - I am not too worried about mining wearing the cards out. All are running very efficient settings, all are cooled well, and all have VRM cooling. Crypto has come a long way in terms of algorithms that no longer eat cards alive.
6 - I've gotten really "lucky". I say that because most of the coins I've invested in have increased in value dramatically, and all of the coins I've mined have at least doubled in price. Because of the recent price surge in ETH, my ROI is significantly lower than originally estimated.
With that out of the way, lets talk about some reasons I decided to go ahead with this project.
1 - ITS FUN! This was a really big part of why I wanted to do this. Beyond my interest in cryptocurrencies, this is a great way for my to get to play with some hardware I wouldn't usually in a configuration I wouldn't usually get to. I've learned a lot from this, and at the end of the year it wont have cost me a dime. Again, looking at this as a hobby/side gig rather than free magic internet money.
2 - I wanted to learn more about crypto. This gives me a serious incentive to stay up to date with news, development, market behavior, and more. This has been one of the single largest learning experiences of my year so far.
3 - I have power I'm already paying for, why not use it? The main portion of these earnings are going towards my tuition. Since power is included and I don't get charged for using more, why not go ahead and find a way to leverage that? Learning, and making my education cheaper, excellent!
With all of that out of the way, I've had one hell of an experience setting this up. This is NOT a typical PC, and typical wisdom means nothing here.
To begin with, ETH uses a memory hard algorithm. This means that memory speed matters above all else, as opposed to many other places. For this reason, all of my GPU are running the following settings in afterburner
mv: -96
power limit : -15
core: 1100
mem- 2200
The GPU are all BIOS modded as well. Each has had the memory timings for the 2000+ speeds replaced with the timings from the 1750 clock. Each of the cards pulls around 28mh/s. I have not been able to record actual draw from the wall yet (no kill-a-watt), but for what it's worth afterburner/gpu-z estimates power draw around 90w per card. Temps with the small box fan float 50-58c depending on room temperature, with 40-55% fan speed.
One of the other interesting differences here is the driver situation. Crimson drivers post 16.9.2 will not accept modded BIOS without a driver modification. Beyond that, more recent drivers often have serious issues with stability and performance. For those reasons, I'm running 16.7.3.
Another issue was how to monitor and access the rig. I really didnt want to leave a monitor plugged in all the time, but this was easily solved with teamviewer. However, another issue came up with the rig powering off after roughly 15 minutes of running after I unplugged the monitor. There was some kind of issue with windows trying to shut down a display that was no longer plugged in, also resetting teamviewer to a lovely 480p screen. Setting the monitor to never shut off fixed these issues!
The final issue, one that I spent hours trying to figure out before it finally dawned on me was stability. No matter the settings I could not get the rig to run for more than 4-5 hours without soft crashing. I took everything apart (the reason for the pictures) and found that half of the 8pin connectors on the PSU are dead. Currently working on returning the unit under warranty. Lesson learned, do not trust a cheap 1000w PSU, no matter how much you think it'll be ok! Currently LHF is running my personal rig's 1250w seasonic, and I am using a 450w EVGA I had laying around with my secondary desktop gpu (RX480 mentioned earlier)
Something about all this hardware was just awesome for me to see!
additional view of LHF without cards
I'm very happy with how LHF has turned out. Everything is working well, currently at around 110 hours up time, 0 errors. This would have been much longer if not for an update to the miner. As it stands I'm considering throwing together another mining rig, as well as finishing out LHF with her final 2 cards. Other than that, come summer I would really like to build a nicer wooden frame for everything, especially if a second rig comes into play.
I'd love to hear feedback from you guys, or answer any questions you might have about the rig, the hardware, setup, mining, crypto, whatever! I know this is a long ass read and over a pretty divisive topic, but I just wanted to share my experience, both good and bad as an honest example of what GPU mining looks like in 2017, as well as just talk about it! I'm pretty excited and happy about it all, so its always fun to share.