Best bang for the buck gpu for 100 - 200 for ETH mining?

xiTzTHATGaMeRxxiTzTHATGaMeRx Member Posts: 34
I'm low on money and need to start mining as cheaply as possible. I have my current gaming pc mining $100/month and am looking to buy a new pc for mining only. I need to know the best low cost gpu to start with and would love to possibly eventually make a living mining ethereum. I'm looking to start off with 1 gpu but eventually turn it into 2-3 gpu's for this pc until I can afford a motherboard capable of holding 5 gpu's for 2-3 gpu's do I need a quad core amd processor? or will a cheap $40 dual core work as well? I need the build as cost effective as possible and will borrow ram and an hdd from my current pc.

Comments

  • adasebadaseb Member Posts: 1,043 ✭✭✭
    The cheapest are second hand 7950s but they are hard to find.

    The 2nd cheapest is the R7 370.

    Keep in mind you will not be able to make a living mining ethereum, most likely this will only be profitable for a few more weeks/months.

    Don't get into debt thinking this.
  • dittoditto Member Posts: 139 ✭✭
    Ignore the people who keep saying you can only mine for a few more weeks/months, stop spreading lies.
  • adasebadaseb Member Posts: 1,043 ✭✭✭
    ditto said:

    Ignore the people who keep saying you can only mine for a few more weeks/months, stop spreading lies.

    And how long do you think ETH will be profitable to mine? 12 months?

    This is a very competitive business and difficulty is going up like crazy. EXP went up in price and already people started mining it like crazy.

  • Marvell9Marvell9 Member Posts: 593 ✭✭✭
    it will at least be profitable to mine for 12 months
    remember the price can only go up now that its found a bottom around 10ish.

    most Large businesses will not be able to put alot resources into mining eth due to the fact that its only a one or two year business model more suitable to small deployments or indivuduals.

    I think we will see a rise in the hash rate yes but it will still be more profitable to bitcoin or any other currency for at last six more months to a year.
  • adasebadaseb Member Posts: 1,043 ✭✭✭
    edited March 2016
    Marvell9 said:

    it will at least be profitable to mine for 12 months
    remember the price can only go up now that its found a bottom around 10ish.

    most Large businesses will not be able to put alot resources into mining eth due to the fact that its only a one or two year business model more suitable to small deployments or indivuduals.

    I think we will see a rise in the hash rate yes but it will still be more profitable to bitcoin or any other currency for at last six more months to a year.

    If its was Gauranteed to be profitable for the next 12 months, I would quit my day job.

    But the way it was with Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, the minings are always short lived. History repeats itself.

    I could double, triple, my hashrate easily but only thing thats stopping me is because I don't want to get stuck with 100's of GPUs with no buyers.
  • blueboxbluebox Member Posts: 181 ✭✭
    There are two different points being discussed here, might be good to head off the difference.

    There's the PoW to PoS shift which will eliminate GPU mining altogether. This will likely be at least 9 months if not more like 12-18 months away, depending on how fast the devs decide to — or can — get to that stage. I think everyone can agree on this basic point.

    The second is whether any miners can continue to produce enough ETH to make it worthwhile, if the global hash rate/difficulty starts rising again anything like it did since January. There's been a bit of a reprieve since the Homestead fork, but I don't expect that to remain, particularly if ETH price starts rising again (like it did). There are a finite number of GPU's on the planet, but there's still a lot that haven't been put to use on ETH yet...

    I did an analysis on my mining production since January to present to see how much difficulty lowered production. If difficulty had continued at its near-exponential rate due to the number of GPU's being thrown at it, mining would come to a near halt in only 2-3 months.

    Here's the equation I fit to my 2.5 months of mining production, from Jan-March:
    y = -0.0038x² + 1.1821x
    R² = 0.99959

    y=ETH, x=days. My 40MH/s was producing 1.18 ETH/day on average at the start, but because of the parabolic increase in difficulty it had the inverse parabolic effect of decreasing production by .0038 ETH/day. After 50 days, instead of having 59 eth I only had 49.

    Had this continued (and you can plot it), production would have essentially ground to a halt in about 3-4 months.

    This model does not apply over the past two weeks because difficulty (and global hashrate) have stagnated, but if it does ramp up again like it did, the model will apply again.
  • thesmokingmanthesmokingman Member Posts: 152 ✭✭
    edited March 2016
    adaseb said:

    Marvell9 said:

    it will at least be profitable to mine for 12 months
    remember the price can only go up now that its found a bottom around 10ish.

    most Large businesses will not be able to put alot resources into mining eth due to the fact that its only a one or two year business model more suitable to small deployments or indivuduals.

    I think we will see a rise in the hash rate yes but it will still be more profitable to bitcoin or any other currency for at last six more months to a year.

    If its was Gauranteed to be profitable for the next 12 months, I would quit my day job.

    But the way it was with Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, the minings are always short lived. History repeats itself.

    I could double, triple, my hashrate easily but only thing thats stopping me is because I don't want to get stuck with 100's of GPUs with no buyers.
    Not always...after all, isn't the point of remembering history is so that we don't repeat it again? Eth is nothing like Litecoin or BTC, so all your comparisons are apples to oranges. I've seen you make these statements and create threads both here and on BTC full of doom and gloom when at the end of the day you have no more information on ETH than the rest of us. If you look at what caused the crashes etc with the coins you mention, you will notice that a majority of the issues that precipitated their crash aren't present with ETH.

    On the other hand, if that crystal ball that you're looking into is giving you all the sure fire answers and how ETH mining will be handled due to the events that you are certain will happen, how about giving out the winning lottery numbers!!
  • adasebadaseb Member Posts: 1,043 ✭✭✭
    The price increased 500% however. Did you take that into consideration.
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