Still Worth It To Build A Gpu Mining Rig ?

poga88887poga88887 Member Posts: 3
I was wondering if it was still worth it.
I have this great idea to build a mining rig from a random old pc for like 50$ + a 120$ hd7970 maximum around 200$
by the looks of it the hd7970 will reach 20mh/s with current price and diff im looking at like 258$ a years (min power costs (0,067$ for me) (200$)) and if i even subtract the cost of the build its still 60$ or 5$/month in the 1st year.
and heck even if they go to PoS I got a upgraded gpu (if its not fried) for in my main gaming rig (currently hd6970) and a random pc to do stuff with. would you guys agree ? is it still worth it ? or do you have suggestions ? leave a comment :)

Comments

  • poga88887poga88887 Member Posts: 3
    poga88887 said:

    I was wondering if it was still worth it.
    I have this great idea to build a mining rig from a random old pc for like 50$ + a 120$ hd7970 maximum around 200$
    by the looks of it the hd7970 will reach 20mh/s with current price and diff im looking at like 258$ a years (min power costs (0,067$ for me) (200$)) and if i even subtract the cost of the build its still 60$ or 5$/month in the 1st year.
    and heck even if they go to PoS I got a upgraded gpu (if its not fried) for in my main gaming rig (currently hd6970) and a random pc to do stuff with. would you guys agree ? is it still worth it ? or do you have suggestions ? leave a comment :)

    its maybe nice to say this would be like all my birthday money. (yes im still a kiddo)
  • DividesByZeroDividesByZero Member Posts: 58
    poga88887 said:

    I was wondering if it was still worth it.
    I have this great idea to build a mining rig from a random old pc for like 50$ + a 120$ hd7970 maximum around 200$
    by the looks of it the hd7970 will reach 20mh/s with current price and diff im looking at like 258$ a years (min power costs (0,067$ for me) (200$)) and if i even subtract the cost of the build its still 60$ or 5$/month in the 1st year.
    and heck even if they go to PoS I got a upgraded gpu (if its not fried) for in my main gaming rig (currently hd6970) and a random pc to do stuff with. would you guys agree ? is it still worth it ? or do you have suggestions ? leave a comment :)

    You are only looking at current market rates. If you go long you will more than likely get a higher payout. For example, if you were mining 7 months ago you would be getting 2 dollars per ETH (granted more eth earned for work completed). Would you start mining? If it goes to $100 you would have been making $50/month.

    I guess it's perspective and risk level.
  • poga88887poga88887 Member Posts: 3

    poga88887 said:

    I was wondering if it was still worth it.
    I have this great idea to build a mining rig from a random old pc for like 50$ + a 120$ hd7970 maximum around 200$
    by the looks of it the hd7970 will reach 20mh/s with current price and diff im looking at like 258$ a years (min power costs (0,067$ for me) (200$)) and if i even subtract the cost of the build its still 60$ or 5$/month in the 1st year.
    and heck even if they go to PoS I got a upgraded gpu (if its not fried) for in my main gaming rig (currently hd6970) and a random pc to do stuff with. would you guys agree ? is it still worth it ? or do you have suggestions ? leave a comment :)

    You are only looking at current market rates. If you go long you will more than likely get a higher payout. For example, if you were mining 7 months ago you would be getting 2 dollars per ETH (granted more eth earned for work completed). Would you start mining? If it goes to $100 you would have been making $50/month.

    I guess it's perspective and risk level.
    After doing some research I think im gonna do it! I will probably mine ethereum while it lasts. and after that some other gpu coin, even feathercoin would be 100$ profit a year with power costs subtracted so its not that bad. the market for new coins are getting bigger every day and i will take the risk, i think lol
  • ShawnYShawnY Member Posts: 58
    @poga88887 , welcome to the mining world! I just started mining as well with 5x 480s, and you will enjoy the ride, tweaking the shit out of your cards to squeeze out every inch of power you can get!
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    edited August 2016
    @poga88887 don't do it. 7970 can't reach 20MH, 280x goes with 17-18MH now and they will go slower as the dag increases. Take that 200$ and buy eth. With 18MH (if it can even reach that), you will have about 250W power use at least, if 10c/kW you will make 7.6ETH in the first 6months and pretty much not even half of that the next 6months. Right now 200$ buys 17.8eth. You can never mine that ammount, with the difficulty increase after about 1year that card won't anything, maybe 0.5/month ? or even less. Its only worth doing it, if you go for at least 4cards / motherboard and you have cheap electricity, sub 10cent/kW but even then, you will need eth price increase or a new profitable coin.
    EDIT: Just for reference, ETH first sale price was 0.0005, today its 0.0192, peak was about 0.03. so thats a 38x increase or 60x peak. You will not see this kind of increase ever again with this coin but you might see it with something else in the future. You could hope for a long term 5-10x (2years) increase at best.
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    edited August 2016
    I'm going to have to say it's not worth it. I recently built a mining rig with 3 r9 390's hashing at 92Mhs. I have them undervolted/overclocked to where I'm paying 50$ a month in electricity, but I pay 0.091kw/h. <-Keep this in mind.

    I built the rig 3 weeks ago, with a budget of 1200$, I think my whole rig cost 1150$. From the 3 weeks I've been mining and testing pools just for fun, with my hashrate I was able to make ~210$ a month. Now, 3 weeks later, that monthly amount has gone down to ~173$ a month. 3 weeks ago I was able to ROI in 6 months with assumptions from calcs saying what they said at the time. Now it will take me 225 days to ROI. I'm returning everything Tuesday to Amazon. In another 3 weeks, I assume I'll lose another ~43$, and that monthly ROI will be getting smaller and smaller.

    If I had 10,000$ and bought super cheap/used stuff, I can definitely make my money back, but it will be slower than the speed of smell.
    Post edited by ceddycakes on
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    @ceddycakes you mean 3 r9 390 right ?
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    edited August 2016
    oAPMo said:

    @ceddycakes you mean 3 r9 390 right ?

    Correct. My apologies. Thank you for catching that. Fixed it.
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    @ceddycakes btw amazon lets you send back hardware after 3weeks ? thats awesome
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    edited August 2016
    Yeah I was still within the what I assume is a 30 day return policy. Honestly I can move onto another coin. But when looking at coins and what they're developers are doing, it's hard to pick and support. Well, it's not hard to pick and support. I'm just so new, I don't trust myself. On ICO countdown, Golem and First Blood sound pretty cool. But again, I'm too new to this and Ethereum seemed like a fun and easy start. I do like what the project involves. It's a cool idea. But the real world being the real world, there's a lot of salt going around. There's Expanse, which to my non-developer brain, sounds meh at best. I really should look deeper into it. But this comes back to going to another coin. Do I just mine and hop around to return on ROI and "have fun" or what? I don't know what to think.

    I'm still on the edge about keeping the miner and have until Tuesday to pack everything and send it off. It's a fun hobby watching the numbers go up(or down). I think it would be fun to get into trading, but I don't have the know how. I probably do, but not like what I assume are professional day traders in real life making a living.
  • rawmeenrawmeen Member Posts: 79
    @ceddycakes don't return them if you are enjoying this hobby. Also, keep in mind that if you believe in Ethereum, then you should assume that the price of ether will go up which means that your ROI at the present moment doesnt mean much. I too came in a bit late but I wouldnt change anything if I could go back in time. Learned a ton and will continue to learn since I'm already invested which is way different than if I had just bought coins. Good luck whichever way you go.
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    @ceddycakes here's my story, started mining in 2014 january, when everyone jumped on it, card prices were skyrocketing just like now, (in europe at least for sure) back then ltc was the main coin, I never mined that coz I saw no future increase and it was already hard so I mined small coins, now those used to come out every day, some day 4-5coins started at once and you had to chose which one is less scamy. About 50coins I mined in total of which only 3 ever ammount to anything, basically the rest I never even sent to the exchange, they didn't even had an exchange, dead coins.

    I could ROI my whole rig in the first 6months if I wasn't so naive and stubborn to sell BLK, which at that time was the best coin in my opinion, I saw the future in that so I held and held while the price increased almost 100x and back to oblivion, I never sold it, lost about 20BTC with that. This coin only had 1 week of mining, then I moved to vertcoin, I mined that for more than a year and the price was just going down and down, I lost hope and interest aswell and one day the price of it went up, not insanely but since people didn't mine it (price too low), it was pretty easy to get alot of it, so that one year of mining got me about 20BTC, my first real btc exchange was 2016 july-august? I waited 18months to see any return, then ethereum came, which made another 20btc aprox coz I traded so badly, sold about 1k, first batch at 0.016k (peak at that time), then at 0.026 (well now its 0.019 so it wasn't that bad but it had 0.035 peak). Looking back now it was worth it but it all depends on which coin you mine, which one you believe in for long term and when do you sell, if I would have sold eth at 5x price increase (from first appearance on exchange) and would give up on vert when everyone else did, I'd have like 10 btc in total, if that. And if I gave up on BTC aswell, I'd be selling it at 250-300$. So if you go long term, you kinda have to see your money and time fly out the window sometimes.
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    rawmeen said:

    @ceddycakes don't return them if you are enjoying this hobby. Also, keep in mind that if you believe in Ethereum, then you should assume that the price of ether will go up which means that your ROI at the present moment doesnt mean much. I too came in a bit late but I wouldnt change anything if I could go back in time. Learned a ton and will continue to learn since I'm already invested which is way different than if I had just bought coins. Good luck whichever way you go.

    oAPMo said:

    @ceddycakes here's my story, started mining in 2014 january, when everyone jumped on it, card prices were skyrocketing just like now, (in europe at least for sure) back then ltc was the main coin, I never mined that coz I saw no future increase and it was already hard so I mined small coins, now those used to come out every day, some day 4-5coins started at once and you had to chose which one is less scamy. About 50coins I mined in total of which only 3 ever ammount to anything, basically the rest I never even sent to the exchange, they didn't even had an exchange, dead coins.

    I could ROI my whole rig in the first 6months if I wasn't so naive and stubborn to sell BLK, which at that time was the best coin in my opinion, I saw the future in that so I held and held while the price increased almost 100x and back to oblivion, I never sold it, lost about 20BTC with that. This coin only had 1 week of mining, then I moved to vertcoin, I mined that for more than a year and the price was just going down and down, I lost hope and interest aswell and one day the price of it went up, not insanely but since people didn't mine it (price too low), it was pretty easy to get alot of it, so that one year of mining got me about 20BTC, my first real btc exchange was 2016 july-august? I waited 18months to see any return, then ethereum came, which made another 20btc aprox coz I traded so badly, sold about 1k, first batch at 0.016k (peak at that time), then at 0.026 (well now its 0.019 so it wasn't that bad but it had 0.035 peak). Looking back now it was worth it but it all depends on which coin you mine, which one you believe in for long term and when do you sell, if I would have sold eth at 5x price increase (from first appearance on exchange) and would give up on vert when everyone else did, I'd have like 10 btc in total, if that. And if I gave up on BTC aswell, I'd be selling it at 250-300$. So if you go long term, you kinda have to see your money and time fly out the window sometimes.

    I really appreciate the encouragement and personal experiences you two have shared. Both of you explain the pros and cons that are constantly running through my brain. As I have 1 more day to think this over, I'm going to think really hard and see what I come up with. It's refreshing to hear uncertainty as weird as that sounds.
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    If I were you right now, would return the cards if there are reasonably priced rx 480 cards, they have much better long term return coz of the lower wattage. I couldn't go lower than 1200W on a 4x r9 390 rig with dual mining dcri39 -100mv, with card flashing I might be able to but these are noname cards and I'm a bit afraid of flashing them. Buy rx480 models and my preferred option is any card with dualbios (sapphire mostly has dualbios I think). You can do this or wait till people start dumping rx480 cards because its too unprofitable to mine, get them at 200$ or less (here its 300$ minimum for new cards) and hunt for the new coins.
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    edited August 2016
    oAPMo said:

    If I were you right now, would return the cards if there are reasonably priced rx 480 cards, they have much better long term return coz of the lower wattage. I couldn't go lower than 1200W on a 4x r9 390 rig with dual mining dcri39 -100mv, with card flashing I might be able to but these are noname cards and I'm a bit afraid of flashing them. Buy rx480 models and my preferred option is any card with dualbios (sapphire mostly has dualbios I think). You can do this or wait till people start dumping rx480 cards because its too unprofitable to mine, get them at 200$ or less (here its 300$ minimum for new cards) and hunt for the new coins.

    Would the 4GB or 8GB version matter regardless of "resellability"? And which risers should I purchase? I have https://amazon.com/gp/product/B00IMYODGS/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 currently
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    For gamers 4GB and 8GB is the same, 99% of the time people won't be able to use 8GB coz the card is not ready for 4k gaming and for full HD gaming 4GB memory use is still not reached in most games but for hashrate 8gb seems to be better, although I've read people flashing 4 to 8 and have same hashrates, I really don't know coz I didn't test that but since you have amazon, just buy both and see which is best.
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    Risers I still have the old ribbon ones but if you can buy the usb with molex powered. I wouldn't use the sata ones, max power usage if I'm correct, 3pin for 12V each 1.5A, so 54W. Thats not so much, molex can do 132W on 12V (less coz of heat but still close to 100W). I have my ribbon cables cut and soldered the power line to the psu directly, coz molex connectors suck big time, they become lose so contact is not perfect. Your sata cable would be OK if you didn't OC very much and undervolt but I hear rx480 uses more power on the riser cable than other cards (not sure how is this true because PCIE 8pin cable should give your 150W DC and people report 180-200W AC usage, 158-176W with a good 88% efficient power supply, so that would be only 26W on sata, thats not bad, problem is, if either the cable or the gpu gets hot, then it start using more and more power, then I can imagine over 50W on sata which could burn it, hence why molex is safer generally)
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    oAPMo said:

    Risers I still have the old ribbon ones but if you can buy the usb with molex powered. I wouldn't use the sata ones, max power usage if I'm correct, 3pin for 12V each 1.5A, so 54W. Thats not so much, molex can do 132W on 12V (less coz of heat but still close to 100W). I have my ribbon cables cut and soldered the power line to the psu directly, coz molex connectors suck big time, they become lose so contact is not perfect. Your sata cable would be OK if you didn't OC very much and undervolt but I hear rx480 uses more power on the riser cable than other cards (not sure how is this true because PCIE 8pin cable should give your 150W DC and people report 180-200W AC usage, 158-176W with a good 88% efficient power supply, so that would be only 26W on sata, thats not bad, problem is, if either the cable or the gpu gets hot, then it start using more and more power, then I can imagine over 50W on sata which could burn it, hence why molex is safer generally)

    This? https://www.amazon.com/Powered-Flexible-Extender-Bitcoin-Mining/dp/B00EX627A8/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1471878813&sr=8-9&keywords=molex+pcie+risers
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    Yeah I have those but the usb ones are what people use nowadays (2.5years ago those didn't existed commercially). So lets see, if you have the sata ones and the cable after 6+hours of use is not hot then there's nothing to be worried about. If there is, then just cut the cable and connect a molex pin on it, connect to your psu's molex and your fine. I don't understand why they use SATA on the other end because it comes from molex on the board as I see. 2 reasons I see for this, 1. the board itself is bad and can't handle 130W so they put a sata on it, or they just went with extra safety to limit the power use with sata. Its a bit weird but they are the better solution then the ribbon cables, not sure if anyone uses them anymore for new miners :D although at 2$ its cheap AF, I bought them at 8-10$ back in the days. for that price I'd buy ribbon cables even if you use the sata ones its good to have backup and not wait days/weeks for new ones. (I ordered from canada, took almost a month to arrive to EU)
  • ceddycakesceddycakes Member Posts: 70
    oAPMo said:

    Yeah I have those but the usb ones are what people use nowadays (2.5years ago those didn't existed commercially). So lets see, if you have the sata ones and the cable after 6+hours of use is not hot then there's nothing to be worried about. If there is, then just cut the cable and connect a molex pin on it, connect to your psu's molex and your fine. I don't understand why they use SATA on the other end because it comes from molex on the board as I see. 2 reasons I see for this, 1. the board itself is bad and can't handle 130W so they put a sata on it, or they just went with extra safety to limit the power use with sata. Its a bit weird but they are the better solution then the ribbon cables, not sure if anyone uses them anymore for new miners :D although at 2$ its cheap AF, I bought them at 8-10$ back in the days. for that price I'd buy ribbon cables even if you use the sata ones its good to have backup and not wait days/weeks for new ones. (I ordered from canada, took almost a month to arrive to EU)

    Cool cool. I still would have to buy the 480's to test and see if my risers will be ok. I thought I would have had an issue with the 390's but no problem. All I can find now are the molex to sata power connectors. The one I posted is just one of the two available on amazon. I can try new egg, but I had a bad experience with them. They're on my shitlist for now. I'll keep searching.
  • oAPMooAPMo Member Posts: 97
    I'd buy both SATA and ribbon cables, that way you are good for sure and if you can get some molex connectors to have a few spare pins that way you can cut the sata and put a molex for it, only the yellow cable (12V) is used anyway.
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