Updating the PC

[AZRedhawk44]

Interesting.  I'm not having any luck getting a GPU miner working, but CPU mining on a couple of hot-standby servers yields 93kh/s.

I don't doubt it.

For grins, I tried briefly mining on one of my company's HyperV servers when it was sitting at idle.  Intel cores trump AMD cores, and Xeon cores trump Intel cores.  Then throw a dozen out of 16 possible threads at it... or all 16, if you don't mind impairing the server's ability to monitor its clustering software or other stand-by duties.

Even my 3.5 year old Xeon with 16 cores yields 60khash with 12 threads running, leaving 4 remaining for my coworkers.   I only ran it for 10 minutes, though... during a meeting.

[zxcvbob]

At the current exchange rate, what does  "60khash" mean in US dollars?  Is it pennies per week?

[AZRedhawk44]

60khash = speed of cracking math problems.

The pool I'm in has about 500 megahash processing power, and breaks a block roughly once every 5 and a half hours.  That's a reward of 50 LTC that gets split between the contributors based upon their processing contributions.

If I'm pushing ~60khash into that pool for all 5.5 hours, I'll end up being rewarded with about 0.005 LTC.  In a day, I'll get that 4-5 times, so 0.020 to 0.025 LTC per day.  A month will see me win about 0.6 to 0.7 LTC.  

At $30/LTC, that's about $20 a month.

Obviously not worth it from an energy perspective.

I'm only mining right now in order to learn the ins/outs, how to configure various CPU/GPU mining apps, how to connect to different pools, which pools have the best payout policies, testing if I want to mine on Win7 or Ubuntu 12.04, and so on.  I should get my video card that I ordered by Wednesday.

I'm netting anywhere from 40 to 100 khash right now depending on whether I'm mining on all my computers at home, or have a few off.  I was playing with proxying earlier today, in a boring meeting at work so I rigged an SSH tunnel to my home, to a Stratum proxy, then had my work laptop CPU-mining and downloading/uploading shares through that secure tunnel.  Did it on that Xeon server for about 10 minutes the same way, just to see how the change in CPU arch would affect the return.

No matter what, the GPU mining is the way to go with LiteCoin, though.  I get my new card and I'll be right around 500 khash.  That'll put me near 0.25 LTC per day, or about 7-8 LTC per month ($200+).

[cordex]

Okay, got the GPU miner running at home.  250kh/s on low usage.  That ups the ante a bit ...

[AZRedhawk44]

Sigh... going in deeper.

Ordered new mobo/ram/cpu.  AMD 8-core CPU, mobo with quad PCI-e slots.

Ordered a second R9 270x.

[cordex]

Sigh... going in deeper.

Ordered new mobo/ram/cpu.  AMD 8-core CPU, mobo with quad PCI-e slots.

Ordered a second R9 270x.

Should make for a pretty good miner.  Got my first tenth of a lightcoin today ... hooray, $3!

[AZRedhawk44]

Should make for a pretty good miner.  Got my first tenth of a lightcoin today ... hooray, $3!

It's not $3, until you trade it for $3.

It might be $5.

Then again, it might be an opportunity for someone else to point and laugh and say Ha-ha!, Nelson style, when all the cryptocurrencies fold.

I think January/February will drive BTC up towards $2000, and LTC north of $50 though.

[Gewehr98]

That'll put me near 0.25 LTC per day, or about 7-8 LTC per month ($200+).

Ok, I know for a fact that my water-cooled 8 core Xeon workstation with Radeon HD6870 draws a lot of juice.

Running a miner 24/7 for a return of $200/month, does that even sound profitable?

[AZRedhawk44]

Ok, I know for a fact that my water-cooled 8 core Xeon workstation with Radeon HD6870 draws a lot of juice.

Running a miner 24/7 for a return of $200/month, does that even sound profitable?

Depends on the power draw.

A miner pulling 500 watts and producing 1100 khash/sec will be profitable.

A miner pulling 500 watts and producing 150 khash/sec will not.



ETA:  My bet is on increased value of the cryptocurrencies, short-term.  Not sure about long term.  Depends on if there is a merchant movement to embrace them and try to break the Visa monopoly.  As such, any BTC/LTC you can generate now, even at a break-even rate, will generate profit as the currency matures.

Think about all those guys who "broke even" mining BTC at $8 and squatted on them until they hit $1000 each.

[cordex]

Got my older GPU running too.  Total kh/s is over 550 - sometimes going over 600.  Not bad for the equipment I'm running.

[AZRedhawk44]

Just a thought... LTC has about ~600-odd days until the block chain cuts the reward in half from 50 to 25 LTC.

The BitCoin value jump was gradual, due to the already-existent supply of BTC to buffer the reduced mining returns, but increased scarcity caused value to increase over time.

I wouldn't mind having a few hundred LTC stashed away for the day when LTC mining reward is halved.  And BTC, for that matter, for its next halving in 2016.

[Gewehr98]

Based on increasing difficulty in mining any VirtualCoin, the certainty of hardware failure when stressed in a mining configuration, electrical costs, and a fluctuating market - wouldn't it be easier to just buy a few VirtualCoin and camp on them for investment's sake?

[AZRedhawk44]

Based on increasing difficulty in mining any VirtualCoin, the certainty of hardware failure when stressed in a mining configuration, electrical costs, and a fluctuating market - wouldn't it be easier to just buy a few VirtualCoin and camp on them for investment's sake?

I think video cards burning out after 12-18 months of mining is perfectly okay.  Gotta make room in the case for a faster card due to increased difficulty anyways, and the card pays for itself after 1-2 months.

Probably better to just proactively order a replacement card periodically and upgrade the system, pull the used card, and sell it on eBay before it goes bad.

[cordex]

I think video cards burning out after 12-18 months of mining is perfectly okay.

Me too. I bought an XFX HD5870 with a "lifetime" warranty  a few years ago. It burned out (not from mining) and they replaced it at no charge with a 6950. The replacement card died after a couple years and i got another 6950. We will see what happens with this card when it burns up.

[cordex]

AZR,
What pool do you like?  I've been using mine-litecoin.com but their webservers don't seem to be too stable.

[AZRedhawk44]

I'm on hashfaster.com, after an unsatisfactory experience at kattare.com.


For grins and giggles I put a $25 offer on an ebay auction for a couple of Radeon 4850 cards.  One guy accepted the offer, so I have one of those on the way as well.  One box will be maxed out with my 700 watt power supply, new mobo and new R9 cards... but I have a 600w box and a 500w box.  I think I know what's wrong with my old 4x PCI-e mobo and can get it configured to mine with Linux with no drama, so it will go with the 600w PSU and the AMD triple core to mine, and the 500w box will get the single PCI-e mobo with AMD dual core.

I'm not going to power on any machine that can't generate at least 125khash with its GPU(s).

I should be able to do 2-3 Radeon 4800 series on the 600 watt system, and one more random video card on the 500 watt system.

With all 3 systems running GPU-only, I should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 khash.

Six months from now if this works out like I hope, I'll start rolling the R9's down to the weaker boxes and I'll put newer GPU's in the biggest box.

[AZRedhawk44]

...And I just scored another Radeon 4870, for $20 on evilbay.  Cheap hashes!

[cordex]

I'm on hashfaster.com, after an unsatisfactory experience at kattare.com.

I'm going to give hashfaster.com a go for a few days and see how it runs.  So far I like the lower transaction fees, but the dashboard gives less info.

[AZRedhawk44]

At moderate intensity (I = 12) with CGMiner 3.6.6, I'm getting right around 400 khash/sec with one card, on the PCIe 2.0 system and AMDx3 system.  It'll peak to near 500 khash sometimes, and dip to high 380's other times.  Dropping intensity to 11 will drop the hash rate to about 275 khash.

Cool feature:  CGMiner has pool failover capability.  I can tell it to connect to multiple stratum workload servers and either load balance the work from all those different pools, or work only one pool and fail over to a different pool if the top preferred servers become unavailable.

[AZRedhawk44]

Oops.

I misread the tag on two of my PSU's.

They're labeled as 500ATX and 600ATX... one would just think they are 500 and 600 watts respectively.

Nope.

They're 400 and 500 watts, each.

I ran the 400 watt PSU with an AMDx3 cpu and Radeon R9, to death.

I know that the 700 watt PSU is truly 700 watts.  I'm setting it up right now with the 8-core AMD and new mobo and one of the R9's.  Gonna get a kill-a-watt device later today to check watts consumed before adding the second R9 to it.  And I'm rebuilding the 3-core AMD onto the remaining 500 watt PSU and the pair of 48xx Radeon cards.  That should be sufficient power for those two cards, but I'll spin them up one at a time and check load using the kill-a-watt before trusting them both to the PSU.

[AZRedhawk44]

And... I'm megahashing.  Barely.  Intermittently.

Issues:

8 core system with dual R9's has one unit reaching 82* C and only cracking ~300khash.   The other unit is remaining at 56* C and hitting 400+ khash.  I think it's an air flow issue.  I can work around this by piping some additional air intake into the box.  I need the air to enter between card 1 and card 2.

3 core system with dual 48xx's has insufficient juice to run both, with its 500 watt power supply.  I need 600 watts.  Running the solo 4870 card I get a little over 100 khash, bursting to 150's sometimes.

The plan here is to replace the 700 watt PSU in the good system, and roll the 700 down to the old system.

But not until I get some LTC from the arrangement.  So far, I've only generated a quarter of an LTC.

[cordex]

Let me guess - the hot card is stuck against the bottom of the case?  Mine is positioned there and I ended up pulling a small but powerful fan out of a server power supply to clear up the hot spot between the card and the case. Knocked more than 10 degrees C out immediately.

I have seen peaks at over a megahash but usually is running 700-900kh/s now.

Turned out .85LTC so far with existing hardware, but when you get your system figured out you are going to leave me in the dust.

[AZRedhawk44]

No, it's actually the card that's the higher of the two, towards the center of the mobo.

I have an empty PCI slot in the back of the case that could be contributing to an air flow issue, allowing recirculation of exhaust back into the case interior or something like that.  GPU fan/heatsink systems are exhaust fans, right?  Or are they intake fans?  The dual-height cards like this 270x have slots on the PCI brackets for moving air some direction or other from inside the case to outside, or vice-versa.

I jury rigged a spare 80mm fan into the case for now, and it dropped the temp on that unit by 10 degrees. 

As a more permanent solution, I ordered a single-PCI-slot exhaust fan, and I bit the bullet and got a 1000 watt PSU with it.  I'm pushing the limits of this 700w unit, and I want it in good shape to properly run the other box.  If exhaust is the wrong solution, I can swap the pins or reverse the orientation of the fan (if there isn't a switch to control motor direction) and turn it into an intake fan.

The new PSU should help also with air flow, since it has a giant fan on it that my current unit lacks.

[cordex]

My card fans are exhaust fans.

[AZRedhawk44]

My card fans are exhaust fans.

Then I think that my top card is being treated to intaking its own exhausted hot air.  Bottom card doesn't have that issue since all the air flow is buttoned up properly.

The PCI exhaust fan will increase velocity of air from the front of the case to the rear of the case, and stop the R9 card from intaking air which probably consists of 50% of its heated exhaust.

Just had a scare:  Thought I blew out the other smaller PSU.  Nope.  Just forgot to set the Windows power plan to High Performance always-on mode.