Ethereum mining, actually. From what I heard, it’s RX-480/580 only.
My co-worker and friend at work mentioned today that he’s Ethereum mining. He recently got a GTX 1070. He said he was earning $2 and change in bitcoin a day?
What’s this all about now? We didn’t really get a good chance to talk since we were so busy today.
It’s just another cryptocurrency. Doesn’t really make sense to buy a 1070 to do it with a 200-odd day break-even time, but I guess if he bought it to game on why not make two bucks a day?
Probably costs more than $2 of power to run it… ;)
Shouldn’t be anywhere near that. 1070 has a TDP of 150 watts. Let’s say 200 watts for whole system power. That’s about 5kWh/day, which is about 50 cents/day at reasonable residential electricity prices.
So push the break-even point out by another six months, then.
So, what’s the necessary GPU RAM number these days? Most 1060s have 6GB, most 1070s seem to have 8GB, and the 1050s have 2GB, as far as I can tell. It seems two is too low; is six fine? I’m looking to build/buy a new machine for my wife, who is still rocking a GTX 480. GPU prices are wonky overall, but it’s particularly confusing given the proliferation of sub-models.
For this purpose, 1080p is fine, no 4K necessary, and she’s been ok pretty much even with the 480 on stuff like Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. Nothing too cutting edge (though I will be building/buying the new machine with a pure SSD storage loadout, as I have come to loathe Winchester drivers with a hot passion).
Is the 1060 still probably the best bet here?
So, is there a way to get involved in this that isn’t super-shady or opening yourself up to potential problems (I have no idea if the websites are legit, etc.)?
I have a 1070 downstairs and it is sitting idle most of the time.
I wouldn’t buy a card with <4GB RAM in 2017, and 4GB is fine for 1080p. Don’t buy the 3GB 1060.
I am not sure why this version even exists. I know it saves a few bucks but it’s just better to wait and save more for the bigger card.
It doesn’t look too complicated. You can even throttle the gpu usage so it isn’t running 100%. Not sure what the tax issues are with doing it.
Thanks, that’s kinda what I thought.
I asked him today. He contributes via Nicehash. You can go to the nicehash website and it guides you through how to contribute. He says because of the value of bitcoin right now, he’s actually been generating over $5.50 a day so far, and if the rate stays about the same, he’ll actually get the $330 he paid for his 1070 back in February back in about 3 months, even taking power usage into account.
The nicehash calculator even claims that my old 7950HD equivalent could generate me about $2 a day. Hmmm. It will likely wear out my video card faster though.
I’ve never used anything like Bitcoin before. The idea that you can (drastically oversimplifying) make money out of thin air is so bizarre to me.
Don’t feel bad, it is to most economists, too.
Can you game at the same time? Or do these guys have a separate rig just for making money with?
I dunno. This has always seemed like one of those iffy “too good to be true” schemes. Except that people have apparently been doing this successfully for years now.
From what I’ve seen you can throttle the amount of resources it uses, but for the people that do it I imagine they are dedicated systems, or have it set up some way to kick in when the system is idle similar to what projects like seti or gimp do.
@wumpus time for a new graphics card soon:
http://www.pcgamer.com/early-benchmarks-show-vega-frontier-edition-beating-titan-xp/
PC GAMER:
While Nvidia’s professional Quadro cards would perform better in these tests than the Titan Xp, the professional equivalent to the Titan Xp is the Quadro P6000, which sells for nearly $6,000. AMD’s Frontier Edition is much less expensive—the air-cooled model will sell for $1,200, while a liquid-cooled variant will go for around $1,800.
What a bargain! :)
Competition is good! Wake me up when there are consumer releases though…