Hey guys, Just wondering if anyone here is mining LTC, if so what sort of rig are you using and how many coins per day or week is it mining for you. With prices at current levels im thinking about setting something up but want to know cost vs benefit. Cheers SS
I mined back before things got crazy. 4x rigs, each had 2x HD7970's in them for 1300 - 1400 khash combined (per rig, depending on clock settings). Each rig drew about 550 - 600W at the socket, so you can get power costs from there. When I was mining, LTC was about $3 AUD each, and I was lucky to get 1.2 - 1.5 LTC per rig, per day, so power costs were barely being covered. I would assume LTC difficulty has skyrocketed since then also. HD7950's are a better mining card (cheaper to buy and run, and similar khash). I believe the new series AMD cards are also superior. There some good calcs out there you can use to work it out if you know approx power costs and khash - try coinwarz.com Edit - Since it is summer, be prepared for some major heat if you keep them inside your house.
Firstly a how to build your own rig guide: http://www.cryptobadger.com/2013/04/build-a-litecoin-mining-rig-hardware/ As noted in the article, the HD7950/7970 cards are getting hard to find, you might need to use the new Radeon R9 cards instead. As pro$pector mentioned, keeping the cards cooled may be a problem in summer. For profitability, try these calculators: Simple: http://ltc.kattare.com/calc.php More variables: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator
I read that some of the R9 are just rebadged older cards.. A point that was made by other in the bitcoin forum was to consider power consumption of the cards as well...
i have a 7950 setup that is profitable. will be investing in a few 280x as the 7950s are now end of life. difficulty has doubled since the price rise but not expected to increase like bitcoin as an fgpa or asic is a long way off for scrypt.
HD7950's are indeed sweet cards, the power saving over the 7970 alone is worth it. I talk regularly to a guy who has a 200x HD7950 farm in the UK, he is swapping them all out for R9's as apparently they run much cooler and the 7950's go for good money now. Taking the heatsink/fan off the GPU and applying some high quality thermal paste makes a huge difference too with heat.
I'm happy with my current position in Silver and still add little bits here and there, I just want to invest in something that is going up in value for a change
Back to the original question... I have five rigs, 4 with 4 GPUs, one with 3. A degree of mix & match between 7950s and 7970s to keep within power constraints (and I've had a mains cable melt ) I have a few 7990s for another project. A rig is an open-plan unit with a motherboard, an open frame to hang the GPUs, and one or two power supplies. Milkcrates are used extensively out there. Use good-quality PSUs; you will need powered risers to avoid burning the mobo, and plan on around 2.3Mhash/s per rig (your mileage may vary). I use Win7 mostly - Win 8 may allow more GPUs but it sucks. Team Viewer is a godsend. CGMiner and CGRemote are both free and very useful - one system is automatically turned off during daytime hours using CGRemote. Fine tuning for optimum hashing is black magic. Difficulty is going up exponentially as everyone has a go, and GPUs are getting hard to find - I think AMD will have an appreciable boost on the back of Scrypt crypto mining. Before you even start, answer three questions for yourself - Space, Heat, Power. Where are you going to put them - avoid dust, water, near a good power source et cetera; Heat - how will you manage what is a effectively a 1.5kW fan heater on all day & night; Power - how are you connecting it, and what will you pay. If you live in a cold part of the world your rigs are ideal for home heating. Up here in the tropics - not so much. An ideal situation is to have a honking solar with spare capacity that you are already writing off as an asset. The theoretical ideal card is an R9 290X - good luck finding those, and the reference design airflow sucks (single fan. Ho Ho). If you can get hold of 'em (and I suspect the US has already been sucked dry and Oz is pricing 'em high) you would probably find that they would spend a lot of time throttled down.
I understand you need to join a mining pool to start mining LTC. Any recommendations from those experienced in such things, thanks in advance.
I have 5 x cards going at the moment 2 x are r290 X's and they pull 860KH/s each. I have another 3 card rig on order.
If I could find an R9 290 or 290X at a reasonable price I'd be happy to fill a rig with them - but the local market price seems a little high: 290X has an RRP of $799. I have ordered one to experiment with from Shopping Express. That cooler will have to go - I would expect a Gigabyte Windforce in short order. Nice to have all the hot air going in the same direction, but not if the cooling suffers. All this makes the prices only a few months ago seem cheap - I picked up the Gigabyte 7990s in the low $600s. Ah, nostalgia. 7970s are a little cheaper at as low as $350. I wonder if we'll see a dual Tahiti soon... What's your draw at the wall for your existing three-card rig?
My system with the 2 x 290x's Draws 900w at the wall while mining and that is without the CPU mining as well The system has 2 x SSD's and 3 x spindle HDD's and is water cooled. I picked up the cards 2nd hand with water blocks allready installed on them for $1300 delivered. I bought them for my gaming machine, then discovered mining water cooled they sit at a pretty constant 54 degreese and are overclocked to 1100mhz and pull approx 860kh each. The other system I have not measured as it does not matter to me as I have the rig at work but would probably use the same or more power. the R9 280's are hashing @ approx 660kh for me @ stock speeds, for mining they are the better bang for your buck at the moment.
Those 290X's were a steal, and waterblocks would fix the obvious cooling difficulties. I have a total immersion project which is stalled whilst I get an AC guy in
