CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

Sigh. I guess that's why the inventory problems aren't going to end anytime soon. Again.

 

What a letdown.
All the thought process of determining which card is the most future-proof and which presents a better price-performance ratio becomes completely moot.
No one needs to decide between a card we can't buy and another card we can't buy.

At this rate I'm just going to shut off from pretty much all AAA PC gaming until the mining bubble busts again. Which if it's anything like 2017 it should be well until next year.


At least we (or some of us) have the new consoles to be excited about, thankfully.

 

Yeah I started ethereum mining, it says 140$ per month 95MH/s for a 3080@176W.

 

My understanding is, don't trust a "mining return" of longer than maybe 2 months. It's very likely that you won't be able to get your cost back. The reason why mining Ethereum is profitable now is mostly due to the fact that not many new miners are joining in, combined with the situation of the current high activities on the Ethereum blockchain (the gas fee is very high right now), also the high price of Ethereum. However, none of these are guaranteed to last. More miners could be joining in as profit is high enough, and gas fee might be lower once the "DeFi Farm" frenzy hit a wall, or the price of Ethereum could go down. So, in the end, it's still an efficiency game: the miners with access to the cheapest electricity win (better GPUs are also more efficient, but the upfront cost is generally too high to justify the cost). Also, the "Proof-of-Stakes" Eth 2.0 is coming, maybe in a year or two, at that time mining profit will be greatly reduced.

However, if you want to use your GPU normally (as, for gaming or other purposes), it's quite possible to do some short-term mining to cover some of the cost. $140 per month is not too shabby. Of course, you'll want to make sure that you know how to sell your mined Ethereum or Bitcoin, as it can be quite expensive to sell them for fiat in some places.

 

Man has two guesses to unlock bitcoin worth $240m - BBC News

 

Leaning by doing...password on a piece of paper...lol

 

Elon Musk's Tesla buys $1.5bn of Bitcoin causing currency to spike - BBC News
February 8, 2021

 

Crap. Soon it is cheaper to buy a Tesla than a graphics card.

 

Last month I made 180$ net profit. I was testing out and hoping from pool to pool. I tried Ethermine, Flexpool, 2Miners and finally Sparkpool. First ETH to fiat was fun, I bought few raspberry copper heatsinks with that money for my 3080's backplate for the sake of mind. RTX3080/3090 VRAM's starts throttling at 110C Tjunction. Altough my card never past 100C at auto fan which stays around 50%. Micron's operating Tcase temperature for the GDDR6X is 0<Tc<95C. Tcase should be lower than Tj.

Past month I was mostly playing Wolcen and Cyberpunk an hour daily. I added my spare RTX 2060 into the PC 2 weeks ago, since then I don't play games anymore, lol. During using Autocad I switch my render GPU from 2060 to 3080. 2060 stutters during mining and 2D drawing, whereas 3080 runs smoothly. This month's estimate is 410$ net profit. I think adoption of crypto by big companies like Tesla and VISA, and money printing is only going to catalsyt the crypto prices. Just stay away from shitcoins like Doge and XRP.

Local GPU prices skyrocketed, most of them either are out of stock or asking 700$ for an RTX2060. Even used 480/580 8GB card prices are around 300$.

Spoiler

 

Me, with my brother and son have 2x3080, 3x6800XT's, 2x3070 and one 5700XT. Radeon's can do 63MH/s with ease and they are cool despite drawing 150-160W. 3070 doing 62MH/s draws 140W and has to spin fan's up a bit to stay cool, also memory starts throwing errors above +1200MHz when warm, so keeping these cards cool is ... profitable
3080's are monsters, drawing 244W the GPU temp is easy to manage and stays at 45C-52C, but VRM and RAM are hot as hell, tripping safety limits and bringing fan to 100% just to keep card on the verge of throttling. Now to be clear, this is in 'SLI' sandwich, but with decent spacing and in open case. GDDR6X are really power hungry when stressed by hashing algo. But reward is fluent Raytraycing in CP2077 at 4K ... err I mean 102MH/s in ETH! I need to dig out my 240mm and 300mm fans to help these babies breath

 

Cryptocurrency mining makes a move to RTX 3000 Series Laptops (guru3d.com)

 

My understanding is Bitcoin mining on GPUs has been dead for a long time. So what are people mining? Are any other crypto currencies even worth the time and effort?

 

Most likely they are mining Ethereum. Right now Ethereum is suffering from very high traffic, thus the "gas price" is very high (i.e. people are willing to pay more to have transactions confirmed by miners). Therefore, while normally miners were rewarded 2 ETH for each block mined, recently one can expect to get 4 ~ 5 ETH for each block mined. Combined with record high ETH price, it can be quite profitable mining Ethereum, for now.

 

Quite a lot of them really. Most cryptos are somewhat tied to BTC in their price so even despite the fact that BTC isn't possible to mine on GPUs anymore its price is affecting GPU mining almost directly.

 

Knowing next to nothing about the subject, I did ideally wonder how good Tesla's FSD v3 chip would be for mining. It does 72 TOPs in 72W.

 

Ethereum mining doesn’t need TOPs. It needs GB/s of random memory accesses. Performance depends on the memory subsystem, not so much on the cores.

 

Any reason you went with the rasberry pie coolers and not something with taller fins to take care of better air flow ?


Was thinking of something like this myself
https://www.amazon.com/a14111400ux0...=1&keywords=heat+sinks&qid=1613082930&sr=8-14

and I have an older version of this
https://www.amazon.com/Antec-Spot-C...eywords=antec+spot+cool&qid=1613083295&sr=8-1

I figure i could point directly over heat sinks to put a lot of air flow on them

or even something like this
https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Adjust...5a138&pd_rd_wg=hrk5B&pd_rd_i=B008A2TDC6&psc=1

 

This is interesting graph of ethereum network hash rate:


https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_network_hash_rate#:~:text=Ethereum Network Hash Rate is,122.1% from one year ago.

Last time there was crypto boom and bust at least one dude made a ton of money by figuring in out advance the bubble had bursted. If I remember right he short sold stock. I could remember wrong. This 2 part podcast has the details. Basically he observed hash rates and did some leg work to understand situation better than others.

https://ark-invest.com/podcast/nvidia-and-the-crypto-implosion-of-2018-with-akrams-razor-part-1/

 

I have another card just a slot above in sandwich fashion and the height is a issue, raspberry copper heatsinks was readily available for cheaper. You can use nvme coolers, or old xeon server heatsinks as well. I suggest you look for LED lighting heatsinks, they are usually much cheaper than PC counterparts, and bigger in size as well. Anything PC related is overpriced for some reason.

 

thanks for the advice. I have to figure out exactly where the ram is on my zotac.

My vega 56 is the card I mostly mine on 24/7 as my wife only plays civ and its typically once every few weeks with me. I think I'm going to repast it as its a launch unit blower model. Just trying to get confirmation on if i need to get new pads for the vrms. Right now its giving me 36mh but i have it way under clocked because otherwise it over heats. I'm hoping repasting it will allow me to get closer to 40mh/s . I know some people have them getting 50mh/s but they have the fan really loud on them and typically in a room set up for mining in an open bench.

I'm going easy on my 3080.. I'm getting about 82mh/s with the board drawing 271.3w. I don't want to kill the card mining. Just make a bit of a profit. Right now nanopool is saying i should make 380-400 a month mining at its current rate but since i shut off the mining to game a few hours a day its going to be less than that. I'm okay with that however.