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Showing 12 of 12 results by HackneyB
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Topic
Board Computer hardware
Topic OP
[WTS] Sapphire 7870 XT w/boost
by
HackneyB
on 28/09/2013, 19:28:17 UTC
Selling one or two used Sapphire 7870 XT w/boost edition cards.  Tahiti LE chipset, 1536 stream processors, box, unused game vouchers and all parts included. 

Sapphire (11199-20-20G) Radeon HD 7870 XT WITH BOOST 2GB GDDR5
- 925 MHz Clock, 6000 MHz Memory
- PCI-Express 3.0, Dual-Link DVI, Double Mini DisplayPort, HDMI

1.5BTC each, shipped in Canada
Post
Topic
Board Mining speculation
Re: Difficulty speculation for the round started on 29/6/13
by
HackneyB
on 07/07/2013, 05:52:18 UTC
May I ask why you're doing this?  Smiley

There's a math puzzle factor to this and maybe a flip a coin aspect too.  But over the last 3-4 months difficulty changes have been sort of unpredictable - there was even a decrease if I remember correctly. 

All due to a looong list of factors that affect the total network hashrate, including the less obvious ones like homemade rig uptime lapses, to FPGAs being sent back to BFL, people going on holidays and just not caring, to individual miners switching to other pools, to solo, to other cryptocurrencies ....

Don't get me wrong I'm tracking things too but why such a real time approach?
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: USD You Would pay for 1 GH/s Right Now
by
HackneyB
on 06/07/2013, 23:14:54 UTC
If mining isn't profitable, how come people still are mining with GPU's?

Some people are still mining with CPUs, I'm sure. 

Reasons (all a risk) for mining with GPUs, I assume:
1. Even if paying for electricity, you are still today making more than electricity costs of running GPUs.  This does not account for hardware costs.  I don't know where the tipping point is but I think somewhere with BTC dipping below $50, at current difficulty. 
2. Not everyone pays for their electricty. 
3. You can be losing money today, but believe that BTC will some day be worth $100, $1000 or even $10000. 
4. If you can't do math but everyone's hyping about it like they are, you can believe it is all profitable. 
5. It is still possible (just not probable) that difficulty will go down.  And GPU mining will be rejuvenated again. 

etc etc
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: USD You Would pay for 1 GH/s Right Now
by
HackneyB
on 06/07/2013, 14:31:50 UTC
I get the sense that majority of people getting in now did so because of media coverage and they don't fully realize how much money can be made.  For every winner there have to be some loosers right?  The money has to come from somewhere. 
Post
Topic
Board Mining speculation
Re: Difficulty jumps 28%
by
HackneyB
on 06/07/2013, 14:24:03 UTC
There are other startups hashing themselves and producing (and selling) ASIC hashing hardware, not to mention that GPU hashing is still going on and people are still joining just for fun, even if they won't care about profit. 

Asicminer is hashing themselves and selling devices to people.  Chips are now being sold as well, presumably all those chips will be hashing soon .. we're going to get flooded with hashes at an even faster pace now once Avalon and BFL buyers become the minority in the ASIC market. 
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: USD You Would pay for 1 GH/s Right Now
by
HackneyB
on 06/07/2013, 14:12:54 UTC
This is exactly the question I've been asking myself, and tracking with calculations..

Someone on this forum mentioned that mining hardware is worth no more than $.30 per 1MH/s so in theory $300 per 1GH/s.  That's before electricity costs are factored in.  

However if you project difficulty into the future at about 10-15% increase every 2016 blocks, and then figure out how much you can mine, it is eye opening how few bitcoins you can actually mine in the lifetime of this hypothetical 1GH/s ASIC device.  Today you can mine something like 0.14 BTC per week, per 1GH/s, but 6 months later its 0.002 or 0.001 per week and it no longer matters if you keep mining or not, you're basically going to turn off the device and throw it away.  

And that's before you look at the market price of BTC .....

Edit: based on the difficulty calculations, a 1GH/s device will mine 1.6 BTC in 52 weeks starting from today, if difficulty increase trend continues at the average rate it was recently.  That's $160 if BTC price is $100 on average, $80 if BTC price is $50 on average.  (!)
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: First post - curious about mining with my workstations
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 04:48:09 UTC
According to this they would be mediocre at mining - potentially less than today's $100 ATI cards each
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison#Nvidia


Also https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4404.0

Quadra 6000 are 3 year old cards.  They probably still rock for other things, just not for the type of calculations that mining is.  
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: GPU not recognised in Guiminer
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 03:03:31 UTC
I read somewhere that NVIDIA cards aren't the best type suited for mining, but reading my guiminer readme.txt:

Quote
For AMD/ATI cards, to get a version of OpenCL you need the Stream SDK which is
available here:
    http://developer.amd.com/tools/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/
   
For NVIDIA cards, you can also install OpenCL and mine that way, or you can
install CUDA and use rpcminer-CUDA which may provide slightly higher performance
since it is optimized specifically for NVIDIA cards.


I also have something called GPU_Caps_Viewer_1.18.0 which shows a good breakdown of your system's GPU capabilities - maybe you can spot what's missing with that tool. 
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: About flags and performance
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 02:59:25 UTC
This sort of speed sounds like you're running the CPU and not the GPU. 
When you create your miner, make sure the Device drop down  is NOT the CPU. 

When I mine with the CPU and GPU at the same time I get 500KHash/s .. just the GPU - 187MHash/s. 
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: solo litecoin mining question
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 02:20:50 UTC
You have to find a block, so when you are mining yourself, you have to wait till it finds a whole block, you don't get anything till you find the block.

Wait, so does that mean you are constantly finding partials? Or does it mean that it just takes a long time to compute the block.

Sorry for the newbie questions, I've been trying to read as much as I can.

Basically if you were mining with that card a year ago things would be different.  Today it may take you months or years to get a block. 
Look at it this way - there is a pool which totals 1 TeraHash/second.  It takes that pool 12 hours to get a block and get that 25BTC reward.  Your card pulls 300MegaHashes/second and is basically 3000 times slower than everyone combined in that pool.  So in the long run you will need 36,000 hours to find a solution to a block which is 4 years. 

My numbers are all off by a bit but its the magnitude that matters - you will have to wait years without joining a pool. 
Mining bitcoin yes this would be correct.  LTC difficulty is much lower and your numbers are definitely off...with that said i do agree it would take a very long time to get your own block.  Pool mining is definitely the way to go.


Thanks I missed that point.  Doesn't "the market" factor that in and make LTC cheaper by exactly the factor that it is easier to mine?
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: 7950 or 7970 for mining rig
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 02:17:46 UTC
have you thought about the fact that these cards consume 200-300W and that to have 5 of them your PSU may need to be monstrous?

Also seems this only makes sense now if you want o resell or use those cards elsewhere .. if buying only for Bitcoins some cheaper cards may make more sense based on how much processing power you get per card cost. 

7970 - 600MHash/s and $400
7770 - 200MHash/s and $100
Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: solo litecoin mining question
by
HackneyB
on 09/04/2013, 02:08:20 UTC
You have to find a block, so when you are mining yourself, you have to wait till it finds a whole block, you don't get anything till you find the block.

Wait, so does that mean you are constantly finding partials? Or does it mean that it just takes a long time to compute the block.

Sorry for the newbie questions, I've been trying to read as much as I can.

Basically if you were mining with that card a year ago things would be different.  Today it may take you months or years to get a block. 
Look at it this way - there is a pool which totals 1 TeraHash/second.  It takes that pool 12 hours to get a block and get that 25BTC reward.  Your card pulls 300MegaHashes/second and is basically 3000 times slower than everyone combined in that pool.  So in the long run you will need 36,000 hours to find a solution to a block which is 4 years. 

My numbers are all off by a bit but its the magnitude that matters - you will have to wait years without joining a pool.