Anyone mining BitCoins / LiteCoins on TE?

[aasimenator]

So i've been thinking of invest some money & building up a 2000 KHash/s LiteCoin dedicated Mining system. and wondering if any members here on TE do these things already & give me some pointers regarding any problems they faced when they started.

e.g. Most of the build logs online for litecoin mining is pretty solid but i know the temps here in India is an overkill atleast in Summer time which is not that far now.

On my existing computer with a XFX R9 280x i can mine 550 KHash/s but the temps for the VRM1 reaches 90 Degrees C. whereas all other buildlogs i've seen with this card the temps were only around 70 Degrees C. depending on the ambient temps which were quite lower than ours.

 

[DigitalDude]

I don't mine but was checking out things ( i have an nvidia GPU ). you need to do a lot of calculations to check that you will be profitable and not lose money. what is your power tariff? 550kh/s sound low for a 280X, I guess it is because of the temps. an open air arrangement and a table fan will be the best solution but dust is a big problem for us

these details will give a rough idea about profitability:
LTC GPU Mining profit chart
Litecoin Mining Hardware 2.0 (LTC price is outdated)
Mining hardware comparison

a 2 MH/s system will probably cost atleast 1.2lakhs ~110LTC (tri sli 280X/290 rig). so at current difficulty it will take around 4 months of 24/7 mining to get the cost of the system back. factoring in power costs and difficulty increase it might be even 6 months before you start making profit. so only if you are confident in LTC and in it for the long haul consider doing this. there are also talks about ASIC miners being developed for LTC mining by some companies that (they claim!!!) will give 5MH/s for <100W and cost around $1200 and are promising shipping after April 2014. they might turn out to be a total scam but who knows if true they might push up the mining difficulty significantly.

I'm considering to get cheap second hand parts to test the waters. considering the present crash of LTC (from $40 to $15), indian temps, quality of power and inflated costs of new GFX cards i'm skeptical about building a high cost dedicated mining system. only insurance is if everything tanks atleast the system can be sold

btw if you don't know already, there is https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=89.0


_

 

[aasimenator]

there are different intensities at which the software can mine, 20 being the max, at low intensity of 12 i can mine around 460 Kh/s with the temps around 80 C in closed cabinet for 24 hours
at intensity of 13 i can mine around 550 kh/s but have to keep the lid open or the temps reaches 100 C & can blow air on the card from a small table fan to reduce it down to about 85 C
at 18 i can mine at 700 kh/s but the temps cross 107 C within a few minutes and even using a table fan to blow air on the card does nothing maybe less 1 / 2 C

This temp is only of VRM1 & VRM2, GPU stays within the range of 65 - 80 C no matter what the difficulty. XFX has told me to get the card replaced due to its higher temps, waiting for the holidays to be over to do so.

1.2 Lakhs is my estimated budget as well with 3 x 280x graphics card, but i am going to start with 1 system only at this point , once i recover the money invested I will build another 1 or 2. Or if the ASIC miners for LTC arrives by that point then i'd go with those instead of a pc as that will yield better results.

The Indian Temps is what worries me too & i was briefly thinking of getting a system build & setup and shipped to the datacenter in canada where i have most of the other servers in work on, but opted out of it because of the regular maintenance it would need and it would also possibly need to be in a closed chassis.

The price drop was very heart breaking to me too as i only bought the 280x so i could test mining before going into it. But I am pretty sure it will be back up to the $40 mark by end of Jan 2014. I had also bought 10 LTC when it was @ $12, today its already up to $22

how i keep my card cool when i am mining

Look how much dust it has accumulated

 

[kailahopkins]

If you’re CPU user, I would recommend Dual Core, Quad Core and I’ve heard that the Corei5 do good as well. I'm fine with AMD GPU mining, it's significantly faster.

 

[aasimenator]

Cpu is not at all a good option no matter how good the cpu
I have mined on i5 n i7 and even 8 core xeons none of the give over 100 khash/s so its not worth the time and the power consumption.