I love testing ideas and even more than just testing new ideas I love testing them using Minimum viable product approach.
I've been in a crypto craze for a while already - started with buy and hold, added little speculative trades, tried an ICO and now even considering to start mining. Totally insane? Well, I can only agree!
In fact, that doesn't even sound like me - you see, I like buying and holding, I even enjoy doing a few swing trades once in a while, but to run a mining rig? Totally not me. It sounds like a lot of hassle to me.
But still - starting a mining - is the latest crazy idea I've been thinking lately. And here you go, just ordered some goodies from Amazon.
Inspiration for ordering these goodies comes from these two great articles (make sure to read them out)
- Affordable 12 GPU Mining Rig: Monero, Vertcoin, Bitcoin Gold & Ethereum
- Silent Ethereum Mining On EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 at 22 MH/s
In short, when looking for most affordable options for GPU mining rig I was worried about two positions, motherboard and graphics cards.
Luckily there is a great motherboard priced just a little bit above $200 with up to 13 GPU - ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ 13GPU Mining Motherboard CryptoCurrency
When speaking about graphics cards I was struck between EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 and ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1070 Mini 8GB GDDR5
After a brief rethinking I decided to stick with the cheaper EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 card:
So here comes my shopping list:
A quick note: Items listed below contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on Amazon site, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you
- Kingston Technology KVR21N15S8/4 ValueRAM 4GB 2133MHz DDR4 Computer Internal Memory ($49.99)
- EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC GAMING, ACX 2.0 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC), Only 6.8 Inches Graphics Card 06G-P4-6163-KR ($274.99)
- ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ 13GPU Mining Motherboard CryptoCurrency ($219.95)
- Kingston Digital, Inc. 120GB A400 SATA 3 2.5 Solid State Drive SA400S37/120G 2.5" SA400S37/120G ($49.99)
- MintCell 6-Pack PCIe 4-Pin MOLEX PCI-E 16x to 1x Powered Riser Adapter Card w/ 60cm USB 3.0 Extension Cable & MOLEX to SATA Power Cable - GPU Riser Adapter Ethereum Mining ETH + 2 MintCell Cable Ties ($45.95)
- EVGA 1000 GQ, 80+ GOLD 1000W, Semi Modular, EVGA ECO Mode, 5 Year Warranty, Power Supply 210-GQ-1000-V1 ($169.99)
- Intel CPU BX80662G3900 Celeron G3900 2.80Ghz 2M LGA1151 2C/2T Skylake Retail ($45.18)
Total: $856.04
Apparently, I purchased two 120GB SSD. As in total, I paid $ 906. Well, not a big issue as there are never too few SSD. I will put this SSD in one of our office PCs as a backup drive.
Now, as you can see I've paid about $850 for the bare minimum with just one EVGA Geoforce GTX 1060 6GB card. I didn't order more cards - as I was looking for a minimum viable product approach, purchasing just the bare minimum to setup and run a mining rig, at the start with just one GPU. Later, if things will turn out good, I plan to add a new GPU once per month, kind of dollar cost averaging, the same approach I'm using to buy coins once in a month, see: Dollar-Cost Averaging as part of Cryptocurrency Portfolio . This time instead of buying more coins I plan to buy more graphics cards. Sounds crazy? Probably it is!
If you would purchase 12 GPU all at once, such mining rig would cost you $3,880.93. Yikes, a pretty huge investment in a hobby experiment.
Now, as I have access to "cheap" electricity here in Georgia, at about $0,06 per kWh, I did simple calculations, assuming 22 MH/S per GPU
| GPU | Hashing Power MH/S | Invested | Profit per month |
How many months
|
| 1 | 22 | $856.04 | $38.40 | 22.29 |
| 2 | 44 | $1,131.03 | $76.80 | 14.73 |
| 3 | 66 | $1,406.02 | $115.21 | 12.20 |
| 4 | 88 | $1,681.01 | $153.61 | 10.94 |
| 5 | 110 | $1,956.00 | $192.01 | 10.19 |
| 6 | 132 | $2,230.99 | $230.41 | 9.68 |
| 7 | 154 | $2,505.98 | $268.81 | 9.32 |
| 8 | 176 | $2,780.97 | $307.21 | 9.05 |
| 9 | 198 | $3,055.96 | $345.62 | 8.84 |
| 10 | 220 | $3,330.95 | $384.02 | 8.67 |
| 11 | 242 | $3,605.94 | $422.42 | 8.54 |
| 12 | 264 | $3,880.93 | $460.82 | 8.42 |
As of writting this - Mining metrics are calculated based on a network hash rate of 113,391 GH/s and using a ETH - USD exchange rate of 1 ETH = $ 421.43. These figures vary based on the total network hash rate and on the ETH to USD conversion rate. Block reward is fixed at 3 ETH and future block reward reductions are not taken into account. The average block time used in the calculation is 15 seconds. The electricity price used in generating these metrics is $ 0.06 per kWh.
It would ask me about 22 months just to get my investment back on this mining rig if I would decide to stick with just one GPU.
As I'm planning to add at least one more new GPU to the rig per month I can see that with more GPU's connected mining ethereum seems really tempting. Getting back an investment in just 8 and a half months (with 12 GPU) to me sounds like a 50% profit in a year.