Hey everyone,
I got some good feedback on my beginners guide check it out here (LINK) if you don't already know how to use MSI afterburner, Nicehash Auto switching miner or how to calculate your electricity usage and profits on whattomine.com. If you are familar with all that then the following guide is aimed at squeezing that extra $1 per day out of each card and tweaking it for extra hashing power.
1. Which cards can make you a profit on. Listed in order of profitably and resale value. Note I only list very common cards other less common but powerful models are also good.
GTX 1080ti
GTX1070
GTX 1080
GTX 1060
RX570
RX480 - Will need to be retired in one or two months so if you have these SELL now as they will still get a high price. Note that you are kind of ripping people off if you do sell high and they are unaware of the coming changes to mining ETH so please be aware.
So you know how to mine with nicehash.exe and its giving you a steady profit. Most of the cards listed above will give you a very similar ROI (return on investment). They will pay themselves off in 3-6 months depending on BTC price etc. Except the AMD cards are generally a bit slower on returns.
The 1070 is ranked higher than the 1080 as they are very similar but the 1070 has the benefit of having some models that only take up one slot so if you want to fit more cards in a single case having one of these might be worth it.
1080 ti is ranked the highest for one reason. Once it is paid off it's all profit. You want to fit as many cards on one motherboard as you can and you may as well have the most powerful if they pay themselves off at the same rate. That way you can fit more in your system without having to buy another CPU/MB/PSU etc.
2. Where to buy.
New egg and amazon a great places to pick these cards up if you live in the US you get bonus points on amazon? and newegg has great deals and points too. I live in New Zealand so I have to suffer and just buy at my local computer store. Also buy new unless you can get the receipt for second hand as these cards have 3 year warranty.
3. Which coin to mine and calculators
For the purposes of this guide assume all hash rates (mining speed) is based on the 1080 ti. As they are all relevant to their price per performance. For example the 1080 might cost 30% less but it also hashes at 30% less etc etc). Note the RX480 and RX570 probably are not as efficient based on their price as they are selling second hand for sometimes more than people paid for them. I would not be buying these cards anymore.
3.1 Advanced mining. So nicehash will automatically pick the most profitably coin to mine for you and mine it. It will pick the best miner and algorithm also so all the hard work is done. But if you want to squeeze an extra $1 or sometimes 2$ per card there is better ways to do it.
There is several popular command line miners. They can mine different coins and algorithms and some are better and some are not. Nicehash has tried to keep up but it is usually a little bit behind.
To find profitable coins use this link.
Whattomine.com
By default it is set to 3x 280X at non tweaked settings but it gives you a good indication, 3x 280 is similar to 1x 1080ti but the 1080 ti uses less power. You can select your card but clicking on the name of the card and it will go red. You can configure your cards and how fast they go as well as how my electricity they use as your power cost. You can even put in your hardware costs to see how long it would take to pay off the card.
Use whattomine as a guide. Take Zcash (zec) for example on a 1080 ti. It is a very stable and profitable coin to mine. Most will use ccminer or some other miner to mine it. A typical hash rate would be 500 sol (same as hash mh/s). But if you get an advanced miner that targets this coin you can get a massive boost of upto say 720 sol. Usually these miners are free but sometimes the developer will take 1-2% of your earnings. This is very very fair. They are generally taking 10cents a day off you and giving you an extra 1-2$ sometimes more depending on the rates.
So from that picture you are making $5.54 USD a day and spending around $1.25 a day on power, that is $4.27 a day profit. As the price of BTC goes up or you can hold your mining earnings and sell when its up the better the price is. Zec and everything is about to take a massive dive so by the time you read this guide the prices might have gone up or down. Those prices will rebound and it is the risk we take. But you can move onto other coins etc.
Once you have found a coin you like click the coins section on whattomine.com and input your values for it and this will give you a more accurate reading.
4. How to mine with advanced miners
Nicehash.exe is so simple that this is where it could get confusing.
So you have picked your coin or algorithm (algorithms sometimes mine multiple coins switching between which one is more profitable).
Now you need a miner. Note not all miner programs work with both Nvidia/AMD most of the recent ones tend to optimize Nvidia over AMD or don't support AMD at all.
A - For zcash (ZEC) you will want to use EWBF's CUDA Zcash miner v0.3.4b. (https://github.com/nanopool/ewbf-miner/releases) or version 0.3.3b is also fine. This miner will give you around 30% boost of most other zcash miners. Nicehash now has this built into is latest version.
B - Download the file and extract this to your desired folder for example "C:\mining\EWBF".
Now find the start.bat right click and select EDIT. It is an example of the basic commands to use to start mining. I will give you an example so don't worry.
C - Make sure you have a BTC wallet where you want to send your BTC as this guide is showing you how to mine ZEC but auto convert it to BTC as this is generally best practice. If you want to actually keep the coin you are mining that is more complicated and I will not be showing it here but you can easily google for the solution. You can use an exchange or you can use your own personal wallet or you can use Nicehash wallet. Personally I use nicehash wallet as there is a 3% fee to use external wallet and a 2.3% fee if you use nicehash. Also if you go external and you have only one card the minimum payout usually takes a week. If you use the nicehash wallet you can get paid out every day or every second day.
D - Select your mining pool. You can solo mine or pool mine. Think of it like a real gold mine. You are trying to find blocks or in this case gold. If you are by yourself in a big gold mine you could go for months and find nothing or strike gold if you were super lucky. If you go as a group and share all the profits regardless of who finds what that is what a mining pool is. You can earn bonuses but you generally don't need too worry about that. Always use a mining pool. Solo mining is for people with lots of cards and advanced knowledge.
I generally use nicehash pool because of the auto convert to BTC. But you can use any pool you want but remember they have different fees and reliability.
https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted#seller - This is a list of all the different algorithms and pools for the different miners. We will be using equihash.usa.nicehash.com because zec uses Equihash to mine. Choose a different one based on your location for better reliability. Nicehash.com also has lists of other pools you can use too.
Other useful pools are as follows.
www.nanopool.com you can set lower limits on the payouts to get paid sooner but it does not auto convert to BTC so you must have a wallet per coin. Nanopool has a great wizard for mining setup. Just select the coin you want to mine and it will tell you what to download and create the bat files for you and you are good to go. But it is not always the most optimised so you may as well just use nicehash.exe.
zpool.ca Auto converts to BTC or whatever coin you want and has lower fees but occasionally gets DDos attacked resulting in brief connectivity loss.
E - edit the command file or .bat file. Right click start.bat and select edit. Here is mine for example with my Wallet address.
miner --server equihash.usa.nicehash.com --user 3Dz5TNYhKHf19XJBXkjGY6fdYALpEwVkUy.Ryzen --pass x --port 3357 --pec
Replace with your wallet key and where it says "Ryzen" just put the name of your miner in there. Everything else can be left as is. Save it.
F - Configuration. This is the most important step. Most cards their sweet spot is around 65-75% reduced TPD or reduced power. Open MSI afterburner that you already know how to use from my last guide. You will be custom setting the settings per miner. Where as with Nicehash.exe you set it to settings that work good for most miners.
Set pretty much exactly like this. 75% TPD is a sweet spot, you would only set it higher if the price of zcash went up alot. Zcash likes higher clock speeds 1080ti can go from +50 to +200 for the clock speeds. +50 is safe on almost all models. Already overclocked models dont like to go much over +100. Stock models can sometimes go upto +200. Google your card to find what others have set it to. If you set it and start mining and your PC freezes you set it too high.
Zcash mining doesn't really get any benefit from overclocking the memory so just leave it at zero. Some claim that you can set it to -502 and it doesn't change the hash rate. For zcash I find +0 is better and the negative setting is not really doing anything it might stress the memory less. Try it yourself. Make sure your temp is under 60-70 adjust the fan accordingly. Some algorithms such as Skein do run the same at -502 as setting it to zero so it doesn't hurt.
Please stick to default settings other than TPD 75% when you first start the miner so you know you are stable then try to tweak the settings up slowly.
Note on bat files. You can save individual bat files for each different miner. Or if you use the same miner but sometimes use a different pool create a new bat file for that configuration. Another thing I do is write down the MSI tweak settings for each card inside that bat file so you dont forget what works well for each card/coin.
5. Extra requirements that most miners need if you have a Nvidia card. (install in this order)
- Nvidia cuda latest version https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
- Latest drivers for GPU
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53840
6. The fun part.
Double click the start.bat to start mining. Monitor your temp and adjust the fan speed to compensate.
You can see I have two cards in this rig. It is my gaming computer and I have not optimized it so you can see the Hash rate or SOL is not high but it is not terrible either. Also it can take a while to ramp up. Aim for around 4 Sol/W by lowering or upping the TPD and tweaking the core clock. Mine is set to +0 in this test.
Depending on what pool you use you can see your stats in near real time to make sure it is working.
7. Finding info
I would recommend these forums for finding stuff to mine and effeciency etc.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0
So to recap. Find what you want to mine. Get the miner, choose a pool. Tweak and configure. Find out your hash rate and put it in a calculator to make sure it is making more profit than Nicehash.exe.
I personally mostly mine Zec and some other ones like HUSH or occasionally a coin will spike so high you will target it. You can google search to find out which miner you need or which is the best and how to configure the bat file. I recommend starting out just using nicehash pool because it is simple and auto converts to BTC.
Autoconvert to BTC is the best way. Most coins follow the price of BTC. So mine what is profitable at the time and buy whatever coins you want with it.
A QUICK WARNING Just a note guys prices are the lowest I have every seen for mining returns. But they are still profitable. If you have a gaming computer may as well do it. Just hold your BTC and sell it later at a higher price. Things are going to be rough over the next month or so as most coins will drop because of the BTC 1st AUG announcement.
My next blog I will go over using the exchange and converting back to real $$$ if this blog proves popular enough for me to write another one. I am sorry if there is a lot of information but it is hard to skip over anything. I will also be covering multiple GPU's in a single rig. Up to four or five in one.
Build in progress this rig is currently running 2x 1080 ti outside of the case. Waiting for parts to connect two more cards.
