I have an i3-2120 3.3ghz It’s been running 24/7 at ~4.2Sol/s for over 2 months now and I’ve yet to get anything.
In the beginning of zcash I had an old Xeon E5430 that I started mining zcash on. It averaged 3Sol/s. I never got any zec with it either.
My next rig is a 8 core Xeon I’m going to have 32g mem to start when I have the money to buy it.
The question I have is cpu mining a waste of time?
In my case sure seems like it.
I’ve been mining with slushpool from almost the beginning. I average about $3 a week with an old antminer s3.
Slushpool claims he going to support zec but nothing has showed up yet on how to do so.
Since I’m building a new rig should I switch to GPU mining? If so what is out there for GPU’s that will generate some thing as fast as my bitcoin rig?
Zcash is ASIC resistant so i dont think cpu mining it would be profitable at all, probably good for staking something maybe, GPU mining definitely seems to be the way to go, my rig is decent 5 firepro w7000s, with the difficulty now looking at 1 zec every 40 days or so, minimum cpu power, maybe 2 ghz, everyone talks about the high end cards but expensive and in short supply, how fast is you btc rig?
CPU mining has been a waste of time for quite a while. The network hashrate is above 300 MSol/s. A CPU is lucky to do 10 Sol/s. Decent GPU’s will net your around 400-500 Sol/s. The GTX 1080 Ti will get you 700+ Sol/s for comparison’s sake.
I would strongly recommend switching to GPU mining. You would also be better suited to join a pool as you’re looking at probably a year or more for return on investment if you solo mine. You would need a good 200-300 KSol/s (The equivalent to 500x1080 Ti’s) to even think about solo mining and even then you would have to be pretty darn lucky to get anything.
You should obviously make up your own mind, but if it were my antminer I would try to get rid of it as soon as possible because the value is only going to decrease with the network difficulty ever-increasing it will never be able to mine more Bitcoin than it does right now you could probably get a decent price for it still , at least graphic cards will retain their value longer into the future because people love video games, when my rig becomes obsolete and least I can get maybe two-thirds of what I actually paid for just out of the graphics cards, then the board, mem, HD, fans
I’m at the drawing board stage with a GPU miner, everything I have read elsewhere says the CPU doesn’t need to be anything special (also 4GB memory is stated as adequate)…
The first thing I read here in the mining instructions says ‘activate CPU mining’ - I can maybe see this could be necessary as a legacy thing, but before I go buying a celeron… I figure it’s best to ask the daft question now and this thread is the most recent thing I can find which is related.
If you’re feeling charitable any comments on whether or not the cheapest 8GB 1070’s I can find is a sensible idea would be much appreciated… Radeon cards seem to give a bigger bang for the buck but some of the currencies I have looked at have compatibility issues.
The CPU really doesn’t need to be anything special. I do know that there have been some issues previously with regards to how many PCIe lanes certain motherboard/CPU combos contain but you’d have to look deeper into that on your own as I only briefly came across it. Personally, I put 8GB of RAM in my mining rig (and will do so when I get around to building my next one). While 4GB is fine, I like the fact that if I need to quickly convert one of the rigs to do something or I plan to run something else other than just the mining software on there, I can. I have several machines doing all sorts of things and I like the flexibility to shuffle things around on my network from machine to machine as needed without having to swap out hardware. But that’s a personal preference.
The 1070 Ti’s offer the best cost/efficiency ratio at the moment. AMD cards can mine zcash just fine however, nVidia cards have the upper hand and offer way more performance and efficiency than any of the AMD offerings. That being said, the nVidia cards aren’t the best for some of the other currencies. So you would have to decide based on how invested you plan to be with zcash. That doesn’t mean nVidia cards are useless anywhere else, they’re not. Just not going to get the best value at this time.
Going with the cheapest 8GB 1070’s isn’t a horrible idea by any means, but if you can find 1070 Ti’s that aren’t priced significantly higher than the regular 1070’s, you might want to think about investing in those instead.
Thanks for that, and at christmas too - have a good one!
Looked at my prospective motherboard and there’s one x16 main PCIe slot, the others are all x1
Checked out chips from celeron to 4.5 Ghz core i7, they all have this identical spec:-
PCI Express Configurations ‡ Up to 1x16, 2x8, 1x8+2x4 Max # of PCI Express Lanes 16
‘Up to’ is a little ambiguous, doesn’t really say how they might be managed by the CPU in other configurations, but I guess the inference is that after 3 GPU’s you’ll either have 1x8 and (n-1)x1 down through 3x4 and (n-3)x1 etc. IF the motherboard supports it?
Either way the board I’m getting leaves it at 1x8 and (n-1)x1 if I’m lucky or just nx1 if not.