Is this a PC worth mining on?

Sorry kind of a noob to mining and was just looking for some feedback as to what I can expect with my PC?

CPU AMD 760K X4
Mother Board Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-HD2
GPU AMD 7950 3GB DDR5 (Sapphire)
RAM 8GB Kingston
Power Supply Ultra LSP 600 watt
HDD 1TB Western digital Blue

Just looking for a little feedback

Here’s my generic answer to all questions like this (and there are a lot of them!):

If you’re thinking of this as a money-making enterprise, I can’t advise you, other than to say: do your research and don’t invest more money than you can afford to lose.

But if you’re thinking of doing this because you love the idea of a global, open, censorship-resistant financial network, and you love the Zcash community and you want to be a part of it and support it, then go ahead!

And maybe (or maybe not), you’ll occasionally get a little reward in form of being the first to find a block and get the Miners’ Reward for that block. :slight_smile:

But if you’re doing it for the latter reason — out of love — then don’t count on making more money that way than you spend. :slight_smile:

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That was a really good answer :ok_hand:

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the problem with this answer is if there is a gpu miner that is 1000X better than your standard software, there really is NO reason to waste your time or electricity on mining the coin…
so what if this is the case?!

I think you missed the point of zooko’s post:

But if you’re thinking of doing this because you love the idea of a global, open, censorship-resistant financial network, and you love the Zcash community and you want to be a part of it and support it, then go ahead!

Yes it’s very unlikely to be profitable on that hardware but you will be supporting the network so it depends on what is most important to you (and you do have a chance to get lucky).

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im not talking about profitability at all. im talking about why would i start up a computer, even an old one that is free to run for me, to compete (mine) vs other people with a 1000X advantage?!
i love the idea, however its not going to happen. unless you implement huge memory requirements to where GPUS cannot mine profitably.
edit: i can go “support” the bitcoin network with my computers also
when is the last time people have done that, gunuinely?!? with CPUS?!?
not for many years, so why would they do it with your coin all the sudden? its a great utopian dream,
without harder memory requirements GPU farms will take over and there will be no “everybody can help”
my CPUS do nothing to help the bitcoin network

Bitcoin with ASICs are not a good comparison. There are already optimized CPU solvers that reduce the GPU efficiency to under 10 times. Even those GPU miners out there now don’t have a 1000x advantage (30 H/s to ~0.2 H/s) is only 150 times.

ok compare to ETH
my CPUS still do nothing to help the network
hell, ZCOIN the scamcoin CPU mine coin, my 20 computers dont even make .01% of the network
unless you can get gpu efficiency within 5-10X that of CPUS, this whole idea is impossible. i hope it can happen tho
also:people have GPU farms READY to switch over immediately, most people dont have cpu farms laying around
GPUS will RECK this idea unless more equal

unless you can get gpu efficiency within 5-10X that of CPUS, this whole idea is impossible

I understand that’s the idea. Check out this thread where tromp has a CPU at 6.7 H/s Tromp's solvers which is well within your bounds.

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cool, im in to donate. but that doesnt compare to Toomins r9 290s running 150H/s
its a tough balance. seems like addigd cuckoo cycle somehow as tromp has said would solve alot of this

That’s a full rig of GPUs not a single card which is ~30H/s

if this is true and no more optimizations can be made, than near 5-6X differance is spot on. that would be amazing and i think the best scenario to support zooko vision and everyone else of the project

Actually the only elegant solution in this case is changing block distribution algo. In this case it won’t matter do u have a farm of GPUs or only one CPU. It will be a simple random block distribution based on geo-location as I already offered or even without geo-location. In this case insta-mining or superfast-mining are impossible. It will also extend mining time what will give additional time for proper open-source GPU miner development and optimized CPU development. So, instead of spending a lot of power and time developers can simply change block distribution algo. Dear Zooko, if You and The Team are real engineers, why do You go the most difficult way instead of the most reasonable and elegant, as real engineers?

Current situation about even the start of mining scares generic folks making them think that its not worth of it at all, and the only way is to change the algo convincing those folks that they do mine and have the same chance to catch the block along with others, is not it the main idea of Being Equal!

I agree I used to think they would raise the memory requirement to keep zcash friendly to CPU miners but now it seems greed has taken over and gpu miner farms will take over day one.

This will be interesting to see if regular people will support a coin with the 20% investor tax and the centralized gpu farm nature of the mining setup. Might as well just give all the coins to a handful of people now and skip the farce that mining is about to become.

Zcash Is really shooting itself in the foot. Raise the ram requirement considerably in a beta before launch please.

I don’t have the answers for full decentralization, but I’d like to mention that strong CPU coins still have large centralization due to botnets. Perhaps it’s even worse than bitcoin (ASICs) in some cases.

GPUs at least are purchasable by normal consumers and have a significant cost to scale. Botnets don’t have access to good GPUs en masse.

I see Zcash as an innovation in privacy, not an innovation in PoW.

Disclaimer: I run Zeropond.

Ah yes, a gpu farmer with 400 plus GPUs right on time mentioning the famous bot net Boogeyman.

With a high enough ram requirement most bot nets become non threats. There is definitely a bigger threat by the massive gpu nets online now and about to come online.

So zcash team can placate the few and loud on this forum and enjoy your new zec tokens or you can give zcash a shot to be adopted by and appeal to many more people, like was once the stated goal.

Either way this will be fun to see. Cheers.

Perhaps a RAM requirement could work, but if the requirement is too high you’d cut many users out of mining and specialized farms would exist anyways.

Botnet operators don’t particularly care about the performance of their hosts, so you’d need a very high RAM requirement.

Taking into account that calculations are memory intensive, will You notice that something wrong with your PC, when the most of the memory is exhausted? Probably You will reboot and current block mining will fail, then algo simply will chose another host for mining excluding previous one. 8GB for ram I consider enough, its not simple to find the most vulnerable android device with even 6GB of ram. So, I would not care about bot nets.

Imagine a proposed algo. The host for mining is picked up randomly and has enough ram to mine a block from requirements point of view. If host fails to mine a block due to any reason, then the host is picked up again. GPU hosts will be faster, farms even more, CPU are not, but all of them will have the same chance to be chosen. If the host is dedicated for mining a folk who runs it will notice it, if not a person will notice very soon that something is wrong when all cores and ram are in use by … (botnet)? Bot nets won’t be effective, cause in many situations block mining will fail. Let’s add a requirement of open inbound port on the router, and how big chance the bots will have? I can continue and prove that wise implementation of the algo is effective and fair way to run the coin.

seems like my ideas have picked up some steam. time for an answer from @zooko