To 1080ti or not to 1080ti

Mining
1

ok, so from what i have read the 1080ti is the bomb, providing awesome hash rates on zcash, and is not using a ridiculous amount of watts.

470 would be my choice, but even second handed the market places in our country are full of people asking them, so i guess i’m not the only one mining in this country.

i’m tempted buying them. but i am afraid of ending up with a one trick pony that is only good for mining zcash and the likes. if zcash goes down, you’re going to be stuck.

also, if vega comes in august or september, this could have an impact on everything, because i expect (hope/wishful thinking) that they will be the better ones for being able to mine both zcash and eth.

reason why i still might consider 1080ti (or 1070 maybe) anyway, is that i have limited space , i dont want to put my garage full of miners :slight_smile:

also in my country i pay a lot for electricity (0.20 euro), but since the prices of zcash went up, i care less about the electricity to be honest, just prefer to mine more and get quicker return (especially with vega coming)

i have a left over machine with 750 watts in it. how many 1080 ti gpus could i put in there if i would undervolt them? let’s say 150 watts for the system, 600 left, 500 to be safe? according to My First Rig Build 1080 Ti GPUs - #4 by BUTUZ that could be 2 cards at 249w for instance, mining 2x 734 sols.

what do you think, would 2 1080ti’s be ok with the 750 watt cpu?

and what are your thoughts in general on nvida cards for mining? can you mine anything else that is profitable enough?

2

I have the same question.
It seems like AMD GPU mining ETH is always more profitable than Nvidia GPU mining ZEC.
Even though AMD cards are almost not available, I still hesitate to decide using Nvidia.

3

For the price of the 1080Ti you could have 3 AMDs with higher hash rates. My current rig I’m running an EVGA 1080 To FE which is getting 630 H/s but is drawing around 240w and 2 280xs getting around 590 H/s which are drawing about 145w a piece. I wouldn’t put any more than 2 with a 750w power supply seeing as mine is drawing 240w.

4

how do you get such low amount of watts on the 280xs? i am also running them over here, 300H/s but with around 210 watts i believe

5

with the buying price you are right that you can buy 3 amds with a higher hash rate than one 1080ti. also with amd you can pick up 280x or 7900 very cheap compared to 470s and they mine even more :wink: they use more watts, but for the price that these older cards are being offered roi is very quick.

i actually stil have a mining rig also at this moment with 2 280x, 2 7900, and 2 470s in there (and 2 850watts psus).
thing is though, my pci locations are limited, and i do not want to add more equipment besides from maybe changing some gpus for models that have a better sols to watts ratio.

6

I’m not sure how accurate it is, but i’m using HWiNFO to monitor the wattage. The AMDs only have VRM Power In while the Nvidia has GPU Power. Also, I switched to the EWBF miner today and i’m getting an average 685 Sol/s, but wattage increased to 256 max. I am using -i 1 for the AMDs though. The 1080 definitely appears to be better in sols to watts.

7

Zcash Mining with an Nvidia Gtx-1080Ti (aka Gtx-1090) Gpu.

Unfortunately, loading WMiNFO crashes my system, and GPU-Z only shows TDP%, not the actual Wattage. But using Evga Precision-X this can be derived. (Will also need to do some at-the-wall measurements later).

Under adjusted & low-power settings, the Gtx-1090 video-card generates about ~ 590 Sols/s (it fluctuates), with a Power Use of about ~ 143W. For an Efficiency rating of about [4.1] - Using the NiceHash Miner.

These results are roughly in line with those reported by others on this forum.

However, it does drop out of the Precision-X settings (and back to stock) sometimes, apparently at random. Then the Sols go up, but the Power use increases by a lot more. Which results in much lower efficiency.

This may be due to the crypto-switching facility in the NiceHash algorithms. Which has been disabled, but the problem persists. So, will need to run more tests, and try some other Miners.

8

I just purchased an EVGA 1080 ti SC2 and it does 720H/s using 248-250watts of power. Windows 10 with Claymore miner

9

how do you get stable temps at 700 + sols? these cards wreck, but the fans do basically nothing unless youve got your rig blowing tons of air all over the place.

10

I don’t know if you care about electricity costs, but have you tried dialing down the PowerTarget (& Temp) settings on the Gtx-1080Ti/1090 GPU, via Precision-X for example? At it’s most efficient (~ 4.1 Sol/W), the card does just under 600 Sols/s, using about 145W. Which is also more stable.

Sample snapshot (it varies ±7%) - 2x GPUs.

2017-0622 Z-Cash-Miner-EWBF Stats[api]c.jpg1250×495 155 KB

11

Definetly go with 1080TI, better resale, better sol/s vs power usage compared to non TI. I would suggest cheapest: http://mylifegadgets.com/GTX1080TI

12

with the difficulty keep raising… probably not work on Zcash soon…

13

Nice thing is that the 1080 ti is a little more versatile for other currencies than the rest of the GTX lineup if you need to switch later.

14

can you stop being so negative in all your comments? we get your point now…

2 Likes
15

Yes Sir and Sorry Sir… :joy:

16

Power isnt really a concern. I have used the tuning tool to bring it down on power by 5%… i then over clocked it a little and its still doing 700-740h/s and it stays around 68*C

I have a decent amount of case airflow.

17

You’re lucky if you don’t need to pay for Power! I find that electricity eats up about one third of the gross income. Also, it’s hardly ever mentioned here, but there’s the environmental concern of using energy to create nothing more than digits - which I prefer to mitigate where possible (by running at max effecency). Plus, my preference is to run the cards cooler, so that they last longer and stay productive for several years, rather than degrading due to 24/7 burn-out. (Jm2c).

18

Hi all. I’ve been gaming since 1999 and mining since yesterday :slight_smile: A friend of mine made me try it out using my two Strix 1080ti:

GPU Clock: 1703MHz Memory: 1391MHz Boost: 1817MHz
Power Target: -20%

And the results:
image

Now, electricity in my country is crazy high at 0.23 so I basically get peanuts in return for so much costs involved. My wife when she first heard of power costs wasn’t impressed, I can tell you that.

My monthly profits before electricity? 150
And after electricity? 50
:smile:

So here’s a few questions:

  1. Is this mining thing even worth doing in my country with such high power costs involved?
  2. I’ve got two spare 7970 BEDDs laying around, should I put them in or should I just give two more 1080ti a chance? I’d be just below 1000W with 4 of them running with returns likely greater than with two 7970s.
  3. Or should I just build me a mining rig? Surely more efficient than this ‘kaleidoscope’ I’m having.

Appreciate your comments.

19

TL;DR

  1. It can be, but your return-on-investment times will be significantly longer than the average Joe.
  2. Every bit of hash power helps; in general, Nvidia cards tend to give significantly better sol/W performance than AMD cards, but until you have more 1080Ti’s, you can probably configure those to generate a fair profit. Check the benchmarking sites for details.
  3. Discussed in more detail below, but if after all that you decide to mine, I’d definitely recommend building dedicated rigs. They are the only real way to generate coins with any reasonable speed.

It’s a somewhat questionable time to be getting into ZEC mining at the moment, tatransky. At least as it relates to investing new capital in mining hardware. Here’s the lay of the land from my perspective.

Average network difficulty which correlates with the number of calculations required to solve a block/level of complexity of the mathematical problems has increased significantly over the last 1.5 months. When I started in July, it was hovering around 4.25-4.5 million; these days, it’s more common to be around 7.5-8 million, with spikes over 10. As numerous others on this thread have pointed out (@phakov et al), there are numerous good reasons out there to think that this will only worsen, not improve. How does it relate directly to mining hardware? Well, in July, the average 1080 Ti needed about 9 months to earn its money back (that was calculated with an electricity cost roughly half of yours, which I estimate would push your ROI times out about ~25% longer).

Bottom line: if you’re looking to make a quick profit, it won’t be through mining. You’ve really got to be in it for the long haul to have any realistic chance of getting into the black. That being said, it’s a fairly interesting hobby and I’ve enjoyed the experience thus far. Like you, I played around with the hardware I had laying around at the time (a couple of watercooled EVGA 1080Ti’s), but quickly realized that in order to accumulate a reasonable stash, more investment would be needed. For perspective, 9 x 1080Ti’s with mild overclocks are pulling in ~3 ZEC / month (I’m getting about 740-750 sol/s/card).

If you do decide to take the plunge, I recommend you build a dedicated mining rig (or 2), and before that, I do recommend asking a bunch of questions around here and other forums, along with research on the internet. There are a lot of good benchmarking sites that speak to average performance rates of cards, and lots of discussion regarding operating system choice & setup, component selection, etc. I really can’t stress enough how important this part is; nothing sucks more than buying a bunch of parts and realizing the motherboard isn’t stable with that many cards, or you can’t control them all from the OS you were going to use, or the risers you bought were of a flawed design, etc.

20

Thanks for your 2 cents mate. Much appreciated.

I wasn’t really looking to make profit here- instead maybe make me a few coins, learn a new thing or two and see what the future has in store. Besides- my electricity bills are exponentially high already w/o mining activities so why won’t I just let mining cover this bill? :smiley:

Anywho- I’ve just bought two more, so if all 4 running on water hit 750-800 sol/s (just like the two do currently at 40’C and below 570W), mathematically speaking I can still game on two every now and then while other two pay for it, I’ll see how it goes, you know that in the worst case scenario I can always sell them quite well (O11G+EKWB+BP<$1000), so from my point of view- I can’t really go wrong here. Wouldn’t you agree?

Cheers!