Old Dell Computer Turned into Miner - Update #5
Last October I decided to try my hand at mining with a cheap DIY upgrade to an old Dell desktop I had sitting around gathering dust.
(My DIY Miner before I tidied it up).
Time To Upgrade Again
Unfortunately, I was not aware of the 4GB dag issue with ETH mining when I bought my AMD 570. But starting in late December, the dag for ETH mining went over 4GB. Due to some cleaver programming by the mining software folks, the 4GB cards limped on, but lost more and more hashrate with each new epoch. My card was still earning about $0.60 cents per day when I pulled it but it was time to upgrade to an 8 GB card.
3X Money Back On First GPU
I had originally thought my little project would pay for itself in around 6 to 8 months. But I have been HODLing my ETH mining earnings in my BlockFi account, and those cummulative earnings are now worth 3X what I invested in my DIY project.
I also made money on the card itself as the prices of GPUs have really gone up over the last few months. I sold the original AMD 570 on Ebay for $50 more than I paid for it.
New AMD 470 8GB Card
After spending way too much time looking at replacement GPU cards I finally ended buying an AMD 580 with 8GB. Or so I thought.
When I plugged it in it turns out it is really a 470, not a 580 as the seller advertised. But it worked fined and I decided to keep it. The seller was kind enough to give me a partial refund to account for the lower value of a 470.
As I said, prices have really gone up. I could have bought this card for $150 last October, but I ended up spending $320 for it now. But it is able to mine me over $3 per day in ETH so here I am, again, looking at a 100 day payback.
This new card is a pusher (meaning it has a centrifugal fan that blows air through the card) that is a bit more noisy then my last card. It also runs hotter which is apparently the norm for these cards.
One good thing is that it does seem to use about 15 watts less energy than my old card. I'm surprised since I figured the new model card would be more energy efficient. It may be the fan difference. Who knows. But I will take a 10% energy savings.
I was smart enough to check, and an 8 GB card should be capable of mining ETH until 2027 (although I don't know what happens with Eth 2.0). I probably will have retired the old girl way before that, but who knows.
Anyone else dipping their feet into mining these days? The profitability has really picked up with the rise in ETH prices.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
