Nvidia is currently second in the Ethereum crypto currency mining game as the Geforce 1060 3GB cards perform a bit slower than the Radeon RX 480 or Radeon RX 580. It is needed to get the highest possible performance with as little power cost possible. Nvidia is taking the mining market seriously and it even created a dedicated 8 x GTX 1060 GP106 system for crypto currency market.
After the initial setup of a machine with a motherboard such as Asrock H81 Pro BTC or Asrock H97 Anniversary, you need as many mining cards with at least 4GB RAM, 60 GB hard drive and Intel Celeron G1820 or G1840 CPU. The mining task is not CPU intensive at all, it is all about the compute power of the GPUs involved. These two motherboards will let you plug in up to six cards and 1100 W or higher PSU is recommended.
Geforce GTX 1060 3GB in the German market sells for about €195 while for the most part Radeon RX 580 is sold out or selling for close to €300 if you can find one in stock. Radeon RX 570 is closer to the €190 to €200 price-mark, but it is also sold out.There are a lot of how-to articles around the net.
New crypto currency driver
Nvidia apparently has been working on a new driver that is targeted to improve the hash rate and compute power of the card. The key metric for miners is how many Megahashes per second you can deliver, and at what power. Radeon RX 480 is still the king of mining as you can get close to 24 Mh/s with less than 100W power. In case you are using six cards, you will burn at least 0.6 KW/h and if you mind the whole day, you can end up consuming around 14.4 KW.
The real question is how much you need to spend for a kilowatt, and therefore applies to some countries, especially in eastern / south eastern Europe. For example, energy in Bosnia is almost two times cheaper than in Austria. Iceland seems to be the hot spot for crypto currency as energy is cheap and it is cold for the better part of the year. Yes, just like any compute intensive server, GPU crypto currency servers are getting hot, and the better you cool them, the longer they will last.
Cryptocompare website did some math for you.
In case you pay US $0.4320 for your energy per day, the Radeon RX 480 with 25.0 MH/s rate makes a $ 5.68 return per day. This is, of course, based on the daily exchange rate and can vary in both directions. Based on these numbers one can make US $170.45 a month and pay off a US $199 priced Radeon RX 480/570 card in about 35 days. Return per year can be a whopping US $2,073.79 per card. A similar hash rate performance can be applied to the Geforce GTX 1060 cards but remember, we don’t make any recommendations, we are just here to inform the population.
These profit numbers are the reason of the Radeon RX 580 shortage.
