Of course, "home" Mining Now it can no longer be as profitable as it was a couple of years ago. However, there are still many enthusiasts who, for various reasons, choose this particular method of mining cryptocurrency.
From a technical point of view, a mining farm is just a computer. However, due to the peculiarities of the extraction of the crypt, which is, in fact, the selection of encrypted cryptocurrency program code, the necessary combination for which is formed by brute-force set of numerical variations, the requirements for the hardware in it seriously differ from the usual desktop or laptop.
Unlike a regular computer, when the system requirements for such components as the central processor, the amount of RAM or hard drive size are very high, the main thing for a mining farm is video cards, more precisely, their power and quantity.
Another difference between a mining farm is the right choice of a motherboard that can support, for example, five video cards at a time.
And finally, the power supply: since the video cards consume a large amount of electricity and require powerful cooling, a conventional power supply is more than enough.
In order to explain why graphics cards are needed for mining cryptocurrency, let's look at some of the details.
The central processing unit (CPU) is the most important part of the computer, which “indicates” to all other parts of the computer what they should do in accordance with the commands of the programs and the user.
In turn, the traditional role of the video card (GPU) is the rendering of graphics and visual effects.
Thus, the GPU and CPU are designed to perform various types of tasks.
CPUs were primarily designed to "make" a wide variety of decisions. To give a simple example, when a document is saved, the function of the CPU is to convert that document to the appropriate file type and instruct the hard drive to save the file. Simply put, the processor works on the principle “if this happens, do that, otherwise do something else.”
The graphics processor is not designed to solve various problems. Technologically, the meaning of video processing is the rapid execution of large volumes of uniform work and a huge number of repetitive operations.
Mining cryptocurrency, in general, does not require making various decisions, but is a repetitive mathematical operation. It is for this reason that using the graphics processor as the main part of the farm for mining some types of crypts is the best solution. The GPU should “answer” only one question: “there is a block” or “no block”.
But how to choose the "right" video card for mining? Of course, for an approximate calculation of earnings from mining on specific graphics cards, there are special calculators of income and payback. But it is difficult to focus on them: the rate of cryptocurrency is constantly changing and it is unlikely that it will be possible to get exact values.
So which mining card to choose?
When choosing a video card for mining, first of all, you need to consider the four basic characteristics of the GPU.
It:
- GPU frequency;
- Video memory capacity;
- Memory bus frequency;
- Energy efficiency indicators.
The first three parameters directly affect the speed of extraction of the crypt, the fourth - determines the cost of electricity.
As in the gaming industry, two manufacturers, AMD and NVIDIA, are competing for the championship.
To date, the most appropriate video cards for mining are called, basically, five.
This is the most expensive in the list of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, outstanding to 700 Sol / s (from the English. Solutions per second - solutions per second).
Slightly inferior to the leader of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (with proper overclocking - to 500 Sol / s).
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is also a very interesting option: Depending on the hashing algorithm, it can produce indicators up to 470 Sol / s.
The only AMD representative on our list is the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. It is slightly inferior in performance to NVIDIA GPUs, but you shouldn’t discount it.
And finally, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. Theoretically, it is the weakest video card presented. However, some miners consider its price-performance ratio to be optimal: there are many statements on the network that, compared to 1080 (taking into account the higher cost of the latter), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 can pay off faster.
However, our top five - it is also the most expensive. Many believe that in the budget segment you can find a video card, although it is inferior in performance to the leaders, but much cheaper.
It’s very difficult to advise how to do better: build a mining farm on a single, but very powerful and expensive video card or choose something simpler (but their relatively low cost allows you to purchase 4-6 graphics cards right away). Efficiency of the pool for mining, network failures, cooling problems and other components can affect the performance.
Among other things, in order to build a farm for mining, the following components are required:
- Winchester (most miners believe that it is preferable to choose an SSD-drive - the stability and speed of its work exceed the usual hard drives);
- CPU;
- Memory module (at least 4Gb);
- Monitor emulator;
- Video card itself;
- Powerful power supply (with a margin of 20-30% of the maximum farm energy consumption);
- Risers, that is, devices for connecting several video cards to the motherboard.
However, the complexity of the mining of popular cryptocurrencies (including bitcoins, but mining this coin takes place on specialized processors) has now increased so much that the use of GPU farms for these purposes already last year has almost lost its meaning. The extracted coins will be enough except to pay for electricity bills.
However, not everything is so bad
Although with less efficiency than recently, farms can be used to mine “ether”, litecoin, DASH and many other altcoins.
A big disadvantage of using a farm for mining is the cost of equipment. Most miners believe that the farm should use at least 4-6 graphics processors, the cost of which today, depending on performance, starts from 15 thousand rubles. You should not try to save and buy already-used video cards: it may happen that the graphics processor fails very quickly - after all, it has been working around the clock for a long time.
Thus, only for the GPU will have to lay out thousands of dollars. Add to the list the rest of the "iron" and it turns out that the minimum cost of equipment for mining will be no less than 100 thousand rubles.
You can’t count on a quick return on investment either: you’re very lucky if you can get the money back in six to eight months.