Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Mining Edition card on sale in UK

[HEXUS]

Popular online retailer puts up product pages. Port-less card is priced at £248.99.

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[LSG501]

Curious if these 'mining cards' would work for things like gpu rendering (ie vray rt and the likes). I'd guess they would but they seriously need to drop the price because it's only a few quid saving over a full fat gpu and I know that I'd rather spend the extra 20 quid or so and get a fully featured card.

[Spud1]

It will be interesting to see who buys these and what they ultimately get used for. Based on current prices/difficulty they will be useless for mining BTC (26MH/s would give a loss of £0.30 a day before power is taken into account), but Ethereum is just about profitable (£2.70/day before power)

You'd need a serious amount of luck to recoup your investment..or be very smart with which coins you work with!

If you just want a bit of fun with BTC mining then 2nd hand ASICs can be had for £100ish on ebay that will offer much better power/hashrate ratios - at that price none are profitable but if you just want a bit of fun...ETH is ASIC resistant so I guess it's an option for that, however at circa £1.50 a day profit after overheads, your still taking a huge risk on the price/difficulty of ETH in the future.

Personally i just keep my existing PC mining ETH overnight/when I am at work - no extra investment and it currently covers the power bill (at least the mining portion!)+ a 1% profit (thats using my GTX1080).

[LSG501]

Personally i just keep my existing PC mining ETH overnight/when I am at work - no extra investment and it currently covers the power bill (at least the mining portion!)+ a 1% profit (thats using my GTX1080).

Been curious about it of late.. How easy is it to set it up, I've got solar panels so I'd cover the running cost during the day... thinking it might be something worth trying during the pc's 'downtime'

[Spud1]

Been curious about it of late.. How easy is it to set it up, I've got solar panels so I'd cover the running cost during the day... thinking it might be something worth trying during the pc's 'downtime'

It depends on how willing you are to learn Best place to start is https://bitcointalk.org/ - there is a lot of helpful information on there and its a great resource to get started.

It took a couple of hours to get things going for me - deciding to pool or solo mine (I am pool mining with ethpool), which miner to use, which OS etc...but in principle you:

1) Create a wallet
2) Decide to pool or solo mine
3) If solo mining, download geth and sync the blockchain
4) Download a GPU Miner (i'm currently using Claymores) and start mining

The devil is in the detail - there is a lot to tweak/configure, decisions about which HostOS to run (and depending on your H/W, which VM). Best advice is to start reading

Getting your money out is a lot harder and is a topic all on its own...most exchanges are shady enough particularly for alt coins. I convert to BTC and extract my cash that way as I find it much easier (and have benefited from the BTC price boosts as a result!) from a number of exchanges depending on the best exchange rates at the time. Thats a whole other area to dicsuss.

[Bluecube]

You could also try mining Burstcoin which uses hard drive space instead of mining hashes via a CPU/ GPU. It's easy enough to set up and get running too.

[Aerithos]

zpool is good way to multi-algo mine and have the payout be whatever coin you want. As long as you don't mine sha256 (BTC), scrypt, or x11 based coins, you can usually make a small profit after electrical costs.

[scaryjim]

Curious if these 'mining cards' would work for things like gpu rendering (ie vray rt and the likes). ...

I was wondering if you could use them for crossfire with a "normal" card - after all, you should only need to use the outputs from one card for crossfire...

I don't see any reason why they shouldn't work to offload any GPU-acceleratable task, tbh. You would need to make sure that you had another functional GPU though, of course.

[LSG501]

I was wondering if you could use them for crossfire with a "normal" card - after all, you should only need to use the outputs from one card for crossfire...

I don't see any reason why they shouldn't work to offload any GPU-acceleratable task, tbh. You would need to make sure that you had another functional GPU though, of course.

I suppose it depends if it has a connector/hardware for crossfire/sli and if it's being treated like a consumer version of amd instinct/nvidia tesla or a reduced hardware gpu.

For a pure renderbox you can go headless and use things like backburner to manage the rendering it's just whether or not these mining cards can be used in the same way as any other opencl/cuda type gpu's etc or if they've put some artificial restrictions in place (wouldn't be surprised if they have)

[kompukare]

I suppose it depends if it has a connector/hardware for crossfire/sli and if it's being treated like a consumer version of amd instinct/nvidia tesla or a reduced hardware gpu.

Maybe for SLI, but Crossfire hasn't used a connector since Hawaii.

The price of these doesn't make sense since they have next to no resale value. Anyway, didn't ETH and BTC come down in price a fair bit the last few days?

Whattomine.com currently has a 470 at $2.41 per day after power (at 20c per kWh), down from just under $5 a few weeks ago AFAIR.

[GhostSquirrel]

yeah, the last week has seen a big drop in the amount you can earn from GPU's. That's the issue with buying hardware just for mining.

If you have a powerful GPU sitting idle you might as well earn a few $$ but imo its rarely profitable to invest in hardware unless you get lucky and the price sky-rockets.

[scaryjim]

... Crossfire hasn't used a connector since Hawaii. ...

Before that, in fact - AMD supported crossfire over PCIe on lower end cards starting with the 6670. Hawaii was when they rolled it up through the entire range.

I see no reason to think hat these cards are artificially limited in any way beyond having the display outputs left off. Certainly they'd need to have their full compute capabilities to be any use for mining...

[kompukare]

Before that, in fact - AMD supported crossfire over PCIe on lower end cards starting with the 6670. Hawaii was when they rolled it up through the entire range.

I see no reason to think hat these cards are artificially limited in any way beyond having the display outputs left off. Certainly they'd need to have their full compute capabilities to be any use for mining...

Okay, didn't know about those pre-GCN PCIe crossfire.

Now, if these were official Nvidia cards, I'm sure they could come up with 'some random fuse to blow' (I think that's what Charlie at SA says about Intel's processor segmentation), but that's unlike in this case.

[GamerGuru7]

This still isn't helping the massive shortage of GPUs everywhere On the bright side, it's pushed me on to wait for Vega and save up for a higher tier card.