Mining Litecoin and Alternative Cryptocurrencies - Estimated ROI

My last post on the ROI for mining Litecoin with the new R9 290/290X GPUs is still more or less on target -- difficulty is stabilizing for now, with an expected return of around 2 LTC per week per R9 GPU. That works out to around $45 per week, or $180 per month, so you'll have paid for your R9 290/290X in three months, give or take. But what about switching to some alternative cryptocurrency?

In roughly one week of mining, I mined about 1 BTC with 7000 KHash of GPUs. That works out to over $700 per week for hardware that you could match with seven or eight R9 290X GPUs, eight or nine R9 290 GPUs, or ten R9 280X GPUs. Now if you do the math, at present that means best case you would need $4600 worth of R9 290X cards, $4000 or R9 290 cards, or just $3500 worth of R9 280X (HD 7970) cards. Until prices are closer to MSRP, it looks like the 280X is the one to get.

Now, if current alternative cryptocurrency mining remains even close to where it's been, we're looking at roughly $2800 per month, so you'd pay off the GPUs in less than two months, and realistically all of the hardware could be paid for within two months. That's pretty darn appealing if you ask me! And you don't have to go out and buy dozens of cards in one fell swoop either -- just start with a single rig and if you go with 3-way R9 280X you could have the whole system for around $1500, and it would be paid for in about six weeks.

The problem is Hashco.ws is still in a state of disarray following the hack, so I've moved to Middlecoin for now. I switched about 5000 KHash of PCs to Middlecoin six hours ago, and at present it looks like my BTC balance is 0.0135 BTC. For a full day of mining that works out to 0.054 BTC, which would yield roughly $40 per day, $1200 per month -- not quite so rosy. I'll update tomorrow when I've seen just how many BTC I get through Middlecoin after a full day of mining, as it could still be ramping up my payouts; I'm hoping to get about twice that (0.1 BTC per day), which is closer to my previous rate with Hashco.ws.

Update: I've switched most of my systems back to Hashco.ws as the primary pool, with Middlecoin as the secondary pool. Hashco.ws is still a bit of a pain, as you can't log in to create new workers, and if you don't have an account already you're out of luck until they get the front end to their site working again. However, I'm getting payouts of around 0.075 BTC per day from Hashco.ws, and Middlecoin is typically providing another 0.015 BTC per day. So around 7000KHash/sec is generating 0.09 BTC daily, or close to $70 per day in income. Power costs are around $400 per month for my systems, but modern R9 builds should be more like $200-$250. Net income per month thus works out to $1500-$2250.

Flashing Radeon HD 7970 GHZ to R9 280X

I'm in perhaps a bit of an unusual situation in that I have a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPU, direct from AMD. The Vendor ID is 1002 and the Subsystem ID is 3000. The VRM on this card identifies as CHL822x and the memory is Hynix H5GQ2H24AFR. Looking through TechPowerUp's VBIOS catelog, I kept looking for VBIOS that would provided decent hashing performance from this card. Previously, I only managed to hash at around 510-520KHash/sec, which is quite low for a 7970, but the problem appears to be with most 7970 GHz Edition cards. The solution is to flash to a non-GHz Edition -- if you can!

I tried numerous VBIOS options from a variety of vendors -- ASUS, Sapphire, Gigabyte, XFX, etc. -- all to no avail. I had to force-flash most of these, due to a Subsytem ID mismatch, and not surprisingly several of the VBIOS options I tried ended up requiring me to boot up off a different GPU to recover to a working VBIOS. Up until last night, I was met with zero success -- the Sapphire VBIOS I tried flashed successfully and I could usually boot into Windows, but I would get a BSOD any time I tried to tax the GPU.

As you might guess from the title, the solution for me ended up being to flash to a Radeon R9 280X VBIOS. I still had to force flash (ATIWinFlash.exe -f -p 0 R9280X.rom), but the Vendor ID was 1002 and the Subsystem ID was 3001, so I figured I had a good chance of succeeding...and it worked! Thank goodness -- no more of this 500KHash silliness for my 7970 GHz card!

If you're having a similar problem, most likely you're in the same situation and have one of the "not very fast for scrypt" GHz Edition/Overclocked cards. You'll probably have to try more than one VBIOS before you can find one that works, but don't lose hope! Symptoms of the problem are that your 7970 will actually hash slower at intensities above 13, plus as noted the inability to break 600KHash, let alone 700KHash. Here's what I was running prior to the flash:

cgminer.exe --auto-fan --failover-only --scrypt -o stratum01.hashco.ws:8888 -u trogdorjw73.tester -p tester -I 13 --gpu-fan 40-95 --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1550 --gpu-vddc 1.170 --thread-concurrency 24160 -g 1 --temp-target 85 --temp-overheat 95 --temp-cutoff 100

With that configuration and the original VBIOS I was pulling 510KHash, and I really couldn't get it to run any better. With the update to an R9 280X VBIOS, I'm now pulling around 700KHash with the same settings but I 20. That makes for decent hashing but a totally useless system if you need to do anything else, but the 7970 (R9 280X) has an interesting quirk: you can often get equal or better hash rates at lower intensities with -g 2 and a lower thread concurrency. Here are my current "usable PC" settings (and note that the GPU core is now clocked at 1000MHz instead of 1050):

cgminer.exe --auto-fan --failover-only --scrypt -o stratum01.hashco.ws:8888 -u trogdorjw73.tester -p tester -I 13 --gpu-fan 40-95 --gpu-engine 1000 --gpu-memclock 1550 --gpu-vddc 1.170 --thread-concurrency 8192 -g 2 --temp-target 85 --temp-overheat 95 --temp-cutoff 100

Hopefully that will help some of you out, and if you have any of the 7970/R9 280X cards you can use similar settings to get over 700KHash. Considering a lot of R9 290 GPUs are topping out at 750-800KHash/sec (at least using their stock VBIOS), and the R9 290 cards are currently selling for over $500 (never mind the $650+ R9 290X cards!), if you can find a reasonable price on the Radeon R9 280X (some are going for $350) or one of the older Radeon HD 7970 cards (these tend to be more expensive, so look for the 280X first!) it's definitely worth considering.