RobotCache Review

There are scamcoins, and then there are coins that are basically a scam. RobotCache and it's Iron (IRON) coins fall firmly in the latter camp. They appear to be legit, but the value is a complete joke. It doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at the problem: you're going to get ripped off. I've run a few tests, though, so let's just cut straight to the chase.

The big claim of RobotCache is that you can buy games with no exclusives, and that you can earn 'free' stuff. And by stuff, we're talking about games. If you enable mining in the client, your PC will happily donate spare compute cycles for both your GPU and CPU to the mining of Iron. It's basically like Ethereum, except not actually worth anything.

I just ran a test on a GeForce RTX 3090 card (#AffiliateLink) the world's fastest GPU. It does about 100MH/s, which is a lot — about twice the speed of an RX 5700 XT. However, it also consumes a lot of power, like very close to 350W. If you were mining Ethereum, that works out to around $2.75 per day in income, minus power costs. For someone that pays $0.10 per kWh, that's $0.84 per day in power, so a net income of $1.90.

That's not great, considering the GPU costs $1,500, as it would take two full years of 24/7 mining just to break even. But compared to RobotCache? It's a damn bargain! See, RobotCache pays you in Iron, and with the RTX 3090 the estimated Iron per day is a whopping 21.3. The value of said Iron is $1.00 per 100 Iron, so instead of making $1.90 in Ethereum, you instead earn $0.213 in Iron. And that's before you have to account for power costs.

Bottom line: RobotCache is hoping to prey on innocent victims. I can just imagine some young gamer using his home PC and leaving it mining while idle. Even with an extreme GPU and CPU, it would take over two months to earn enough Iron to purchase a full priced game. Right now for example, RobotCache estimates 119 days of mining to earn enough Iron to purchase Wasteland 3. So, after four months of mining, and a cost of $130 or so in power, you'd earn a $60 game.

Except, the math is wrong. Yes, you read the correctly: RobotCache is lying on the math! Because the "~119 days" isn't based on your actual PC hardware. I don't know where they pulled that number from. (Actually, I do: it's from "Current Wallet Balance and Avg User Earnings" — suggesting there are a hell of a lot of gullible users of this software!) The reality is with a 3090 you'd actually earn 22 Iron per day (being generous and rounding up), and you need 5999 Iron to buy Wasteland 3. That means it would actually take 273 days, and a cost of about $0.85 per day. Your 'free' game thus ends up costing over $230.

Or maybe not? I still don't know where the Iron per day estimate comes from, but it's all over the place. Just watching while I wrote this post, I've seen it as low as ~12 Iron per day and as high as ~110 Iron per day. The screenshot after about 45 minutes of mining shows an estimate of 65 Iron per day. That's almost enough to break even prospect on power cost vs. game cost. But it's also one fourth what you'd make from mining Ethereum.

Also, just a parting thought: Consumer GPUs aren't really designed for 24/7 operation at 100% load. I've done it in the past, and I've killed off a lot of graphics cards. Some cards only lasted about six months before the fans failed, while others would last about two years. Neither one represents a good return on investment, unless you get the hardware for free and get free (or very cheap) power to run it.

Intel die sizes: Coffee Lake, Comet Lake, and Ice Lake

Intel, for whatever reason, has seen fit to stop publishing die sizes and transistor counts (estimates) on it's latest CPUs. It's a strange move, probably driven by the company's difficulties with getting high-end 10nm parts out the door. Sure, Ice Lake now exists and is readily available, but 10nm was at least three years late. But I digress.

I really just wanted to gather all the die size information I had into one place, for ease of reference. Transistor counts could be estimated, but the density varies depending on what sort of logic is in use (cache, branch predictor, etc.) so I'm not going to even try. But here are the current die sizes, based on physical chip measurements (which are accurate to within probably 2%):

These first three come courtesy of der8auer, who routinely delids CPUs. (Links to Amazon earn me affiliate commissions.)

Core i7-8700K die size: 9.2 x 16.7 mm ~= 153.6 mm2

Core i9-9900K die size: 9.2 x 19.6 mm ~= 180.3 mm2

Core i9-10900K die size: 9.2 x 22.4 mm ~= 206.1 mm2

What about Ice Lake? As with recent Intel U-series processors, the package has two chips. The smaller is the platform controller hub (PCH) while the larger represents the main Ice Lake CPU. I've seen earlier estimates based on the Ice Lake wafer that the die size was around 130 mm2. However, using the package shots it's actually smaller than that.

Ice Lake / Core i7-1065G7 die size: 11.40 x 10.78 mm ~= 122.9 mm2

Ice Lake PCH die size: 5.74 x 9.42 mm ~= 54.1 mm2

Intel does have plans to release server variants of Ice Lake, which presumably means yields are good enough that it can actually manufacture larger chips. But how big would such a chip be?

The current 123 mm2 Ice Lake chips have a rather large GPU cluster that wouldn't be needed for servers. In fact, the 4-core CPU cluster only occupies about a quarter of the entire die space right now, with other portions used for the DDR4 memory controller, system agent, and GPU.

To be more precise, the CPU cores and ring bus use about 26.5% of the die area. The Gen11 graphics is about one third (33.6%) of the die space, the DDR4 controller is only 6.3% of the die, and the system agent makes up the remaining 33.6% of the die.

So if Intel wanted to make, for example, a 32-core Ice Lake server part using the same size Sunny Cove cores, with an 8-channel memory interface, it wouldn't even need to be that big of a chip. Oh, it would be much larger than the current Ice Lake-U CPU+GPU's 123 mm2, but as a rough estimate, Intel could do 32-core Ice Lake with a die size of about 375 mm2. Piece of cake! And only two years late compared to the competition.

Intel Skylake-X and Cascade Lake-X Die Sizes

I'm going to keep this fairly simple, but I figure if I couldn't easily find this information, others are probably looking for it as well. Basically, Intel never gave out information on the die size of it's Skylake-X and later Cascade Lake-X CPUs. The best way to get a reasonable estimate of die size is from shots where extreme overclockers and enthusiasts have delidded the chips. I've gathered what I could find out there to come up with the following data.

There are three variants of Skylake-X (SKL-X) and Cascade Lake-X (CSL-X). While CSL-X chips do have some minor changes to the underlying design (like hardware mitigations of some side-channel attacks), fundamentally not much has changed. So the following should apply to all chips of each family.

The LCC (Low Core Count) variety of Skylake-X has up to 10 cores. This is the die used in Core i9-7900X, Core i9-9900X, and Core i9-10900X. It's also used in the Core i7-7800X, Core i7-7820X, Core i7-9800X, and Core i9-9820X.

HCC (High Core Count) Skylake-X CPUs have anywhere from 12 to 18 cores. These chips (not counting Xeon models) consist of the Core i9-7920X, Core i9-7940X, Core i9-7960X, Core i9-7980XE, Core i9-9920X, Core i9-9940X, Core i9-9960X, and Core i9-9980XE from the Skylake-X family, and the Core i9-10920X, Core i9-10940X, and Core i9-10980XE from the Cascade Lake-X family.

Finally, the XCC (Extreme Core Count) models have 20 to 28 cores. These are used exclusively in Xeon chips -- they're not intended for enthusiasts. Of course there is the Xeon W-3175X "enthusiast" chip that has the full 28 cores, but at $3,000 I'm pretty sure no one bought it for gaming purposes.

But the question I had is: what are the actual die sizes of these various chips? So I did some sleuthing and came up with the following.

First, GamersNexus has some nice shots of a delidded Core i9-7900X next to a ruler. The measurements show a size of approximately 24.5 x 14 mm, giving a final die size of 343mm square. That's the easy one and you can find quite a few other places with pictures and estimates of die size. It's probably accurate to within 1-2%, which is fine since transistor counts are probably estimated in a similar fashion.

Skylake-X LCC Die Size: ~343 mm square

Stepping up to the HCC chip, not many people delidded that one. I found this thread on Overclockers where user batboy delidded his Core i9-7920X, and der8auer also delidded an i9-7920X. We do know the package size for all the Skylake-X chips (it's officially 52.5 x 45 mm, which is accurate to within ~0.25mm I assume). Using that and the delidded images, I estimated die size.

The der8auer image is better for this, and gives a package width of 684 pixels and a die width of 344 pixels, with a package height of 787 pixels and a chip height of 329 pixels. Using simple math, that works out to a die size of about 22.6 x 21.9 mm, or 495 mm square (plus or minus 5 mm square).

Skylake-X HCC Die Size: ~495 mm square

Finally, the Skylake-X XCC die is a bit harder to find, but der8auer comes through again with a video where he delidded and overclocked the $3000 W-3175X. Not that he paid for the chip, but still. Anyway, I've grabbed a shot after the delidding, adjusted the angles a bit to make it easier, and used information on the LGA3647 package size to arrive at the actual die size.

The image shows a width of 763 pixels for the package and 216 for the die width, with a package height of 538 pixels and a die height of 302 pixels. Crunching the numbers, that gives a final die size of approximately 21.7 x 31.7 mm.

Skylake-X XCC Die Size: ~688 mm square

Obviously there's still a bit of wiggle room, but the above is about as good of an estimate as I can provide. Equally obvious: Skylake-X is a big CPU in its LCC incarnation, and even bigger at HCC. Around 500mm square in size is one of the larger CPUs Intel has made. And of course, it can't hold a candle to the XCC die size of nearly 700mm square.

My real question: Just how big will Intel's Xe Graphics HPC variant be? That wafer shot from Raja, along with some of the things IntelGraphics has tweeted, suggests it will be the biggest chip Intel has ever made. And yes, it's going to be very expensive -- even more than Xeon XCC CPUs I'd wager.

Journey to the Savage Planet - all Kindex scans

So, this isn't my usual thing, but I got going and decided I'd try to hit 100 percent on Journey to the Savage Planet so I can retire it properly. You need to scan a bunch of stuff, find all sort of 'hidden' things, etc. You can get upgrades that will eventually make it easier to find the alien tablets and videos, yellow globs, and alien alloys. The one thing you'll just have to sort of do as you go is scan things. Here's the complete list of all the stuff you can scan, then, in alphabetical order:

ALIEN TECH:
Alien Pumpjack
Alien Teleportation Pedestal
Cracked Stone Grate
Crystalline Beacon
Enigmatic Tabliet
Genetic Samples
Leaping Alien Petroglyph
Mysterious Shrine
Ornate Alien Chest
Planet Seed
Rotating Mechanism
Strange Alien Barrier
Strange Alien Statue
Unknown Explorer's Log

CREATURES:

PREY

Baboushka (Demi)

Baboushka (Quarter)

Baboushka

Burglesnatch (Balmy)

Burglesnatch (Tundra)

Imperial Scarab

Maroon

Mesmertoxin

Osmotic Cube

Pufferbird (Alpha)

Pufferbird (Cave)

Pufferbird (Snowy)

Pufferbird (Valley)

Skipper (Royal)

Skipper (Scotch)

Skipper (Tortoiseshell)

PREDATOR

Barfer

Boomerbang (Feral)

Boomerbang (Hermit)

Cragclaw 

Floopsnoot

Floopsnoot Matriarch

Infected Pufferbird

Insectoid Swarm

Jellywaft (Inferior)

Jellywaft (Prime)

Kapyena (Battle)

Kapyena (Widow)

Meat Vortex

Pikemander (Desert)

Pikemander (Marbled)

Porcupod

Schnozo

Slamphibian (Grizzled)

Slamphibian (Health)

Sproutlook

Teratomo

FLORA:
Aluminum Vein
Amber Armor
Bellowbulb
Big Ol' Nut
Blight Bomb Plant (Baby)
Blight Bomb Plant (Teen)
Blight Bomb Plant
Bombegranate Plant (Baby)
Bombegranate Plant (Teen)
Bombegranate Plant
Bombodoro
Breezee
Bright Blossom
Bulwark Bush
Burgle Haven
Cacnut
Canopy Leaf
Carbon Vein
Citrasweet
Combativore
Crackle Cap
Dripping Orifice
Feeblecap
Floatshroom
Fragile Crystal
Fungissimo
Giant Bombegranate Plant
Glow Shrub
Gossamer Wood
Grapple Flower
Grapple Rail
Grotesque Opening
Jellywaft Pit
Large Ant Mound
Larval Jelly
Mallowsap
Massive Skull
Metallic Seed Bag
Polypod Tree
Puffer Spring
Pufferbird Burial Ground
Pufferbird Nest
Pus Launcher
Salt Crystal
Schnozo Hole
Shock Fruit Plant (Baby)
Shock Fruit Plant (Teen)
Shock Fruit Plant
Silicon Vein
Smoke Spout
Space Lettuce
Splinter Timber
Springy Egg Sac
Stinkshroom
Stone Armor
Succulescent
Swarm Hive
Swarm Hive Shield
Tentareeds
Tentaweeds
Vaultivore
Vitality Plant
Witherwood

KINTECH:

3D Matter Reconstructor

Advanced Proton Tether

Binding Bile

Bio-Replication Chamber

Blight Bomb

Bombegranate

Cartographer Deployment Hatch

EKO

Grapple Seed

GROB

Javelin Teleportation Field

Javelin

Jump Thrusters

Kindred Aerospace

Kindred Computer

Launch Boosters

Martin Tweed

Meat Buddy Deluxe

Nomad Pistol

Proton Tether

Resources Backup Storage

Shock Fruit

Springy Seed

Stomp Boosters

Tactical GROB

The Cartographers

Your Sad Lifeless Body

POINTS OF INTEREST:

Ancient Effigy

Crashed Meteor

Gigashrooms

Repulsive Tree

Runic Alien Bricks

Shattered Pod

Towering Statue

I'll leave off the AR-Y 26 stuff (it's 41 locations you visit over the course of the game) and resources, as those ought to be hard to miss. The only stuff I missed initially was scanning the Burglesnatches (hint: kill something outside the lair so it will appear, then use the binding bile on it to hold it still). Also, I didn't scan the smallest split on the Baboushka (the 'Quarter'), missed the Shattered Pod, and forgot to scan my backup storage (when you die). Hope this helps someone! Worth checking out this video of all scanned flora and creatures if you need more details (the time codes are in a 'spoiler' tag below the video, but the text isn't sorted in any meaningful way).

Black Friday gaming PC 2019 for $750

Looking to build a great gaming PC for the holidays? Here's a collection of Black Friday deals that will get you a potent gaming rig for around $750. (Note: These are all affiliate links.)

AMD Ryzen 7 2700: $140
MSI X470 Gaming Plus: $110
G.Skill 2x8GB) Aegis DDR4-3000: $53
Intel 660p 1TB M.2: $107
Asus GeForce GTX 1660 TUF: $220
Rosewill 550W Gold: $67
Rosewill Prism S Lite: $50

Total: $747

Happy shopping, and try not to get mugged in the Black Friday crowds!

Best Graphics Cards for Mining - January 2018

Experiment over -- I want to be able to look back at historical data, so I'm going to just make a new post each month and see how it goes. Basically, SEO isn't really benefiting, probably due to my writing style not containing the proper phrases enough, so let's just do things the old fashion way, eh?

If you're not mining right now, you may have missed out on one of the biggest bubbles in mining profitability in a long time. The good news is that the 'bubble' is ongoing. Profitability of mining with GPUs has reached nearly the highest point ever, so that a lot of high-end GPUs would pay for themselves in only 2-3 months. Late 2013 was a bit better (1-2 months to pay for an R9 290/290X), but regardless there are some great options for mining right now.

Bitcoin's price has stayed in the $13,500-$16,000 range for weeks now, and short of a massive collapse we may not see it drop below $10,000 again. We could also see $100,000 this year, maybe, so I'd suggest holding onto at least half of all BTC that you mine. Ethereum is also kicking butt and taking names, having breached the $1,000 mark and currently sitting at more than $1,300. "The Flippening" draws closer once more -- the point at which the market capitalization of Ethereum (or some other cryptocurrency) surpasses that of Bitcoin.

If you're wondering where things stand, right now BTC has a market cap of $241 billion USD, and Ethereum sits at nearly $135 billion. Ripple comes in third at $77 billion, followed by Bitcoin Cash at $46 billion.

One thing I will say is that the average block times for Bitcoin (and Bitcoin Cash) are becoming increasingly burdensome, and Bitcoin's limited block size is really bad. We've seen transaction fees for small amounts of BTC skyrocket to as much as $20 at times, which has led to Steam dropping support for the cryptocurrency. I hope Steam adds in Ethereum at some point instead, since it's way faster and seems to have better long-term potential. I also wonder how many BTC Valve/Steam ended up squirrelling away over the past couple of years -- hopefully they were smart and didn't cash out of every BTC they received!

Anyway, let's hit the graphics cards and see what sort of ROI (Return On Investment) we're looking at now. Be warned that prices on all GPUs have shot up due to increased demand, so existing miners are making a killing while newcomers will have to decide whether they want to participate in the price gouging that's going on. Also note that Nicehash is back online, and doing better than ever in my book. I used WinMiner and Kryptex during the downtime, which were okay, but after comparing the payouts once Nicehash was back it became clear that Nicehash is paying far more on average -- like 50 percent more I'd estimate.

Something else to note is that CPU mining is still a thing, with CryptoNight-based coins generally paying fairly well right now. The Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen 5 1600 are the top two options for overall bang-for-the-buck, doing over $2.50 per day on the R7 and about $1.75 per day with the R5. That means buying a Ryzen platform could be a great option as an added source of revenue. Core i5-8400 by comparison is only doing about $1.50 per day -- which is also reasonable, considering the price of $200-ish.

One thing I have to say, unfortunately, is that my Ryzen mining rigs are nowhere near as stable as my Intel options. I have three Ryzen boards where some of the PCIe slots simply won't work for mining, which sucks. It's a BIOS / firmware / chipset problem almost certainly, but it could severely limit the number of GPUs you run per rig. I've also noticed that my Ryzen systems are far more likely to hang during POST if they reboot, which does happen on a regular basis. So keep that in mind.

Still, bang-for-the-buck is great, and Intel boards are currently overpriced, particularly the ones that are built for mining. You can look back at the December 2017 post for additional thoughts on the components, but I'm dropping back to a 6-GPU build this round, using an X370 chipset, simply because it works well and it's more affordable than the $300-$400 'mining' boards. Also note that you'll want to set all the PCIe slots to "Gen2" speeds in the BIOS for maximum compatibility.

BASIC MINING RIG (UPDATED 01/13/2018):
Ryzen 5 1600: $205
ASUS Prime X370-Pro: $145
16GB DDR4 memory: $170
240GB SSD: $75
1000W 80 Plus Platinum PSU: $199
6x PCIe Risers: $50
TOTAL: $844

That's $130 more than last month, thanks in part to the CPU swap, but you should be able to make up the difference in cost in less than two months thanks to the more potent CPU. Maximum profitability will use six GPUs, and depending on your GPU choice you may need more than one PSU, which I'll factor into the table below.

The following is only an estimate, and actually income will vary on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Also note that some of the GPU pricing comes via used cards on eBay, which I don't generally recommend buying -- someone has probably already mined the cards to near-death.

GPU	Price (GPU)	Sys Price (1x)	Sys Price (6x)	1x Income	6x Income	ROI
GTX 1080 Ti	$1,100	$1,944	$7,643	$10.67	$54.12	141-182 days
GTX 1080	$700	$1,544	$5,243	$8.87	$43.31	121-174 days
GTX 1070 Ti	$761	$1,605	$5,609	$8.54	$41.33	136-188 days
GTX 1070	$683	$1,527	$4,942	$8.30	$39.90	124-184 days
GTX 1060 6GB	$380	$1,224	$3,124	$6.27	$27.68	113-195 days
GTX 1060 3GB	$295	$1,139	$2,614	$5.78	$24.77	106-197 days
*GTX 980 Ti	$500	$1,344	$4,043	$7.43	$34.68	117-181 days
*GTX 980	$325	$1,169	$2,993	$6.10	$26.70	112-192 days
*GTX 970	$270	$1,114	$2,464	$5.75	$24.60	100-194 days
RX Vega 64	$1,030	$1,874	$7,223	$8.34	$40.14	180-225 days
RX Vega 56	$850	$1,694	$6,143	$8.00	$38.10	161-212 days
RX 580 8GB	$582	$1,426	$4,535	$5.91	$25.53	178-241 days
RX 570 4GB	$420	$1,264	$3,563	$5.54	$23.32	153-228 days
*R9 Fury	$500	$1,344	$4,043	$7.30	$33.90	119-184 days
*R9 390	$450	$1,294	$3,743	$6.02	$26.22	143-215 days
*R9 380	$325	$1,169	$2,794	$4.41	$16.55	169-265 days

* - These are used cards, so these are here mostly for reference.

Obviously, this isn't news to anyone already involved in mining, as indicated by the massive price increases on all the GPUs. The Nvidia cards are all priced about 50 percent above standard MSRP, while the AMD cards are often 100 percent more than the original MSRP. Used cards on eBay are also priced extremely high -- in some cases higher than the original selling price of the cards! But even with all of the price hikes, you could still break even in under four months on many rigs -- and if you bought hardware last month instead of waiting, you're looking at closer to 2-3 months. Damn.

Overall, given other factors like initial setup costs, power use, and card availability, Nvidia's GTX 1060 is currently the best option for new mining rigs. It's still relatively available, and it's easy to run six cards off a single 1000W PSU. The GTX 1070 is also potentially interesting, but the 1070 Ti isn't since the close proximity in price to the GTX 1080 makes that the better buy. The card prices are current as of the above date, but inventory may cause wild fluctuations over the next few weeks.

So hang onto your hats, because mining fever is alive and well!

The most profitable graphics card for mining - December 2017

Last month was a historic month for Bitcoin, with the cryptocurrency breaking $10,000 for the first time -- and it didn't stop there, coming very close to $12,000 before settling back down to around $11,000. That means profitability, if you had started mining in early November, was about 50 percent higher than initial estimates, because difficulty adjustments lag slightly behind price adjustments.

But what does that mean going forward? If I could tell you that with 100 percent certainty, I wouldn't have to write this blog. LOL. But seriously, when you look at the way investment groups and others are getting behind Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, the current low 5-digit valuation could be woefully inadequate. 21 million total Bitcoin -- EVER! -- means in 10-20 years it's not inconceivable for a valuation of more than a million dollars per BTC.

There are those that suggest treating Bitcoin like a piece of art. If you buy a masterpiece today, and sit on it for 20 years, it could be worth ten times as much in the future. So get ahold of a few BTC, sock it away in long-term storage, and check back in 20 years. I suspect despite the naysayers, it will have much better returns than any stock you could buy. Imagine having bought into Microsoft or Apple back in the 80s. $1,000 worth of MSFT stock at the $21 IPO, it would be worth about $4.4 million today, and $1,000 of AAPL from 1980 would be worth about $430K. Bitcoin could blow both of those away, even from the current price of $11K... but how should you go about acquiring some BTC?

You could just buy some BTC, naturally, but I'm a proponent of mining. Even if a cryptocurrency tanks, you at least have the hardware to sell/use, defraying the risk somewhat. And at $11K, I suspect we're due for a correction at some point in the next year -- after which we might see the price soar to $50K or more. Again, think long-term.

If you're looking to get into cryptocurrency mining using GPUs, here are the numbers for current graphic cards. Historically, AMD GPUs were the go-to choice, but much has changed and there are algorithms that run better on Nvidia hardware, with others that favor AMD hardware. Depending on availability and pricing, buying only AMD (or Nvidia) cards may not be the best idea -- spread out your investment over the top GPUs for each vendor, to minimize risk.

I've been GPU (and sometimes CPU) mining since the early days of Bitcoin, back in 2011. I didn't have the foresight to hold everything (which would be well over 2,000 BTC now), but I've made money, slowly and steadily over time, and I've paid off all of my investments and then some. While people getting into mining now are sort of late to the party, it's still possible to earn money -- just not quite as fast as before.

Chasing the alt-coin-of-the-day can be a full-time job, so if you're not interested in constantly monitoring the cryptocurrency market, save yourself the headache and lease your hashing power on NiceHash. Doing it that way means you may miss out on short-term bubbles (I was mining about 50 ETH per day in mid-2016, which I sold at mostly <$10 prices), but long-term it's a lot less work.

Mining requires a lot of power, typically 1000-1500W per mining rig. Power means heat, so in the summer things can become problematic. In the winter, however, all the mining can be used to heat your home. I also set my GPUs to run at lower than maximum power, for longevity purposes, with custom fan curves to balance income, efficiency, noise, and power use. That's a topic for another day, but 80-90% of maximum power (and not overclocking) is the safe approach to long-term mining.

So what do you need to get mining? First you need a PC, which consists of a CPU, motherboard, memory, storage, and power supply. I'm going to target the best returns, which means going low on the CPU while using high-end power supplies, and then using as many GPUs as you can reasonably run off of the power supply (or power supplies). With mining motherboards from Asus, ASRock, and Biostar supporting over 12 GPUs, that can be the fastest way to break even. Here's what you'll need, along with approximate monthly income and ROI figures:

BASIC MINING RIG (UPDATED 12/04/2017):
Pentium G4600: $87
Asus B250 Mining Expert: $150
16GB DDR4 memory: $165
240GB SSD: $75
1000W 80 Plus Platinum PSU: $185
6x PCIe Risers: $60
TOTAL: $712

Because of the change in motherboard, plus supporting up to 12 GPUs, the base build varies on what you want to run. You can technically do up to 19 GPUs, with caveats, but I'm going to run the nubmers for 6 and 12 GPUs. If you run 12 250-300W GPUs you'll need two or even three PSUs, and potentially even go with a 1200W PSU. But for the following calculations, I'm going to use 6 or 12 GPUs, with one, two, or three PSUs as appropriate.

The following is only an estimate, and actually income will vary on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Also note that some of the GPU pricing comes via used cards on eBay, which I don't generally recommend buying -- someone has probably already mined the cards to near-death.

GPU	Price (GPU)	Price (6x)	Price (12x)	1x Income	6x Income	12x Income	ROI
GTX 1080 Ti	$770	$5,102	$10,284	$4.06	$24.38	$48.77	189-226 days
GTX 1080	$540	$3,722	$7,524	$3.55	$21.30	$42.60	152-194 days
GTX 1070 Ti	$450	$3,182	$6,444	$3.38	$20.28	$40.56	133-177 days
GTX 1070	$410	$2,730	$5,752	$3.09	$18.56	$37.13	133-171 days
GTX 1060 6GB	$260	$1,830	$3,952	$2.01	$12.07	$24.13	129-188 days
GTX 1060 3GB	$212	$1,542	$3,376	$1.73	$10.37	$20.74	123-191 days
*GTX 980 Ti	$350	$2,582	$5,244	$2.57	$15.41	$30.82	136-195 days
*GTX 980	$270	$2,102	$4,284	$1.85	$11.11	$22.22	146-227 days
*GTX 970	$200	$1,470	$3,232	$1.69	$10.12	$20.23	119-189 days
RX Vega 64	$700	$4,894	$9,656	$4.04	$24.26	$48.52	173-218 days
RX Vega 56	$625	$4,444	$8,756	$3.49	$20.92	$41.83	179-231 days
RX 580 8GB	$280	$2,162	$4,404	$2.06	$12.38	$24.76	136-208 days
RX 570 4GB	$250	$1,982	$4,044	$1.96	$11.75	$23.51	128-204 days
*R9 Fury	$400	$2,882	$5,844	$2.78	$16.70	$33.40	144-197 days
*R9 390	$300	$2,282	$4,644	$2.33	$13.99	$27.98	129-193 days
*R9 380	$175	$1,320	$2,932	$1.33	$7.97	$15.94	132-221 days

* - These are used cards, so these are here mostly for reference.

As you can see, the increase in Bitcoin prices has had a direct impact on profitability for mining, but it has also caused GPU prices to trend upward. Nearly all of the cards cost 10-20 percent more this month than last month, which is unfortunate. And just in time for the holidays, which means little Johnny isn't as likely to get a shiny new GPU under the Christmas tree.

Overall, given other factors like initial setup costs, power use, and card availability, Nvidia's GTX 1070 Ti is potentially the best option right now, or the existing GTX 1070. On a pure ROI basis, if you're only looking at buying a graphics card, the GTX 1060 3GB is the best option. The card prices are current as of the above date, but inventory may cause wild fluctuations over the next few weeks.

Black Friday Graphics Card Deals

Black Friday is upon us, as well as Cyber Monday and all the other days in between. Happy Thanksgiving be damned, let's have some good old capitalistic greed! But if you're interested in buying a graphics card, here are a bunch of quick links to the various GPUs, sorted by price (except where Amazon's search algorithm sucks, which it often does).

GTX 1080 Ti 11GB
GTX 1080 8GB
GTX 1070 Ti 8GB
GTX 1070 8GB
GTX 1060 6GB
GTX 1060 3GB
GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
GTX 1050 2GB
RX Vega 64 8GB
RX Vega 56 8GB
RX 580 8GB
RX 580 4GB
RX 570 8GB
RX 570 4GB
RX 560 4GB

Here's the shocking reality: graphics card prices on several models are higher this holiday season than the same cards were one year ago. In 2016 you could find the GTX 1070 for as little as $360 during Black Friday, and often well under $400. I'll be surprised if we see better prices this year, simply because all of the cards are selling almost as fast as AMD and Nvidia can make them.

And a big part of that is thanks to all of my miner friends. Which is sort of fun to see, as the gamers of the world still haven't quite figured out what the hell cryptocurrencies are and why they're so valuable. Ha.

In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes on Neuromation, which is nearing launch and claiming that the demand for machine learning could deliver 'mining' payouts that are three to five times higher than what we're making off traditional mining. Wouldn't that be nice -- and it would go toward solving real-world problems rather than just securing the blockchain. I'll believe it when I see it, as the tokens they talk about using to buy compute power are generated by ... you guessed it: traditional GPU mining and blockchain technologies.

History in the making: Bitcoin passes the $2000 mark

When the $1,500 barrier went down earlier this month, I figured $2,000 was only a matter of time. And like a stock going crazy on the exchange, Bitcoin rocketed up and hit its new all-time high just two weeks later.

The question on everyone's mind right now is: What happens next?

I could pull out a bunch of fancy charts and draw lines on them, but the truth is no one really knows. I suspect the instability of the US president isn't helping confidence in the US dollar, and plenty of other countries have reasons to look for some alternative investment.

Stick a bunch of money into Bitcoin, and yes, you might lose value. But suppose you had put $100,000 into Bitcoin back at the last surge in late 2013. 3.5 years later your investment is worth over $200,000. Of course that's after falling to a value of less than $30,000 for over a year, but Bitcoin has a habit of rebounding, and then some.

If you've ever looked at Microsoft, Apple, or Intel stock and thought, "Man, I wish I had the foresight to invest in those companies back in the mid-80s when they were still small..." just know this: Bitcoin has the potential to eclipse all of those stocks over the coming decades. Remember that above all, Bitcoin is the VERY FIRST CRYPTOCURRENCY. Lots of other coins have tried to do better than Bitcoin, most of them have failed catastrophically.

If you're looking for other options, Ethereum is doing amazingly well over the past year. It has features Bitcoin lacks, and maybe one day it will become the top coin. There's also Ripple, which has the distinction of being backed/supported by some banks, or Nem, Litecoin, or Dash. But if I were a betting man, I'd stick with Bitcoin and Ethereum.

See you in four more years, when we can all look back at today and think, "If only I had invested when Bitcoin was still only $2000...."

GeForce GTX 970 4GB Mining Performance

It's not quite as old of technology as the R9 380, but the GeForce GTX 970 has been around for a while. It originally launched in late 2014, and at the time the gaming performance was pretty awesome but the mining potential was somewhat lackluster. Time improved the situation, but even now the GTX 970 is only about the equal of an R9 380 for cryptocurrency mining -- though there are algorithms where it does better.

If you're willing to go the eBay route, you can pick up the GTX 970 for about $150. Gaming performance is definitely better than R9 380, and often better than the RX 470 as well, but again I'm here for mining talk. Here's how things look, running a bog standard (not overclocked) Zotac card:

Here's how things look on WhatToMine, though there's a chance some of the algorithms are just running poorly on my 970. Anyway, NiceHashMiner shows profitability of $1.50-$2.00, and a power cost of around $0.26 per day. If you're willing to mine other coins, Hush (Equihash) is currently netting around $2 per day.

Using the eBay price of $150, that means ROI is only 100 days, possibly as few as 75 depending on what you mine. The cool thing about buying a used GTX 970 is that they aren't actually popular mining cards, which means you're far more likely to get a card that was only used for gaming purposes. That means it's more likely to run without problems -- at least until you run the fans into the ground with mining. Poor GPU.

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