IS GPU MINING STILL PROFITABLE? - Mining Adventure Part 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
2,406 words · ~12 min read
0:00
for months now graphics card supply has been completely tapped out thanks to
0:05
every gamer's worst enemy miners
0:08
and no not young people who screech into the microphone but they're awful too i'm
0:13
talking about the kind of miners who are using hardware both pc components and
0:18
more specialized equipment to calculate what are called
0:22
hashes for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin
0:25
in exchange for a reward effectively
0:29
mining for money but how do you get in
0:32
on the action can you just fire up your old pc and start making
0:38
money let's investigate
0:49
mass drop is now featuring their custom configured akg k7xx audiophile
0:54
headphones check them and other drops out at the link in the video description
1:00
let's get this out of the way first uh to make a gold rush analogy the days of
1:05
walking onto a random plot of land you know sticking your pickaxe
1:09
scissors or whatever into the nearest mountainside and sailing home in a
1:12
golden ship are basically over but just because
1:16
mining the most popular cryptocurrency bitcoin is no longer practical for the
1:22
average person with uh an extra graphics card or two
1:27
that doesn't mean that you can't mine for something so as always around here
1:32
we started our adventure with some overkill hardware bringing our 10 GPU
1:38
server out of the motherballs uh from eight gamers one CPU theoretically 1080
1:44
ti's are the most profitable but we have to ignore cost to buy what do you mean
1:49
ignore costs to buy what do you think i'm like made of graphics cards can we
1:52
use these so then what we ended up with is
1:56
five gtx 1070s uh four gtx 1080s and then a single 1080
2:02
ti it's not going to be like the highest earning rig but we can use this to run
2:07
some important benchmarks and determine whether our plan will be profitable i
2:12
guess we got to take it upstairs um one trip yeah sure
2:16
i was about to say the same thing oh gosh
2:19
come on it's just like complete disregard it's fine who cares
2:23
it's like a five thousand dollar shirt oh i care it's just it's fine like we're
2:26
just not gonna drop it so it doesn't matter right you got it because you never drop anything okay here
2:31
okay technically not the way it's meant to be rolled i don't think but yolo
2:36
can you lift it any higher so i got my ankles okay thank you
2:42
oh don't shift down like that
2:45
you know i think we actually could have fit 11 in here if we use the um the katana i think it
2:51
throttles a little bit i think mining on the katana would be a terrible terrible
2:55
idea i'm just saying i think we could have while i do this Jake's gonna work
2:58
on installing the whopping two sticks of memory out of the 24 slots on our board
3:04
here um cryptocurrency mining doesn't
3:08
really benefit from a ton of RAM with that said though it may benefit from a
3:12
large virtual memory space on your storage drive and then he's also going
3:17
to throw in two of our 22 core xeon processors
3:23
wait i guess i know that's really stupid
3:26
they're just the only two cpus that we had lying around that were compatible
3:30
with this board and we actually have to populate both of the sockets for this because
3:35
otherwise we won't have enough pci express lanes for all of these freaking
3:39
gpus are you struggling yeah a little bit
3:46
i don't have enough do you have any more
3:50
did this take us less than four hours aha [ __ ] you brandon i was right well
3:54
it's because he's here not because i had no confidence in you doing this by
3:58
yourself from that time ouch
4:01
holy [ __ ] god you're going to drive up all of our
4:04
insurance premiums when he has to go to the emergency and get that burn sorted
4:08
out and there we have it we are now ready to
4:13
boot up our system so actually almost um
4:16
cooling is sort of a concern in a system like this so we're gonna go ahead and
4:20
throw our fans back in here and then Jake are
4:23
you ready with that shroud just gotta get this gaff tape unstuck wouldn't want
4:27
to be wasteful you know just are you really reusing tape yeah this tape is
4:31
still sticky how cheap do you think i am is this an evon initiative i mean this
4:35
chassis clearly isn't designed to have graphics cards um yeah i don't know how
4:39
we're gonna fit this in here i think you kind of have to just
4:43
cram the tip in between two of them
4:47
okay it's like it was made to fit yeah see look at that i like that i got
4:51
my reused tape yeah look it's still sticky i told you gaff
4:56
tape is amazing you didn't tell me that i did you've never told me that okay
4:59
well gap tape is amazing uh so now we just need some power okay
5:04
i need four right oh right yeah
5:07
dory i planned for this we could have easily done this experiment with just a normal
5:11
motherboard and 4g yeah but that would have been so lame
5:16
it's like power me please look i'm working on it okay
5:21
please give me power i'm failing
5:24
come on okay we're in we're in all good ah
5:28
yes slightly less annoying
5:32
uh where are all the 632 screws from uh right here i have a thing where do they
5:36
come from where do they go where do they come from
5:41
that was terminally unimpressive okay there we go that's where i like it
5:45
that's how you know it's working okay so while we're waiting to fire up
5:49
Windows and install the NVIDIA driver which by the way takes a long ass time
5:55
on a system with 10 gpus uh let's have a look at power consumption uh we're
6:00
looking at 400 watts right now 400 watts
6:03
had idle at idle so basically no matter what kind of
6:07
hardware you're using mining is going to add a lot to your electrical bill so
6:12
it's this real cost that's associated with it that prevents casuals from just
6:18
using old hardware to mine these days it is all about efficiency so our pascal
6:24
based cards consume a similar amount of power compared to previous generations
6:30
but they run the algorithms needed for mining much more quickly than previous
6:35
generations and the more calculations that you can perform per watt of power
6:40
consumed the more profitable you'll be
6:44
the other key is to mine smarter almost
6:47
no one is mining for bitcoin directly these days because over time the
6:52
difficulty of generating a reward by mining goes up
6:56
a lot so people are opting instead to mine for
6:59
an altcoin like litecoin ethereum zcash
7:04
or even dogecoin yes for the uninitiated
7:07
that was and is a real thing
7:11
okay without scratching the table oh my god that got a lot heavier
7:15
i'm so happy i'm not carrying that side that's fine i'll be on the bottom this
7:18
time oh wait i'm going backwards again what the hell no you go backwards
7:23
also i just locked this door wait and my elbow needs to
7:26
unlock it there we go yeah oh man this thing's heavy
7:32
wait why are we standing like this this is not a good strategy yeah um
7:36
can you slide that way and i'll slide this way yeah
7:39
i got it hey if we drop it it's not that big of a deal so hold on hold on don't push holding
7:44
now sort of counter-intuitive
7:47
uh other side is in it it is yeah
7:51
really are you serious yeah holy [ __ ] that was
7:55
painless so um now that it's installed the plan
7:59
is to use a marketplace called nicehash
8:02
that pairs buyers who want to rent
8:05
hashing power with sellers who have hashing power like us
8:10
so what's cool about that is that after you run the included benchmark which can
8:15
actually take a few hours with this much gear and had trouble with the 88 threads
8:20
worth of CPU that we're rocking in this version of the software anyway it
8:24
determines which algorithm is most profitable for
8:28
which piece of your hardware at any given moment and runs that giving you a
8:33
real-time readout of how much you're earning before electricity costs and
8:38
then paying you out daily as long as your balance is at least .001
8:43
of a bitcoin that is after taking their cut
8:48
it's booting right i think so
8:51
okay so over the weekend Jake i didn't
8:54
really help spent a bunch of time babying this thing through crashes and
8:58
blue screens and we have finally
9:02
got it mining stably tm we initially thought that the issues
9:07
might be related to thermals because let's face it uh the cards are really
9:12
close together by the way your ducting seems to be falling off if you want to
9:15
go have a look at that um get this ladder in here but with
9:19
afterburner up on screen it's actually pretty clear that our climate controlled
9:25
server room has that under control we're hitting 82 degrees top some of them are
9:30
a lot lower like 70 even that actually
9:33
that reminds me we haven't factored the cost of air conditioning into our
9:36
profitability equation but that's something that we can really look into during part two of our investigation so
9:41
getting back to this machine you might have noticed that there are
9:45
actually only eight gpus in the system now see that we pulled out the middle
9:50
too that's actually due to an NVIDIA driver limitation that specifies a
9:54
maximum of eight gpus per operating
9:58
system so shout out to gary over at ASUS for that tip so that means our final
10:03
power usage is a cool 2000 watts no
10:06
biggie then for our remember four power supplies
10:11
let's talk about the return on our investment to buy
10:14
that configuration would run you nearly 18 000 us dollars at an average of 11 a
10:21
day in profit again not accounting for air conditioning it would take around
10:26
four and a half years to recoup that and that is assuming stability in the
10:30
cryptocurrency market stability what stability in the cryptocurrency market
10:35
right what a joke so obviously this would be a really stupid
10:40
mining setup to go out and buy however if you were a little more um how you say
10:46
not a complete idiot about your part selection assuming that your power costs are
10:50
similar to ours at around 10 u.s cents per kilowatt you could actually get your
10:55
upfront investment back a lot sooner so we're going to investigate a more
10:59
optimized config in a follow-up video but this config for about five thousand
11:04
dollars that you're looking at right now is kind of what we're planning let us know if you have any suggestions in the
11:08
comments first let's get back to the original question does what we're doing
11:12
make any sense well if you have a bunch of spare
11:17
modern hardware lying around collecting dust
11:22
actually yes so we're planning to leave that
11:25
system running until phase two when we'll report on our results and then
11:29
compare it to our second system but if you have to go out and actually buy
11:34
hardware to do it your return is likely going to take so long that you'd be
11:38
better off doing what many people are doing and trying to buy and sell
11:42
cryptocurrencies more directly as they rise and fall though
11:46
there are certainly risks associated with that as well
11:50
so why did everyone run out and buy all the video cards and high wattage power
11:56
supplies driving up prices for gamers
11:59
well while the profit isn't anything earth shattering many miners actually resell
12:05
their hardware when it's no longer profitable recovering much of the
12:09
upfront cost and then keeping all the money that was made while the systems
12:14
were in service so let us know in the comments what you
12:18
guys want to see in future follow-ups here because we have hardly begun to
12:23
explore this rabbit hole we're planning a future build with 19 gpus in one
12:27
system so that's going to be a thing and we'd love to talk about asics as well
12:31
those are pretty interesting but we definitely want feedback from you guys
12:36
and we want to tell you about our sponsor today crunchyroll
12:42
is the site created by anime fans for anime fans offering the most current
12:47
episodes of new shows straight from japan like knights and magic and my hero
12:51
academia season 2. all the content on the site is professionally subtitled and
12:55
our link down below gives you a whole month of free anime completely ad free
13:00
coming out in october is food war season 3 and black clover then if you enjoy the
13:06
many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows
13:09
straight from japan within an hour of their premiere and being able to stream
13:13
anywhere anytime from a variety of devices like your phone tablet or game
13:16
console you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for just 6.95
13:20
a month so head over to crunchyroll.com Linus right down there and sign up today
13:26
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
13:30
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
13:34
and video cards sure but maybe not the server also links down there is our
13:38
merch storage has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which
13:41
you should totally join