SirSmash
Regular Member
- May 25, 2014
- 310
- 274
I sold all my cards early this year but I kept the mainboards/powersupplies/shelving/etc. I have 3 shipping containers in the backyard setup as a "data center" (it's a combination of miners plus I have a few 42U racks of HP C7000 enclosures with blades for backtesting trading bots). Made a decent profit on the cards as the vast majority were RX 570 8GB's that I got for like $150 new, sold them for around $400 average per card.
The plan is to pickup GPU's when they're cheap again, which seems like it should be pretty soon. I may go back to buying broken cards and repairing them as I did initially many years ago. That's a super cheap way to get cards, usually I'd buy like 10 at a time and a card or two would be used for parts to fix the rest, but you'd better be pretty damn good at soldering.
What will I mine? Whatever the hell makes me the most money. It's really that simple. Put the hash rates into a calculator and figure out what pays the best. I have no marrage to a coin, the second that coin doesn't give me the most profit is the second I toss the coin to the street and curb stomp that b*. I always exchanged all coins to USD anyway.
If it turns out that mining isn't profitable (electric rates aren't exactly cheap here) then I got a few alternative possibilities, but most are CPU not GPU based. That's fine too as I'd just pickup surplus servers from the local auction, toss in an SD card with the OS (most servers have an onboard SD card slot if you don't want to boot from hard drives), and rack them up. I also keep an eye on things like CHIA (hard drive mining) which isn't something I'd recommend but I do have a couple systems setup with a buttload of old SAS drives for testing.
You can also rent out the resources (CPU &/or GPU), generally it was more profitable to mine crypto recently but before crypto there was still a bunch of ways to make money with compters. Resource selling usually won't be a 24/7 100% use option though, so make sure to set the systems to only power up when needed and shutdown after. That'll save you a buttload on electricity and it's much simpler to guarantee a profit as you just charge more than it costs you. Yeah you'll waste a few minutes on boot but it works out; if the customers complain about bootup wait times you can over allocate like 10% above current use. Then most won't even notice as the job queues immediately and once the rest of the systems turn on it'll go full speed (plus allocate another 10% above for the next potential user).
The plan is to pickup GPU's when they're cheap again, which seems like it should be pretty soon. I may go back to buying broken cards and repairing them as I did initially many years ago. That's a super cheap way to get cards, usually I'd buy like 10 at a time and a card or two would be used for parts to fix the rest, but you'd better be pretty damn good at soldering.
What will I mine? Whatever the hell makes me the most money. It's really that simple. Put the hash rates into a calculator and figure out what pays the best. I have no marrage to a coin, the second that coin doesn't give me the most profit is the second I toss the coin to the street and curb stomp that b*. I always exchanged all coins to USD anyway.
If it turns out that mining isn't profitable (electric rates aren't exactly cheap here) then I got a few alternative possibilities, but most are CPU not GPU based. That's fine too as I'd just pickup surplus servers from the local auction, toss in an SD card with the OS (most servers have an onboard SD card slot if you don't want to boot from hard drives), and rack them up. I also keep an eye on things like CHIA (hard drive mining) which isn't something I'd recommend but I do have a couple systems setup with a buttload of old SAS drives for testing.
You can also rent out the resources (CPU &/or GPU), generally it was more profitable to mine crypto recently but before crypto there was still a bunch of ways to make money with compters. Resource selling usually won't be a 24/7 100% use option though, so make sure to set the systems to only power up when needed and shutdown after. That'll save you a buttload on electricity and it's much simpler to guarantee a profit as you just charge more than it costs you. Yeah you'll waste a few minutes on boot but it works out; if the customers complain about bootup wait times you can over allocate like 10% above current use. Then most won't even notice as the job queues immediately and once the rest of the systems turn on it'll go full speed (plus allocate another 10% above for the next potential user).
