It has been an interesting 126 days since I started my Gridcoin journey. Today, I will get paid my 5000th GRC - cool. This semester and the one to come, I work as a tutor at my university and earn quiet some money. Since I study a lot and don't really spend any money, I thought about investing some of it in building a GRC mining rig.
Reading about mining rigs brings up a few questions. A lot of other miners use motherboards with loads of PCIe 1x slots and a cheap CPU to mine. However, GRC is not as other currencies, in the way that I don't have to just hash, but do real science - cool again. Does anyone of you have experience in optimising their setup? Should I just invest in GPUs and work with a cheap CPU or could I also invest in a little bit more expensive CPU since gridcoin also uses CPUs? Furthermore, how well do BOINC projects if the GPUs are faced with limited PCIe bandwidth?
Having seen the spike in GRC value to over 0.06$ for a short time and a more continuous rise to over 0.04$, I feel like my investment won't be completely for nothing, and even if, maybe I cure cancer on the way :)
So keep BOINCing everyone and help science advance!
P.S: I have not staked in over 3 months. Is this normal with my balance or is something wrong with my wallet? Twice I was shown to have staked in the last 2 months, but the block "disappeared" after a short period of time again.
Checlist:
Hi, thanks! I checked them all and it seems that I match all of the criteria, except for the "wallet online most of the time". I run my wallet on my laptop which is running about 5h per day. Might this be not enough?
Running only 5 out of 24 hours just means that it will take almost 5 times longer (24/5=4.8). Also depends on time of day you are running.
We have a report of similar problem, please see All staking rewards are gone after a few blocks
I assume your in the pool? did you do "execute beaconstatus" ? do you have a beacon?
yes I do have one, it was sent about 2 months ago I think.
My advice would be to get a ryzen 1600 , overclock it as you feel confortable, and then look in ebay for good deals with GPUs. But be careful with the power consumption. Stay at 4GiB of ram if you are only using 1 or 2 cards. upgrade to 8GiB if using more. You dont need to invest on a high end motherboard, you can just use risers if you plan to buy lots of them.
Overall you could buy a decent system pretty cheap
40$ - power supply
200$ - CPU
30$ - case
40-50$ RAM
70$ Motherboard
Plus whatever you plan to invest on gpus.
Also you must keep in mind that this is no simple hashing, as you said, this is real science, and real science uses a lot of CPU even when computing with the GPU (depending on the project, primegrid barely uses any on the other hand) . As an example, with a task from collazt that cpu wouldnt be able to completely feed a GTX1080.
Another, sexy, powerefficient and quiet option would be to invest that money in getting some of these beauties https://www.96boards.org/product/mediatek-x20/ or a similar product , but you wouldnt be able to compute on as many projects. The good news is that very good cpu projects like TnGrid , Universe@home and Drugdiscovery are avaliable for linux on arm.
I half wonder if CPU mining is more efficient money-wise than GPU mining. Even a "mediocre" CPU could get decent mag on a CPU-only project, whereas to get good mag on a GPU enabled project like SETI you need a pretty nice GPU.