So, I’m a novice in the mining community, and I started with setting up my gaming PC to mine on BetterHash. I have a Ryzen 5 2600x and an RTX 2060 Super and it’s making ~$35/mo (if I were to run it 24/7). So I was using their estimator to see what to put in my new open air case with the ASRock H110+ BTC board. I’m working with a limited budget, so I was looking at GPUs under $100 that make more than the power costs are and noticed that they list the Radeon HD 6450 as making $46/mo mining Ravencoin? This has to be a typo… right?
Yes - pretty sure that’s a typo because you can’t mine RVN with less than 3GB of GPU memory (iirc) and that card only has 1GB. I don’t know of anything you can mine with that card any more. As Epochs pass and DAG requirements grow for each algorithm, you will run into an increasing demand for memory just to mine anything. Also remember, that if you are running in a Windows environment, there is an additional overhead for the DAG creation so most 4GB cards are starting to get near the end of their ability to mine Ethereum under Windows. I’m not saying you won’t be able to mine something else with them but profitability is already borderline with some of these cards, particularly when you take power usage into consideration as older cards are usually less power efficient.
Personally, I’d spend a little more to get a card with at least 6GB (but preferably 8GB) of GDDR6 memory as that will ensure that it will continue to operate on the more profitable algorithms long enough to recover the cost of purchasing it - they will also be much cheaper to run if power cost is a thing for you.
Power cost isn’t really an issue, but I’m definitely mindful of it. I figured it was a typo, because there didn’t seem to be a likelihood of a $10 gpu making 400% profit. I think soon the cost of RTX 2XXX cards dropping will help fuel getting 1660/ti cheaper as well, so I may go that route. But my open air case only holds 8 double cards or a bunch of single slots and my H110+ holds 13 GPUs… so I wanted to try and fill it with something cheap in the single slot family to get an idea of a reasonable ROI/profit. I’d love to drop a couple grand on some good cards that make way more, but that isn’t in the budget right now.