Hi All, Due to (I assume) people moving from GPUs to purpose built bitcoin miners the price of second hand 7970s has crashed on ebay. You can pick them up for £150 inc P&P. And they are still good for 100,000+PPD. I got two
Sold all mine a couple of weeks back for considerably more, seemed to have timed leaving mining perfectly!
I read somewhere there might be longevity issues with bitcoin GPU cast-offs - but then that's no different to us Folders who thrash them aswell
All mine were running at 100% load for a minimum of 3 months whilst usually overclocked. Only difference with me is that I had lifted the floorboards up and had the cards pulling in near 0 degree air through winter
Cost of running my rigs was rather prohibitive, I was only able to afford mining by selling 25-50% of all coins I produced to cover electric costs. For a while I was selling 75%, and when it got close to 90% I sold up. Two weeks later it wasn't profitable so lots of others left too. 18x 270X and 6x R9 290's draw quite a lot of power through 4 systems!
I see Dabs are selling AMD Radeon 7970 HD Igb Windforce warrantry repair for £122. I managed to get a spare rig up and running and have a GTx 560 running in one of the slots (about 56,000 ppd). Will this clash with the AMD in the other slot or are there better, Nvidia solutions (ppd) at that price? Perhaps sell the 560 and get 2x7970's? Well done Nelio, and I thought I was doing OK!
I've never tried to mix AMD and nVidia cards in the same machine (sounds like asking for trouble to me!) ... I expect life would be easier if you popped in two 7970's. The PPD would also be greater - expect around 100+k per card.
Thanks for the reply. Just tried purchasing the card on Dabs website and although it is advertised, none exist in stock. ummmmm? Have you lot bought them all?! lol Will try ebay, but liked the Dabs 6 month warranty backing Any suggestions or links to purchases?
I bought a R9 280X as the bitcoin miners sold all their units. Going to grab a second GPU when money allows again, to bump my PPD potential to 250,000.
Made me re-think plans for the spare PC. Found a couple of R9 280X's on ebay and you are right, the PPD from them is about 250,000 . However, I now need to sort out the cooling in the case as one of them is running very warm with the heat rising from the bottom card to the top card. More fans - More noise - More grief from the missus!
I have two XFX DD 925MHz HD7970s and even though I've had the coolers off and reapplied the TIM one of them still won't Fold as it overheats and shuts down. The other runs at about 75degC at 75% fan.
It's why before I go CrossFireX I'm going to also budget for a water cooling loop for my GPUs to keep them in check.