Cryptonote Coins: A Good Starting Point for the Budget Conscious Miners

My journey in cryptocurrency mining started with Monero as the first coin I mined, with a mining rig that cost below USD1k.

I've picked up the basic know-how of mining using Google searches, but most of the information available would be either:

1. Pointing Ethereum as the first coin to start mining with, which would need high end GPU due to large GPU memory needed, or
2. If not sure what's the best coin to mine, use Nicehash as the starting miner and let the system manage on behalf - this is less than ideal as Nicehash would take quite a big chunk of profit from the mining reward as part of the deal

This would be fine if I already am willing to invest a big sum of cash to start with a high end GPU mining rig and then just go with the easy starting point. But I want to start dipping into the world of cryptocurrency mining with just tiny steps at one time, just to make sure what I've picked up is what I've expected.

So here's the question - Is there really no option available to use budget GPU cards to mine coins?

The quick and obvious reason that low end GPUs are not good for mining is they usually yield much lower hashrates while still need to use relatively high wattage, which deem to be less efficient for mining purpose.

However, with the surge of interest by many to get their hands on the coin mining, high end GPUs had become such scarce items that even if you could afford the much inflated price tags, you might still need to queue up for the next available batch to arrive with unknown ETA dates. With shortage of higher range GPUs looming on, the miners now heading towards a slightly altered direction - getting the less powerful or older GPUs but with comparable efficiency in mining.

So, thanks to this change of tide, there was a particular GPU being mentioned by some online discussions that caught my attention during my quest to search for the "low budget efficient mining GPU" - NVidia GTX 750ti.

Turns out this GPU had gained its reputation for its efficiency in generating hashrates using only very low wattage, and it's easily available in second hand market at USD70 or a pinch below. Since then I knew that GPU would be my "first tiny step" into the world of mining.

And then the next few keywords that further got me into the consideration - "Monero" and "Cryptonote".

Further online searches about GTX 750ti had shown this GPU perform particularly well for the coins based on Cryptonote algorithm, which consume fairly low wattage and virtually any computer can mine the coins with CPU and/or GPU - I've experimented using my very old netbook and yes this is true, albeit with very low hashrate. Among the Cryptonote coins available back then (around Nov 2017), Monero coin lead the pack with the biggest market capital, which also had been commonly used as the currency for certain websites (notoriously famed for usage in illicit activities though).

With all this info in hand, building the mining rig along with other hardwares are pretty much walk in a park - just need to get those GPU from second hand market and choose the cheapest available components then assemble them up into a budget aluminum open rig frame.

After using the rig to mine Monero for a couple weeks, online discussions once again point me to some further useful info:

1. AMD GPUs are the overall more efficient card to mine Cryptonote coins - they can generate far higher hashrate if BIOS mod flashing is done correctly
2. There is a budget level AMD GPU with mining performance and efficiency excel even the GTX 750ti - say hello to AMD RX550, which the new GPU cost just slightly below USD100

To put them in numbers and easier to compare - GTX 750ti can mine Cryptonote coins at 260 hash/second using just 35watt of electric power, while RX550 can mine at 440 hash/second using 50 watt. That means RX550 could get 69% more hashrate by just increasing 43% more watt compared to GTX750ti. We can see RX550 is a better choice too while comparing the price, which is just 43% higher priced than GTX750ti.

Eventually my Cryptonote coin mining rig is now equipped with 3 GTX 750ti and 3 RX550, with total hashrate approx 2,200 hash/second. The total is somewhat similar to hashrate of a topline AMD GPU, RX Vega 64, but with much smaller price tag - approx USD500 for total of 6 GPUs vs more than USD1k for Vega 64. However, Vega 64 is still the more efficient GPU with lower watt used - less than 200 watt while the 6 GPU combo uses approx 250 watt.

The journey in finding the most efficient GPU possible that also fit the current budget can definitely be a never-ending one. While this is part of the main thrills when seeking to maximize the mining profitability, there are also other factors that could be considered - which coins to mine, which mining software to use, which mining pools to join, has the overclocking being fully optimized,etc.

Stay tuned for more sharing of my journey in taking up Cryptocurrency mining, which I hope the experience gained now would help in long way to come.