Gridcoin [GRC] Mining Profitability in USD - NVIDIA GPU Mining (Up to USD$103/m per Card at ATH on Gamer Card!)
One of the most common questions I get asked in the Gridcoin forums and social channels is: 'How much can I make with hardware X'? The difficulty in answering this question is that Gridcoin does not function like a conventional cryptocurrency with respect to mining. Your hardware is not put to use to endlessly hash data, but contributes to actual science which is less predictable with respect to performance.
Just like mining other crypto, with Gridcoin:
- The amount you earn depends on how much you contribute to the network compute relative to everyone else.
- You can join a pool to get paid more steadily, rather than having to get lucky staking a block.
- More powerful hardware outcompetes less powerful hardware generally speaking.
- GPUs outcompete CPUs.
However, unlike mining other crypto, with Gridcoin:
- Your compute power is used to solve research problems, primarily for the scientific community. These problems are complex, and vary wildly between projects that the Gridcoin Network rewards contributions on. As a result, hardware performance will vary between projects, as will your mining rate.
- Hashing power is meaningless, so hardware profitability cannot be readily compared
- The daily Gridcoin mint is spread across the 'whitelisted projects', which are projects eligible for rewards (you run these projects - you get paid GRC). If the number of projects in the whitelist changes, this will significantly impact your daily GRC mint.
As a result of the above, the best way to maximise your yields is to contribute compute to the project that has the least competition from other Team Gridcoin members. I have been running a significant number of different GPUs on several of the most efficient projects to mine for the past month and a half, and collected data on the income they have generated. By calculating the average yield per GFLOP of compute and linearly extrapolating, we can predict the earnings of most GeForce cards in the series. Cards highlighted in yellow are cards for which I have actual data, which were used to linearly interpolate the rest of each series. Note that all values are averages, meaning none of the raw data remains in these tables. Further, all hardware is running stock settings - no overclocking or overvolting, which could further increase yield.
We will be skipping the GeForce 800 series as this only includes mobile models. This was because NVIDIA intended for the 800 series to use Maxwell microarchitecture but had already released 800 series mobile GPUs with Kepler architecture. Therefore the intended desktop 800 series GPUs were released as the NVIDIA GeForce 900 series instead.
Please note that some liberties have been taken in making these estimates:
- I have not taken into account power costs as power prices vary significantly depending on where you live.
- I have assumed that the GPU will be running 24/7
- I have not optimised CUDA vs OpenCL (could yield about a 10% increase, depending on the project)
- I have not considered FP64 performance, only FP32 (FP64 is relevant when running MilkyWay@Home)
- These estimates are for the current GRC price (USD$0.032), and ATH (USD$0.13 in June). You will have to adjust the income estimates based on markets rates at the time of reading.
If you are not sure what GPU you have in your machine, you can find out in less than a minute! Hit the start button, and type 'run'. Open the run dialogue box by pressing enter and type 'dxdiag' without the speech marks. If asked whether or not you would like to check if your drivers are digitally signed, select 'no'. In the window that opens up, navigate to the 'Display 1' tab to find your GPU. Note that on my computer shown below, I am running an ancient Quadro 600, which was not listed above and has pretty abysmal performance.
If you would like to get involved, you can get started by installing the research software BOINC and the Gridcoin Wallet.
Image credit, in order of appearance:
Banner, @joshoeah
Tables done by me based off my own mining data
Banner, @vortac
It's about damn time someone put something like this together = ).
To add to it:
Many BOINC projects run through CPUs only. This means that if you are a short term GPU miner and see better short term profits for your GPUs elsewhere, pointing your CPUs at some CPU specific BOINC projects and earning some GRC on the side is a distinct possibility.
Of course I'd advocate for pointing some GPUs at GRC as well because long term-- well let's just say the potential and dedication of Gridcoin and its community is clear.
A really good point @jringo! In fact, CPU mining yields roughly the same profits to GPU mining when comparing hardware from similar tiers and release years. If there is interest, I can repeat the process with CPU data.
Was putting it off because there is a lot more raw data to process for the CPUs.
@jringo actually beat me to it @dutch, I think there is a lot of competition in terms of crypto that can be GPU mined but hardly any where it's feasible to CPU mine. It would be great to show GPU miners they have an additional revenue stream they are missing out on.
Alright. I have started collating CPU data. =)
I think @scalextrix is right: target the CPUs of GPU miners. If you want a hand doing some grunt work data fetching let me know = )
I have just finished analysing my own data sets, and am open to accepting data from other crunchers. However, it is hard to verify data from other people to see if, for example, the machine was actually run 24/7.
seems like you're going to have to rely on the law of averages
Hello @dutch - could BOINK (I hope that I used the correct term) be used to search for a molecule that could activate telomerase and extend telomeres in human cells / organisms?
following you sir.
if I understand correctly, if you have a data set to test, yes! in the same fashion as WCG when they found a more efficient chemical set for solar panels:
https://www.greenoptimistic.com/boinc-solar-cell-design-system-20081210/
https://phys.org/news/2011-09-millions-molecules-screened-ideal-solar.html
It most definitely could, seeing as telomerase shape and function is relatively well understood. BOINC already processes molecular interactions on smaller scales, so I see no reason it cannot test for interactions with more complex compounds.
There are several exhaustive molecular interaction studies already being done.
let us know when you find the immortal molecular interaction pls
After following #gridcoin for awhile now, I am super excited to have become a token holder now. I bought some a few days back. #value! You are in inverse of your competition which has a huge market cap and no functionality. Gridcoin is all Steak and with a little Sizzle... the investors should show up soon.
Exactly! Golem has only one colossal advantage over us right now, which is that their marketing is spot on. That is about to change though, and Gridcoin rules the field in every other respect. We have a working product, that already allows compute to be purchased, and is built on a distributed research platform with 2 decades of development.
Brace yourself as GRC takes off for the moon in the next few months! =)
You deserve a resteem
Thank you! I appreciate that a lot. =)
Great job, thanks for all the calculations.
Currently on nicehash my gf970 is making $32 a month (undervolted) so it's quite on pair what we're seeing here. Would be cool to mine and accumulate some gridcoins in case of future price increase.
Anyway, following :)
That's really interesting, thanks for sharing! =)
I should probably add to the article that everything is running at stock, and could be overclocked and overvolted to increase raw yield.
Thanks for this - I have 3rigs each with 6 GX1060's which are currently mining Ethereum and I was about to point them at Zcash but I'll try with one rig on Gridcoin and compare results.
Great! It's probably worth pointing out that with Gridcoin, your daily mint grows over the course of the first month. Most people see their mint is low on day one and give up because they do not realise this.
To offset this, your daily mint will also tend back to zero over the course of about a month after you cease 'mining'. In other words, you will continue to be paid for weeks after you stop contributing.
thanks for that info
Dont forget you can profitably mine on your CPU too, just choose a project that does not use GPUs
Great post, just finished setting up Gridcoin and Boinc, just synced and starting to work on that Moo! Wrapper Project
Sheesh @dutch, how did I miss this post....
Hey guys! Just wanted to share this. You can Earn while you Trade or Hodl GRC at Btcpop.co!
If there are any lazy stakers out their Btcpop stakes deposits for you and gives you proportionate rewards
These kinds of posts are very helpful when considering builds and BOINC projects. Thanks for this.