Lots of power = lots of electricity
The AMD Radeon RX 470 consumes up to 120 watts under load; for six such boards and an LGA1151 motherboard with, for example, a Celeron G3930, the figure is around 800 watts. At 85% ATX PSU efficiency, power consumption at the socket is around 940 watts; with 24 hours of operation, that’s 22.6 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day. If you pay 29 cents per kWh, the miner has to deliver cryptocurrencies worth more than 6.60 euros a day to get out of the loss zone – but that’s still without counting hardware costs.
If, for example, you spend 2100 euros on components and they are competitive for two full years, you need to add around 2.90 euros per day for hardware depreciation. So, for a mini-grid to be profitable, it would have to run smoothly around the clock for two years and generate cryptocurrencies worth just under 10 euros a day, at a constant electricity price of 29 ct/kWh.
Given rapidly fluctuating prices, cryptocurrency mining remains a risky investment: in the example above, you spend 2100 euros on hardware and a further 2400 euros a year on electricity costs. If the price of cryptocurrencies falls radically, the miner’s operation suddenly becomes unprofitable. High prices for crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Zcash make energy-intensive mining with graphics cards profitable again – a business that also concerns motherboard and accessory manufacturers.
Mining is the process of “calculating” cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Zcash: instead of buying these currencies by exchanging euros, you use your own computer to “mine” new coins. To achieve returns within a useful timeframe, you need very powerful hardware that consumes a lot of power under load: there’s a lot of talk in the forums about mining platforms that are particularly profitable.
Manufacturers of graphics cards, desktop motherboards, hardware accessories and cases are happy to respond to the mining trend. Essentially, special components aim to integrate as many graphics cards as possible. Cards featuring the AMD Radeon RX 470 GPU, for example, are particularly popular. According to NiceHash.com, the DiggerHashimoto mining algorithm achieves around 25 megahashes per second (MH/s). The popularity of this GPU has led to a shortage of miners. Cards equipped with AMD Radeon RX 470 or AMD Radeon RX 570 are out of stock.
In bitcoin mining, however, special chips (ASICs) have been providing much higher hash rates for years, now reaching the terahash range.
Special motherboards
For some time now, companies such as Asrock and Biostar have been supplying special motherboards for mining, such as the ASRock H81 Pro BTC R2.0, with low-cost chipsets and as many PCI Express slots as possible. The latter are used to connect graphics cards, which are not plugged directly into the motherboard: there is no standard ATX case capable of accommodating more than four or five PCIe graphics cards occupying two slots, including the cooler. These dual-slot graphics cards need more space.
