In this article I want to share my experience on mining monero, ethereum and zcash with Nvidia GPUS. Particularly the GTX 970 and GTX 1070.
All three coins offer GPU friendly mining, they are great projects, they are consistently listed in the top 20 coins, and essentially they are all great coins to buy, hold and mine. And most importantly, at the current time perhaps they are the only coins that you can mine with your GPU and earn a not negligible amount of money.
The profitability comparison of this article is based on the prices and network difficulties as they stand for 23/9/2017 12:00 CET time.
Please note that the most profitable coin can change from time to time depending on the current prices and network difficulty. I will update you with new articles if anything ground breaking in terms of profitability happens.
One thing though, that does not change with time, is the energy efficiency of the mining algorithm and we will delve into that matter as well.
So without further due let's go into the experimental setup details and the comparison.
I used the below graphics cards
Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 970 clocked at 1490MHz core clock, and 3800MHz memory clock.
EVGA GTX 1070 FTW ACX 3.0 Gaming clocked at 2012MHz core clock, and 8600MHz memory clock
For mining software I used
Monero: ccminer-x64 version 2.2
Ethereum: ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.6-pre
zchash: Zec miner 0.3.4b\0.3.4b (ewbf-miner)
In my experience the above miners give the best performance
GPU power, temperature and fan speed was obtained from GPU-Z.
For the profitability comparison I used the online profitability calculator https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator which is up to date with the latest prices and network difficulties.
For cost per KW/h I used 0.12$ which is the average price in US for electricity.
Let's move in to the comparison.
An overview of the comparison is shown in the tables below
If you still reading, let's make some graphs out of the above table, let's analyze the results and then go through the conclusions one by one.
FIRST CONCLUSION: Currently Zcash is the most profitable coin to mine
As depicted in the below graph Zcash is currently the most profitable in terms of dollars per month both for gtx970 and gtx1070. Also, GTX1070 as newer and faster card is more profitable for all coins compared to GTX970.
SECOND CONCLUSION: Monero mining algorithm requires less power and keeps graphics cards cooler
The below graphs show that Monero mining is better in terms of GPU power consumption and GPU temperature. This essentially means that monero mining algorithm puts less stress on the GPUs which essentially reduces the GPU wear out effects and increases your GPU life. Also, this makes monero a great choice for mining in places where electricity cost is very high. So definetely monero is the $/watt king.
THIRD CONCLUSION: MONERO MINING IS THE MOST SILENT
I wish I could share with you dbms of sound noise but unfortunately I have only fan speed numbers in %. Speed fan though, is a good indication of noise. Higher speed result in more noise and less fan speed translates to lower noise levels. I can assure you from my personal experience that monero mining on a rig that has two gpus and one CPU working at 100% utilization is quite silent and bearable. You can actually sleep while your rig is mining on the same room. I cannot say that this is the case with zcash and ethereum mining, in my experience the rig is quite loud while mining zcash and ethereum making it not possible to sleep. Perhaps a fractal design case (or in general any PC case that aims towards ultimate silence) can save you, but this is another story to discuss. In general if you want to mine while at the same time doing other work on your rig without being distracted by the noise, I think monero is the coin to go with.
SUMMARY:
To summarize, despite zcash being currently the most profitable coin to mine, I feel that monero is the unexpected winner of this comparison. Monero mining is CPU and GPU friendly. This means that the algorithm is not designed to make the most out of your graphics card compute power. But this is not bad because this essentially translates to lower noise level, lower stress in the GPU, lower temperatures and lower power consumption. As long as monero value is high enough, there is nothing wrong in choosing monero instead of ethereum or zcash mining. Actually monero a few weeks ago, when it was hitting is all time highs at above 100$ prices, was definitely the most profitable coin to mine. With the current prices and network difficulties monero just need a 30% price boost to become again the most profitable coin to mine. This translates to a value of about 120$ which is not unlikely happen. Actually, in my opinion monero is currently undervalued. Monero is the leader in privacy coins and we will definitely see it in the future in much higher prices. Also, as I said before even at these prices and at a relatively low power cost of 0.12kw/h, if you are someone like me who sleeps in the same room with the mining rig, and uses a lot his mining rig for work; then monero is still a viable candidate because of the significant lower noise levels compared to ethereum and zcash mining.
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