Bitcoin mining is something of a mystery to most people and even to some tech savvy people, like myself, who never really gave it much thought. Now however, I can see the benefits of cryptocurrency and cryptomining. So here is my new post series about me, Stu from @TechMojo and my journey into cryptomining.

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Research.

Just like most other things I write about or want to know, I do a lot of research about what it is I want to accomplish.
I started by watching various videos about other peoples journey's into the mining craze. And to start with I was very overwhelmed with the amount of cryptocurrency available and the different types, Z-Cash, Monero, Dashcoin, Bitcoin gold... the list goes on and on.
I had to try and determine why each of the coins were being mined. To that end I started to read a lot of forum posts on github. It was at this point that I learned that some coins are more suitable to a certain type of GPU/ASIC, more accurately, the type of architecture used in said GPU's/ ASIC's
So with me being a huge advocate of AMD/ATI anyway since Athlon XP kicked Intel's ass, I decided to go with AMD if I ever decided to build my first mining rig.

Although coding is nothing new to me, after reading upon the subject, mining pools were the best option for a beginner like myself with only a single GPU in my system at the time. I was using nicehash, up until there security fiasco then I ported myself over and started to use minergate instead.
Being the fact that I only had 1 of 3 GPU's to choose from, an R9 270X, a GTX 750 Ti and a GTX 770. the R9 was a clear winner in how much hashing power it had over the other 2. Nvidia based mining only really gets good hashrates with their Pascal architecture, or so i have read.

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With minergate, I found you can adjust the ''aggressiveness'' of the GPU. So whenever my computer is on, and I'm working (like now writing this) my GPU is mining in the background on the lowest setting, but whenever I am away from the computer, it is at its highest level, thus earning more money. On average I was mining about £1.20 ish of Monero a day with the computer only being on for 12-14 hours a day. Then that was it. I left it doing its thing, and almost forgot about it. That was until last week when I checked the balance and saw there was over £130 worth of Monero in there. So over the last week I have been looking again hard into which AMD/ATI cards are best for this mining. I was going to buy a couple of RX 570's maybe 580's but I am a little strapped for cash and they are almost as rare as three breasted women.
Then I found out that older cards have equal, if not higher hashing power than new cards, but at a cost to electricity/power consumption. Not a problem for me. I am on a fixed tariff, so regardless of how little or how much I use, my bill remains the same each month.

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So which cards to buy?

It was a clear choice when buying older cards with a high hashrate.

• R9 280x / 380x
• R9 290 / 390
• R9 290x – 390x
• R9 295x
• HD 7950
• HD 7970
• HD 7990

All of these are proven to be powerful enough to produce good mining results, but the power consumption is very high, something we already established was not an issue for me. But where to buy them from was another challenge. Being that my bank account is all but empty after the holiday period, the only way I could pay for a card was with bitcoin that I had earned through the Steem Platform and mining over the past few months.

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Fortunately, there is one chain of stores here in the UK that deal with used items, will provide a 12 month warranty on all electricals and there is one of there stores in my local shopping centre.
CEX (Complete Entertainment Exchange) formally Computer eXchange is a nationwide company that does indeed accept bitcoin.
So looking at how much I have to spend, I wanted to get 2 HD 7970's, however, because of how bitcoin has been recently, the amount to spend when it came to actually buy (today) the total amount to spend had dropped, so I settled on an R9 290 at a mere £145. A bargain in my book.

The Wait.

Now its just a matter of waiting for the new/used R9 290 to arrive in the post on Wednesday next week.
Until then, I think I will burn out my current card further by overclocking the shiz out of it one last time before it dies altogether... gonna make it go out with a bang.

When the new Card arrives. I will report on its installation, hashing power and ultimately, how much it could mine.

Thanks for reading.

Don't Forget to Upvote, ReSteem and Follow for more content like this!

Stu @TechMojo

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