The rig consists of not much more than a motherboard/cpu/ram combo, an old ATI Radeon 5850 video card, and an ancient network card. There's no hard drive, the Linux based operating system runs on a bootable USB thumb drive. Notice the motherboard has several PCI-e slots... this is so I can (hopefully) run more than one GPU in the future.
The miner is slow and ugly but chugs along just fine mining altcoins for me... just my type of beast.
I know the 5850 video card is old and there are way better options for mining but with all the new algorithms out there and improvements in mining software, I was curious to see just how much money an old single GPU miner could make.
As it turns out, mining X11 coins at NiceHash.com or a few profit switching pools I tried, this setup only makes about 1.5 cents per day. Yuck!
Keep in mind, that's when mining X11 altcoins. I'm going to play around with mining some other algorithms to see what sort of profits (if any) can be had. This video card came from a time when GPU mining scrypt coins was still profitable and before the scrypt ASICs entered the scene. So nowadays it'd be completely worthless trying to mine scrypt coins unless I happen upon one that somehow magically explodes in price (to da moon!).
But I don't want to rely on luck...
For now I'll start messing with other algorithms to see if there are coins out there that can be mined profitably on shoddy old computer hardware. mining X13 coins seems to make slightly less than X11 coins, so I'll start messing with some newer and/or more obscure algos.
Bookmark and check back often and I'll update the site with my findings.
Keep on & have fun!
