Important note: this is not current information. Bitcoin and Litecoin mining have both changed a lot in the last few months, and this post is from April.
I spent some time looking into mining about three weeks ago - with the proviso that my hardware would be free, since I run a 3D animation company that's in the process of transitioning to GPU-based rendering - and came to the conclusion that right now, it still ain't worth it.
Was your conclusion that the power costs would outweigh the value of the mined bitcoins, or that the value would be marginal enough that it's not worth the bother?
A combination of the two. Power costs plus wear-and-tear on mission-critical components weren't outweighed by the tiny amounts of money we'd make.
To be fair, there's a bit of a conflict between the best rendering hardware - Nvidia, because of CUDA - and the best mining hardware - ATI. Obviously, I'd have been mining on NVidia. However, the numbers didn't even make much sense using ATI.
Bitcoin mining has been screwed because of the dedicated hardware, which has meant a flood of miners into Litecoin - which has proceeded to screw the Litecoin ecosystem too.
I shall keep an eye on the situation - I suspect there will be pockets of opportunity in the future. But right now, not so much.
Curiously, CERN made the same decision and came out the other way. For quite a time they mined Bitcoin using the spare CPU cycles of their data processing farms.
Comments
Important note: this is not current information. Bitcoin and Litecoin mining have both changed a lot in the last few months, and this post is from April.
I spent some time looking into mining about three weeks ago - with the proviso that my hardware would be free, since I run a 3D animation company that's in the process of transitioning to GPU-based rendering - and came to the conclusion that right now, it still ain't worth it.
Was your conclusion that the power costs would outweigh the value of the mined bitcoins, or that the value would be marginal enough that it's not worth the bother?
A combination of the two. Power costs plus wear-and-tear on mission-critical components weren't outweighed by the tiny amounts of money we'd make.
To be fair, there's a bit of a conflict between the best rendering hardware - Nvidia, because of CUDA - and the best mining hardware - ATI. Obviously, I'd have been mining on NVidia. However, the numbers didn't even make much sense using ATI.
Bitcoin mining has been screwed because of the dedicated hardware, which has meant a flood of miners into Litecoin - which has proceeded to screw the Litecoin ecosystem too.
I shall keep an eye on the situation - I suspect there will be pockets of opportunity in the future. But right now, not so much.
Curiously, CERN made the same decision and came out the other way. For quite a time they mined Bitcoin using the spare CPU cycles of their data processing farms.