Good news and bad news, I am still mining and making about a buck a day but the cheapo machine died. The 1050ti is fine but I believe the psu is dead. Now the psu was a 10 year old stock HP power supply. I know when mining you are suppose to use powerful GPU's and PSU's, well this is is purpose of the experiment: to see what works and what doesn't. Now the give the old PSU it's due it was working ok until I decided to add another cheapo GPU in the mix (GT 1030). I do believe that was more than the old thing could handle.
Up until yesterday evening it was doing just fine.
Two days in and it was doing just fine and hashing out like a little champion. In the bottom right corner of the screenshots you can see the date and time.
Four days in and it is still hashing away and making me about a dollar a day even with all the flux in the crypto market.
Five days in and Bitcoin hits 6k and it is still working away.
Seven days in and the little machine that could is earning about .0001 Bitcoin aday. Then I decide to mess things up. I get a cheap Ebay refurbished GT 1030 in the mail and instead of testing the card to make sure it is fine I rush out to the garage and install the 1030. Of course that means turning off a very old, something that always scares me, and plugging in the 1030. It doesn't work and I am now experiencing power issues with the machine. I take the GTX 1050ti out of it and bring it in the house and it WORKS. I tried to install the 1030 and it doesn't :( . I pull the 1050ti out and try to just run the 1030 and it is dead also. Now I have a dead PSU and a DOA GPU. I did get it from EBay so I am sure I will be able to get my money back for the 1030 as for the PSU I will have to get another one and see if the machine can be salvaged. I am still mining with the 1050ti in an Intel G4560 machine in my office.
As some of you might notice between day 6 and day 7 I earned 0.0002 Bitbcoin which is double what I had been earning. There is two reasons. One reason is the GTX 1050ti is performing better in the G4560 machine than it was in the E4300 machine. The other reason is that I decided to supplement the lost earning with my gaming computer and it did it very well.
There are a few things I have discovered so far. One is confusing. According all the talking heads about ambient temperatures and heat from CPU's and GPU's. While the 1050ti was out in the garage it was running around 40 degrees C and the fan was still running around 25 percent. The ambient temperature was well below 0 degrees C. I brought the card inside the house that is kept at a comfortable 72F somewhere around 21C yet the card was only getting to around 56C at the same fan speed. The numbers don't add up. The other is that the GPU and PSU do some how effect the ability of the GPU. I know the PSU is obviously a factor but I do believe that the CPU was a factor also since the Power Supply was doing fine until I decided to increase the load on it.
I will continue to mine with the 1050ti and keep you updated on the progress and I will at some point put a better power supply in the cheapo machine and try to get it running again. Once I do I will put the 1050ti back in it and see if the CPU plays any factor.