GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Mining Performance

One of the best graphics cards around right now, in terms of gaming performance as well as mining performance, is Nvidia's GTX 1070 8GB. There are many reasons why this is a great card, the most important factors being:

1. Availability -- you can find GTX 1070 cards all over the place
2. Price -- the latest price cuts bring the 1070 down to less than $350
3. Power -- the 1070 needs a single 8-pin power connector at most
4. Temperatures -- the 1070 runs relatively cool and quiet

If you're in the market for a bunch of GPUs to use for mining, right now I'd give serious consideration to the 1070, specifically EVGA's GTX 170 SC, which is one of the least expensive models right now and still comes with a decent factory overclock. I've got several of these cards, and while they're not the fastest option, they're some of the best overall rate of return. Here are the stats for one of the factory overclocked cards:

Currently, the GTX 1070 is averaging $3.00-$3.50 per day, with a power draw of 150W -- yes, about the same power requirements as an RX 470/480 or RX 570/580. It costs more, but it also earns more, with a power cost of around $0.35 per day.

With a current price of $344 on the EVGA SC model, that works out to 109-130 days to hit ROI on each card. Even better, due to power requirements you could actually hook up six of these to a single system, provided the motherboard supports such a setup. Which of course you can certainly find. As I did with the GTX 1080 Ti recently, let's look at the complete PC ROI numbers.

Here's the quick math:
Basic PC setup: $870 (no case -- use a wire shelf)
Ryzen 5 1600: $230 (I like the 6-core/12-thread models, for when you're doing other stuff)
Asus Prime-X370 Pro motherboard: $150
16GB DDR4-2667: $97
240GB SSD: $63 (boot faster, install updates faster)
1200W Titanium PSU: $280 (efficiency is really important!)
PCIe riser adapters: $50 (don't use the SATA to Molex power adapter, though!)
Six GTX 1070 cards: starting at $344 each = $2,064
Total = $2,934, income of $18 per day = 163 days to ROI

If you want to cut costs, you could probably go with 8GB RAM and a cheaper CPU, but I wouldn't go too low -- at some point, you might want to do something else with the PC, and having a better processor is really nice. But if you want to go with a Pentium G4560 and a Z270 motherboard, that will save about $170. If you do that, you could hit ROI potentially in 155 days.

Either way, that's a bit faster than building a GTX 1080 Ti mining rig. Another thing I like about going the Nvidia route instead of AMD is that there tends to be more flexibility on algorithms when you're mining via NiceHash. Most of my AMD rigs don't seem to like certain algorithms, and outside of DaggerHashimoto, they're outperformed by Nvidia equivalents. If Ethereum weren't so big, AMD mining would be far less useful.