LiteCoin Mining in Singapore

With Bitcoin rapid ascent, it is now no longer feasible to mine Bitcoins with significant competition for ASIC based chipsets. Instead, home miners are switching to Litecoins instead. This goes similarly for the other scrypt coins such as bbqcoin too. Home-built crypto currency mining rigs are a great way to invest in the new digital currencies, while avoiding some of the risk involved in purchasing the coins outright.

However, looking at market fluctuations for the virtual currency is extremely important to ensure this remains profitable. As of last month (Jaunar 2014), a high end rig (4 GPU) is capable of mining at over 2,800Kh/s. It is estimated that such a system can generate over $600 USD worth of Litecoins per month or over $1k worth of Dogecoin, and will cost you between $2,000-$2,500 to build. Singapore electricity cost is at 25.65 cents per kWh, which translates to about S$150 per month for the rig below. Offsetting the monthly operational costs, time to recover investments is approximately 5 months.

How Does LiteCoin Mining Work

Individual miners will join a Litecoin Mining Pool. A pool is a place where many miners all work on the same “block” and the rewards are divided among those who helped mine the block, as soon as it’s confirmed. Your kh/s contribution will determine how much you are paid to your Litecoin wallet.

Mining Hardware Build List

Power Supply – $230 – EVGA 1300 Watt Gold Rated Power Supply

Motherboard – $140 – ASRock MB-970EX4 Socket AM3+/ AMD 970/ AMD

Graphics Card – Radeon 7950 is the top choice but virtually unavailable

Instead – $400 x 4 AMD Radeon R9 280x – This is one of the best graphics card for alt-currency mining (now that the Radeon 7950 is virtually unavailable). It is capable of over 750Kh/s per card, bringing your total rig power to 3,000 Kh/s. Stick with the Sapphire, Gigabyte, ASUS or MSI brands and avoid the HIS, Powercolor and XFX brands as they are known to have issues with mining. There are several other recommended mining cards listed here. Just remember to calculate the power requirements for whichever cards you decide to go with.

CPU – $40 – AMD Sempron 145 Processor

We’ve chosen the cheapest option here, since the CPU doesn’t affect mining efficiency.

RAM – $50 – 4 GB Corsair DDR3 RAM

1x to 16x Powered Riser Cables – $24 – PCI Express 1X to 16X Powered Riser Cables
These riser cables allow you to suspend the graphics cards above the motherboard for better airflow/cooling. We recommend powered riser cables which plug directly into the PSU to reduce the wattage required from the motherboard. The 1x male end of the cable plugs into either the 1x or 16x slot on the motherboard, and the 16x end of the cable is where the graphics card gets plugged in.

Hard Drive – $40 – Small Solid State Drive

Case – $6 – Personal Preference

Extra Cooling – Crucial, dependent on casing but important for mining which generates a lot of heat

Operating System – $0-$90 – Windows 8.1 – If you’re familiar with Linux you can of course download it for free (some folks consider Linux to be the best OS for litecoin mining, since it keeps your overall costs down, improving your litecoin mining ROI), but a Windows based PC is generally more useful. Installation can also be through a thumbdrive.

As evident from Bitcoin mining, there is no guaranteed return on mining rigs, so use your own judgement, do your due diligence, and decide if this is an investment you want to make. If nothing else, you will learn a LOT about computers in the process of building your rig. Maybe it will all go to zero and this will be a fancy gaming computer, or it would simply have been cheaper to just buy litecoins straight; but returns are only possible with risk. :)