Litecoin mining has been quite profitable for anyone lucky enough to be mining Litecoin recently. In this article, we will look at what is currently the best Litecoin mining hardware ASIC.
Best Litecoin Mining Hardware ASIC
Unlike Ethereum, which you can mine on a DIY mining rig, Litecoin is mined using custom computer hardware specifically designed to mine Litecoin as well as other cryptocurrencies that use the scrypt hashing algorithm.
Currently, the best Litecoin mining hardware ASIC is the Antminer L3+. It is designed and built by a trusted Bitcoin hardware manufacturer called Bitmain and is the fastest Litecoin miner on the market. The unit mines at 504Mh/s while consuming a moderate 800W of power or about 1.6 watts per mega hash. As of the date this article was published, the Antminer L3+ can mine roughly $20/day of Litecoin cryptocurrency.
You can purchase the Antminer L3+ on Amazon or eBay.
If you decide to purchase one or more of these units, you will need a power supply to provide power to the unit. I recommend the reasonably priced AntMiner APW3++ power supply. Pointing a box fan at the Litecoin miner for supplemental cooling is always a good idea as well. ASIC miners are also fairly loud (similar to a vacuum cleaner noise) and produces a fair amount of heat as a byproduct of mining. Keep this in mind when you consider where to place your Litecoin miner in your home or office. For an idea of just how loud the Antminer L3+ is, check out the video below. Just be sure to turn your headphones or speakers down before clicking ‘play’.
Litecoin Mining Profitability
How much will the Antminer L3+ produce in Litecoin? You can use this Litecoin mining calculator, to check the current profitability. The current time to ROI as of the date this article was written, is a little over 100 days. When calculating the profitability of Litecoin mining, be sure to enter the correct value for your electricity costs. The average cost of electricity where I live in the US is about $0.10 per Kwh.
Storing and Selling Your Litecoin Mining Profits
For selling your Litecoin into local fiat currency, I personally use and recommend GDAX/Coinbase. I would also recommend keeping your investment portfolio Litecoins safe using the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet. This hardware wallet supports all the major cryptos including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Zcash, Dash, Stratis, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Ark, Expanse, ubiq, Pivx, Vertcoin and Viacoin.
Happy Mining!
Sidenote: If mining isn’t your thing, and you are just interested in purchasing some cryptocurrency as part of your investment portfolio, I personally use and recommend FTX Global Crypto Exchange (Use FTX US if a US resident)
Great Article!
i know this sound stupid… but would I be able to mine Dogecoins with this rig – its scrypt based from what I hear.
Is this possible?
Thanks!
Absolutely! To the moon, my fellow shibe! 🙂
Would an Asrock 970 Extreme3 motherboard work instead of an Extreme4? (Extreme4 is hard to find right now) If not do you have any other motherboard recommendations for this rig?
Yes, the Asrock 970 Extreme3 motherboard has two 1x PCI-E slots and two 16x PCI-E slots, so it would work equally well.
Would the asrock 970 extreme 3 r2 work ok or does it need to be the one your link points to, which I believe is r3? And thank you for making a great site.
Yes, the ASROCK Extreme3 r2 has two 1x and two 16x PCI-E slots, so it would work as well. It’s just an older revision of the same board.
Also, how can you figure out total power usage (for the calculator, to see what my profit might be) for different components will be?
What if you have a few desktop computers sitting around the house, can you just use those instead of building a rig? Are they just not very efficient, or is there more to it?
(would depend on cards and memory I know, but would cost nothing to get started)
– and thank you for all the great information!
This would only really be worth it for GPU mining if the desktop computers had fairly recent gaming-level AMD graphics cards in them.
I see that most of the graphics cards now on Amazon are either sold out or are ridiculously expensive. Can you recommend anything now very similar that might be in your original price range?
Unfortunately, it is a difficult time to build a rig due to all the cards being either out of stock or being sold by third party sellers for ridiculous prices. From what I’ve heard, the manufacturers still have stock. They just can’t get it to the retailers fast enough to keep up with demand. Some of the vendors have the option to ‘notify me when this item is back in stock’. That’s probably the best option at this point. Demand is higher than it has ever been it seems.
With cgminer no longer available, what program should I use? I want to build a budget rig with 7870 cards, but no longer can find a good miner to use, that is highly recommended. I also saw that you hve to download the litecoin sequence before you can start, but only saw this mentioned a few times. I’ve read several beginners guides and they all go with different ways of doing it, I’m just wondering of there is one way and they are using different steps or leaving some out. I don’t want to get this rig built and be lost in the dark because I tried to start the wrong way, is there a sure fire beginners guide you can reference?
Cgminer is still very available, my friend. You just have to download an older version of it that still supports scrypt based mining. Here’s a link to the last version that supports scrypt: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/3.7/
Hi,
If you were looking to only get one graphics card now as you don’t have the money and need to wait till after Christmas to buy the second would this be wise as it might not be efficient? Also, if you want to use your PC for other things (i.e. it will mine litecoin when your not using it) there is no problem with using a better CPU is there? And can you CPU mine namecoin or Peercoin while GPU mining litecoin to maximize crypto turnover?
Difficulty may go up, but I always say don’t invest what you don’t have (leveraged investing) and don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose. So, you should be fine building a rig with 1 GPU now and adding more down the road. A better CPU will work just fine. Most people build a rig specifically for mining which is why I listed the cheapest CPU that will work. And yes, you can use the CPU for mining another currency at the same time.
What would you recommend mining with a CPU. I have looked up a lot of the info and can’t find any coin that is recommend as still people possible to CPU because the difficulty on BTC PP NMC et al. have gone up so much.
Can I lite coin mining rig mine bit coins as we’ll am to this and trying to figure it out
GPU mining rigs were once useful for Bitcoin mining, but due to the introduction of Bitcoin ASICs (which incidentally can’t mine Litecoins), these rigs are profitable for Litecoin mining and any other Scrypt based currency at this time.
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Hello,
Now the new Asrock mother was ASROCK Motherboard Socket AM3 / AM3+ [990FX Extreme4], is this better from Asrock 970 board ?
Starting difficult to find 970 now.
cheers,
The newer one works just as well, especially since the older board is becoming harder to find.
I just built a budget mining rig. From what I can tell, after monitoring the power consumption, if I’m not pushing the cards past 500M/Hash each, the power supply draws no more than about 500 watts for the whole rig running two cards. I built my rig as per the budget guide above, using the Corsair 850Watt, but I too wonder if the lower priced Corsair 750Watt would not have been a more budget minded PSU choice. With the proper cgminer settings you can get exactly 1 G/Hash from two Radeon Saphire 7950 Cards without using more than about 500 watts from the power supply.
Below is my configuration
————————————–
install Xubuntu 12.04
install Catalyst Drivers Beta 13.6 64 bit from here: AMD driver download site
sudo apt-get install curl
install cgminer 3.2.1 from here: cgminer download site
Budget minded parameters to keep the GPU’s running cool, quiet and low powered:
export DISPLAY=:0
./cgminer -o -u -p –intensity 10 –gpu-powertoune 0 –auto-fan –gpu-engine 1100 –gpu-memclock 1000
gpu-powertune 0 is a key setting. This tells the gpu to increase power 0% under load. If you increase it you will notice your megahash per card will increase but so will heat, fan speed, and power draw.
I know it’s never right to skimp on the PSU but would the Corsair CX750M 750 Watt be enough to power two Gigabyte 7950’s? The reason I’m asking is the significant price difference. I can get a brand new CX750M for $79.99, compared to the TX850M currently on Amazon for $125.
If you undervolt the GPU’s, then the 750 watt should work no problem. Generally I like to keep PSU’s below 90% of their watt rating to avoid overheating the PSU and reducing its efficiency.
Whats the expected hash rate on this rig?
Roughly 1200 Mh/s or 1.2 Gigahashes, though the 7950 cards can be pushed even higher to 650+ each with proper spacing/cooling and overclocking.
Can you post a youtube video of the assembly process?
It’s only an overview, but I posted a short 3 minute video of the assembly process here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwKar38-6LE
With your upgrade option, why would you recommend 2 power supply units for this mining rig instead of getting one power supply initially with high enough wattage for more graphics cards to be added on in the future?
Great question Pete! Getting a 1250 watt power supply like this one, with the goal of ‘upgrading’ to additional graphics cards in the future would work. I recommend the 2 power supply approach simply because the combined cost is about the same, and this keeps the total cost of the rig initially under $1k for folks who don’t want to spend more than that right now, or have no plans to upgrade in the future.