Cyprus-Forum.com

[Sotos]

I recently got my Oculus Go which I ordered from Amazon a few days ago https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076CWS8C6/ (it comes to about €235 using the cheapest shipping method and including all taxes and comes to Cyprus with DHL in less than a week)

I've been waiting for a stand alone, relatively low cost VR headset for some years now. The only other VR experience I had was using Google's cardboard with a mid-range phone, and that wasn't a good experience. This one is amazing, especially for its price. Anybody else has this or another VR headset?

[erolz66]

cyprus42610.html?#p798469

I have the oculus DK2 from about 4 years ago.

[Sotos]

Yes, I remember your post... time flies! Is the DK2 fully compatible with the consumer version of the Rift that came later? Personally I didn't want to deal with all the wires... it just seems too cumbersome, especially for something that you need to turn / move around. Are you still using it?

[erolz66]

Yes, I remember your post... time flies! Is the DK2 fully compatible with the consumer version of the Rift that came later? Personally I didn't want to deal with all the wires... it just seems too cumbersome, especially for something that you need to turn / move around. Are you still using it?

It does not have any official support but I have yet to try something for the standard rift that did not work with it. It is not compatible with the oculus controllers and that does limit it to some degree as some apps / games require these. The wires are cumbersome. In all honesty I am not still using it. It is connected to my pc and on my desk but it has to be at least 6 months possibly much longer since I last had it strapped to my head. I used it most with the thing I first used it with - elite dangerous. It works well with this kind of game, sitting down in one place and the head movement thing does actually make dog fighting better, to be able to track targets by just looking around. It also give a much more immersive experience and a much greater sense of scale. Flying in to a space station on a monitor, you kind of know the space station is huge but it does not really feel huge. With the rift on you get a much greater sense of 'wow this is big'. Having said that it is not without it's problems and for me the biggest one was resolution. With your eyes that close to the screens and going through fresnal lenses I can and do see not just pixels , but essentially sub pixels that make up individual pixels. In general flying around game play, this is not that big a deal, but when reading dials and lots of small text, which you need to do in elite - all the trading screens and stuff, it is just not pleasant. And the comfort aspect had limits for me as well. Back when elite dangerous was new, I could play sessions of multiple hours, even up to 6 or 8 hours at a time. However I do not think I ever managed more than about 40 mins with the rift strapped to my head. They probably got a lot better with later models, and the go - but pressure on bridge of my nose and general heat / sweating limited it use for me for 'long sessions'. Even without the rift I am not playing much elite these days or any games really. I am doing some small time hobby crypto mining on my machine and even though its effectively tiny amounts of money it is inhibiting my game playing generally to some degree, as any time I stop my mining sw it feels like I am 'loosing money'. I might go for a new VR set up in future but it would have to be significantly higher res , around 4k per eye for me or some tech that gave the equivalent for that, before I would spend more money on VR. That and some kind of low latency wireless set up (or dedicated like the go) would be features that might prompt me to spend money on VR again.

[Sotos]

The Go actually has higher resolution and better lenses than the Rift and the Vive, so you can't see any pixels, but there is a bit of chromatic aberration if you turn your eyes (instead of your head) to look at the edges of your view. In the center the image is very good though, I can easily read text on its build in web browser. Of course the games that exist for the Go are like mobile games, so not PC level of detail and it has just 3 degrees of freedom instead of 6. But I don't care about those limitations as I am not a gamer. Watching 360 and 3D video is really nice... a few months ago I bought a 360 camera, but only now that I loaded the photos on the Go I can truly appreciate them. There is a new Chinese headset with 4k per eye and 200 degrees FOV. I wouldn't buy that one, but when something close to that comes from Oculus or Vive in a stand alone version I will certainly go for it.

How much money are you making from mining? You have your PC working constantly? Are you still with the GTX970? I upgraded mine to a 1060 6GB recently, so I wonder if it would worth it to use it for mining or I will end up paying more for the electricity consumption!

[erolz66]

How much money are you making from mining? You have your PC working constantly? Are you still with the GTX970? I upgraded mine to a 1060 6GB recently, so I wonder if it would worth it to use it for mining or I will end up paying more for the electricity consumption!

I was pretty much running my machine 24/7 before I started mining. I did start with the 970 originally but currently have two 1070's in my machine here. How much you make is 'volatile' as the rate of whatever coin you are mining moves against fiat currencies like euros or USD. Right now my 2 1070's , mining with nicehash (this is a mining market places - people buy hashing power , using bitcoin, and the mining sw my end switches automatically to whatever hashing algorithm is paying best price based on what people have bid, and then pays out to miners like me also in bitcoin) at current bitcoin / euro prices is making around 2.5 euros per day ish. Electricity usage just for the 2 1070's running at full load is around 150 watts per card (I have them mem overclocked but under powered), making a daily usage of around 7.2 KW/h. At an electricity cost of say 12 euro cents per KW/h this is around 0.86 euros per day in additional electricity cost because of the mining (if you did not already run the machine 24/7 then would need to add that usage in as well). So rounding everything up two 1070's are making a net profit of around 1.5 to 2 euros per day. Back when crypto prices were going crazy (mid dec 2017) was making more. I think you would make some small net profit even with your 1060 - its a pretty power efficient card but yeah if you add in the extra electricity usage (and wear and tear on machine) of the ruining the machine itself 24/7 (prob around 150-200 watts) then you may be borderline on profit. I not really running mining on my home machine for profit, its more a case of I had the hardware anyway, my machine was running 24/7 or near enough anyway so why not make a few pennies with it. I did buy some crypto mid 2017, so already had wallets and all that kind of stuff set up. The mining at home was just a 'why not' kind of thing after having done that.

[Sotos]

Thanks for the detailed answer. If you are making about €50 per month profit with 2 1070s then I would probably make at most €15 with my 1060, so it isn't worth the trouble. The only use case I guess would be if I wanted to acquire some bitcoin in a completely anonymous way without this being shown on any bank statement. Does the video card work at 100% load when mining? Is there an option where I could set it up to run only when my PC is idle and without going to 100% (not sure my case has the best cooling and I wouldn't want to risk anything)

[erolz66]

Thanks for the detailed answer. If you are making about €50 per month profit with 2 1070s then I would probably make at most €15 with my 1060, so it isn't worth the trouble. The only use case I guess would be if I wanted to acquire some bitcoin in a completely anonymous way without this being shown on any bank statement. Does the video card work at 100% load when mining? Is there an option where I could set it up to run only when my PC is idle and without going to 100% (not sure my case has the best cooling and I wouldn't want to risk anything)

The mining software nicehash miner legacy, which is what I use does have an option to start and stop mining based on if the computer is idle or not. I should say however nicehash did get hacked last year. However they survived the hack and are paying back what was lost slowly over time. Basically you have to reach a threshold before they actually send what you have earnt to your wallet. With my 2 1070's this means I reach this threshold and get paid weekly so when they got hacked I lost the days earning for that week - I think it was around 4-5 days into such a cycle when the hack occurred (those buying hashing power from nicehash potentially lost much more). Nicehash sw itself uses a whole load of different third party mining sw for the different algorithms and some of these do cause 'false positives' on virus checkers, so that is another thing that might put you off and you should know about. You can limit nicehash to only mine certain algorithms but you limit your earning potential if you disable an algorithm that the buyers of hashing power are paying most for. As far as protecting the GPU you can do this with something like 'Asus GPU tweak II' (for nvidia cards). With this you can not set a limit for gpu usage to say 70% but you can set thermal limit and power limit. So you can say do not allow the GPU to go over 65 degrees (I limit mine to 75) and can also set the power % to say 75 %. I did a lot of 'testing' with the various settings (bit like overclocking cpus) to get best balance of mining rate vs electricity usage vs thermal limiting.

[Sotos]

Thanks. Are you using nicehash just because it gives more earnings, or is it also easier to use versus mining specific currency? And why are you using the "legacy" version instead of the new one?

[erolz66]

Thanks. Are you using nicehash just because it gives more earnings, or is it also easier to use versus mining specific currency? And why are you using the "legacy" version instead of the new one?

The main advantage of nicehash is that it pays in bitcoin. You can not mine bitcoin directly in any effective way using gpu's - asic based miner's now dominate that particular algorithm. It can be more profitable but the whole thing is very volatile. When yuou mine a given coin directly then the volatility is related to that coins price vs fiat currencies. With nicehash it's defined by the market for buying hashing power, which obviously relates to the fiat prices of various currencies but it is not direct. I have mined ether directly and zcash directly. My feeling is there is noi a huge difference between direct mining and selling your mining power via nicehash. Nicehash take a charge but their software does switch you to whichever coin is paying the best return (in bitcoin as that is what the buyers pay in). If you get a huge swing in a given coin, like zcash then mining that directly would be more profitable. If you sell what you mine or the price gain remains. There is not definitive 'this way makes more profit' really. The nicehash legacy sw id badly name really. I would call it more aimed at people who want more control. The standard software is easier to use but has less configuration options. Al lot of places say use the standard with nvidia and legacy with amd but this is pretty much historic. Both work with both. Legacy give more control but can be more complicated to set up.