Disclaimer: I researched this info and am also a beginner to mining and linux.
Summary: So it wont work at this point in time on contemporary mining software and the older mining software versions that might work don’t have profitable coin algos to mine.
Deep Dive: I got a 550ti 6gb and a 550ti 8gb believing all the mining software sites (Nicehash, Betterhash, Unmineable) saying “Hardware needed: 6gb or higher GPU, or a 8gb or higher GPU” to mine ETC or ETH. Well they left out very important points. In addition to the VRAM requirement there is the compute core requirement at least for NVIDA. In summary 550ti’s are compute 2.1 cards. No current versions of mining software as of right now (10/31/2021) supports compute 2.1 NVIDIA cards with a profitable algo like ETH.
Check out this site for a list of what compute versions are on some older NVIDA cards: Compute 2.1 - Crypto Mining Blog (cryptomining-blog.com). Don’t make the mistake of buying a VRAM upgraded older compute NVIDA card to mine with. Most miners support compute 5.0 and higher, and a few still support compute 3.0 at this point.
If anyone can add a profitable algo like ETH to an older version of a miner like a ccminer fork, you might be able to actually attain the seemingly impossible ETH 40mh/s on a 550ti 8gb card as reported by Betterhash here: Mining with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti - BetterHash Calculator, even though their current software doesn’t support the 550ti anymore and they admit accuracy is limited. Or if you can add compute 2.1 support to current mining software the same result may be able to be attained. Please reply to me if you can and/or do alter some mining software for this purpose. I would love to be able to mine with an older VRAM upgraded GPU if it could be profitable.
