What coin to mine to maximise volume of return I'm interested in mining some of the newer, more obscure coins. This is mainly for learning purposes.  I'm not too worried about profitability.  But I want to maximise the volume of coin that I can mine in the shortest period of time so that I actually have something to play with.

How can I find out what to mine that will give the shortest time to first payout in a mining pool? I have 1xR9280x.

For example. Looking at ethereum, all of the mining pools I can see don't payout until you have mined 1ETH which could take me months.
Have a look at https://eth.nanopool.org/

Their default payout is 0.2 ETH but you can configure your account to payout as low as as 0.05 ETH

I'm mining at 28 mh/s on an R9 290 and that takes me about 4 days before I see a payout.