Building my first mining RIG

Hi friends, It's been a little while hasn't it? As some of you may know, I'm a professional wedding photographer, and this is pretty much peak wedding season. I had to step away from my duties as a witness for now (I will further elobrate on this in a future post) because of coding and support. Building computers I understand, but coding them, I am not as knowledgeable when it comes to that. I've decided to head in a direction I have some "know how" in.

To start off I followed some basic rig setups I found online and on youtube. I laid out all the parts I needed to get started.

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This is pretty much all you need to get a RIG up and running minus the GPU. I ended up switching out the Motherboard to the ASUS Z270 so I can max out the amount of GPUs I can have on one MOBO. (*Remember to always do a hardware compatibility listing before you order the rest of the parts around your MOBO.)

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GPUs - 2/1080s and 6/1070s (2 short version 1070s) I was able to find all the 1070s from another miner that sold them as a bundle for a discount. The 2 short 1070s turn out to be a little faulty. 1 of them doesn't turn on at all or send any sort of signal. The other under performs and causes a lot of rejected shares. A refund for both is in the process and I hope to replace them with little downtime.

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My initial goal was to mine BCN since it's under a penny and wait for appreciation. Then I jumped on to Ubiq which is on the ETH algorithm to find out that 1080s are not so good on that algorithm because of the GDDR5X. The 1080 TI also has the GDDR5X but does not have an issue like the standard 1080s. After setup I saw that the 1070s out performed the 1080s. That's when I had to find a new coin where my 1080s could shine. I know I have more 1070s so why would I want to load my 1080s more!? Well after doing some numbers I found that the spread from the 1070s to 1080s using a 1080 base mining algo produces more with a little above 1080s on a 1070s also performance.

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I wanted to show you the SSD because for a while my MOBO wouldn't send any signal to the screen and I thought it was an SSD issue after some long extensive trouble shooting. I ended finding that SSD completely compatible with my MOBO. You may not need an SSD if you're doing a headless RIG which this one is. I just wanted window access to setup MINERGATE for BCN.

WE NEED MORE POWER!!!
I wanted to start with a 6 RIG but ended up being able to build an 8 RIG mining machine. So afte8r doing some power research I wanted to double up my 1000w. I have 1 powering just the GPUs (6 of them and the MOBO) and the other powering all the risers and the rest of the GPUs. I didn't want any of them to have less power because of shared connection. This way I get maximum performance out of each.

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This frame was designed for a 6 GPU arrangement. I tried to do a 7 and found out it was too tight and I would receive heat issues over a short period of time. I decided to put the two smaller 1070s on the outside (*didn't know they were both defective at this time.)

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When I first tried to boot the machine I wouldn't get any signal on the monitor. After trying everything I could I reached my friend @crypto2day to troubleshoot. I tried ordering a new CPU, new ram, even a new MOBO just to see if it was a defective MOBO. After a deep research, I found that everything I had worked with my MOBO. It would power on with no red lights giving my any errors, I even tried multiple HDMI cords and different monitors.

After some more research, I found that I was only plugging in the 24 pin from the PSU to the MOBO and I didn't plug the 8 pin to the CPU! 24-8 pin rule! I felt like an idiot for awhile... lol.

*RETURN PILE! (Don't be like me and make sure you know what you're doing first.)

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Now that we got everything hooked up and turned on it's time to test some numbers and performances. I use a headless mining system that I have found on SIMPLEMINING.NET. It's pretty simple and easy to use. You can see all the readings remotely and you have tons of options like rebooting, restarting the rig, and overclocking. I've found that overclocking in LUNIX is much easier than it is in Windows 10 since Windows 10 will just lock up or crash/freeze. In LUNIX it will just lock up and quickly reboot. (DO YOU LIKE MY POSTER?!)

BCN, ETH, and Ubiq weren't coins that would maximize my mining on this rig. I did find that the Zcash's algo was perfect and the coin "ZEN" would be the best producer for me rig after some research and testing. I go the miner installed from SIMPLEMING.NET and started using a ZEN pool from Supernova. They had a walk through instructions on my getting started. I just had to select a miner that was best suited for Nvidia and CUDDA. I was up and running in an hour!

I did some overclocking and found some heat issues in the center. This rig was built for 6 cards and I have 8 cards mounted with an extra PSU. So I addressed this issue with some silent fans to blow through the center. My office got extremely hot so my girlfriend suggested the dining room area for the RIG. The only thing is our bed is right by the dining room so I knew it was going to be a challenge for noise.

We placed the rig in front of the fireplace so hopefully, those two fans would push the hot air back into the open chimney. On the first night it was terrible it was so loud and we could hardly sleep or wouldn't ever fall into a deep sleep. So the next day I had to do some configuring.

The noise came from overclocking which caused the GPUs to run hot so it's fans kicked on to 100% which sounds like revving of a high-speed turbine. The overclocking issue would also make the RIG run unstable. I was getting a lot of rejected shares from the under performing short 1070 and other cards were starting to show rejections after 500+ shares. The noise was not conducive for sleeping since it was so close to us so after doing some adjusting I found the optimal settings to fix the noise issue. IT also fixed the rejection issue as well. The short 1070 still rejects but not as much and the others don't reject at all after 500+ accepted shares.

I also added 3 more silent fans to help with the heating issue in the center and sides. I set 3 fans to blow directly into the rig and have 2 fans blowing the heat out into the chimney. This reduced the heat issue so much the machine runs with little noise to silent now. It's still achieving a lot of hash rate with this setup and settings, if I adjust it anymore it will start to sound louder and reject more shares. I have found the optimal settings for me RIG!

My ZEN/day will flux between 2.2 and 3.8 depending on the Sol/s. I average about 0.08 ZEN and hour right now until I get that last dead card replaced.

Running very stable and this is before I did some fan adjustments. Now the fans stay around 65% - 75%. Zero reboots or restarts on its own. The better your accept rate to your rejection rate is you have better luck getting a bonus block from supernova which is about 11 ZEN.

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Well, that's it! This rig will take 3 more cards to make it an 11 GPU RIG. Please let me know if you have any questions on this build. I will try to help as much as I can or guide you to more knowledgeable peeps. Thanks for reading this lengthy post and being interested in mining. Please give it an upvote and follow me for more builds!