I had a really productive week and gained a lot of useful knowledge. Ever since I learned about cryptocurrency I had interest in mining coins. I never had the money to get into Bitcoin mining because of how high the difficulty is. I started purchasing small amounts of Bitcoin on my own, just so I could be apart of the game. I made some bad investments into HYIP scams and learned from my mistakes. Shortly after that experience of losing some money in Bitcoin scams, I found a place here on Steemit.com. I was able to earn Bitcoins by writing articles. Now that I have a few coins, I'm keeping all of my Steem now and not transferring to exchange to cash out. After learning about Steem, I found Ethereum. Coinbase started to sell Ethereum when it was around $12 a coin and I bought a handful. Recently Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Steem blew up. I decided to try my hand at Ethereum mining since you only need GPUs to do it.

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Learning

First I bought a Geforce GTX 1070 card and plugged into a existing computer to run a test. It was producing an average of 25mh/s which generates about $4-$5 dollars worth of Ethereum coins per day. Over time this will add up. Since my initial test was successful, I purchased the rest of the parts to build my own mining rig. I'm starting off small with a rig that can hold up to 3 GPUs at once. To build a rig you need a motherboard, processor, ram, ssd harddrive, and a GPU. I recommend buying a better fan for the processor then the one it comes with. You want to make sure your rig has good airflow. You are going to get better performance the colder you can keep the parts. When you're chips start to overheat it's going to work them harder to keep them cool. This is extremely important especially when you are running the rig at full power 24/7.

Frustrating

I ran into a few problems when trying to setup my rig. After I put the whole computer together it wouldn't start the display on the monitor. After about a day of troubleshooting I realized my Intel processor was a 7th generation card and my motherboard only supported 6th generation Intel. This was a minor set back because it was really difficult to find a 6th generation card. Luckily the local computer store had an extra Intel i3 that was 6th generation. As soon as I swapped the chips out, the computer started right up.

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Advice

One thing to keep in mind with building your own rig is you are literally starting with a bare bones computer. It does not have any drivers installed or operating system. This is what brought me to my next problem to troubleshoot. I had a really hard time trying to install Windows 7 because there is a known bug where it won't recognize a bootable USB drive. So as a work around, I had an extra copy of Windows Server 2012 and was able to get it installed okay. Once I had Windows Server installed it was able to provide the driver needed to run the Windows 7 install. Once that was complete I was able to finish the installation of the drivers need to run the motherboard.

Mining Time

After everything was setup, I plugged in my new GPU into my PCI express slot, downloaded the miner, and away it went. So after all the troubleshooting to build my new rig, I had 2 days of downtime for mining. I'm now back up and running and producing my Ethereum coins.

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Future plans

The plan is to get more GPU cards into this setup, however now that Ethereum has blown up in value, these cards are extremely hard to find. I know that there are probably investors buying up a lot of GPUs at one time. Part of me feels like the gaming companies producing these cards are holding back on production on purpose. I don't know why I have that feeling, but it could be possible. So many people are trying to get into mining these days, but Ethereum is still profitable to mine at the moment. If there ever comes a time where Ethereum mining is not possible because it moved to Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work I will just switch to mining another GPU coin. It was great experience building a computer which I had never done before. I was able to learn from my mistakes and I'm looking forward to building new rigs in the future.

Thanks for reading. Please Up-vote, Comment, and Follow.

Sincerely Yours,

@johnnyyash