Building My First Mining Rig - Part 3, Conclusion

So I was going to write up a post but I saw someone posting about wanting to build his first rig, but that he was going to wait a few months to see if GPU prices went down or something. I just wanted to comment and encourage him and suddenly I had written a whole bunch of words. Here's what I wrote, and I have a few thoughts that I'll add on at the end.

Don't wait to build your rig IMO. Better to get it up and running sooner, every day is potential profit. You can totally do it.

I just built my first one and posted about it. It's super fun and I got it up and running fairly quickly. I had never built a computer either. The main expense is the GPUs, but you can start with one, even a cheaper one, and build on from there, if you like.

It seems intimidating but it's really do-able if you just understand basics of computers. The main things you have to buy are basically:

Motherboard (you need to look into which one to buy)

CPU (I got mine for like $30, you don't need a powerful one)

4-8GB RAM (again, most basic is fine. Make sure it's compatible with MOBO, some newer mobos require DDR4 or up.)

Hard drive - 60GB or more (I used 60GB SSD, have seen others say to get a bigger one)

PSU (Should be gold or higher; needs to be able to power each GPU and stay under 80% usage. I bought 1200W for 4 GPUS, and currently only using 3, and it uses about 575W.

GPU(s) (This is the main expense, research which way you want to go here)

Risers for GPUs

Some kind of frame, case, or place to put everything (This can be DIY or you can buy a frame for like $60 or more. Need a place to mount or set the mobo, and place to hang or set the GPUs, basically.)

An on/off switch (I forgot this at first, but needed if you have no case)

OS (Linux if you want, Windows if not. Also SimpleMining OS or ethOS should work, ive never used them though)

And then you'll obviously need peripherals to set it up - monitor, mouse, keyboard. And probably an ethernet cable. And some way to get the OS installed, probably USB stick.

And that's basically it. After that it's just a matter of plugging everything into the right place, just watch some youtube, it's not hard once you see how it's done. Then you'll have to start up and boot from the USB to install the OS. Then, assuming Windows, just download a miner, set it up with your wallet address (google for specifics but this is not hard at all) and BOOM.

You can also change BIOS and GPU settings to optimize; I haven't done that because I'm getting decent hashrates without it and it's been running super stable so I don't want to get into anything more complicated yet.

Best of luck and don't be afraid to jump in! Even if you just start with one GPU, just do it, don't procrastinate. I had wanted to for some time, and then one day I was inspired so I just ordered most things online and then went to a local store for a few others. Built it in just a few hours. You can do it! It's incredibly satisfying and fun, and the possibilities are endless - you can speculatively mine new coins, mine eth, dual mine eth and decred/siacoin/a few others, you can join a pool that switches your hashing power to whatever is calculated to be most profitable, etc etc. It rules. And having a flow of new crypto is awesome too, you can hodl or take profits or move the coins into a staking position, or into steem - it's really great.

I'm gonna expand this comment into a post but I just got going writing about it when I saw your post :-)

If you want to know exactly the hardware that I used, ask in the comments and I can tell you. However, I was more concerned with getting it done than getting the cheapest parts, so I didn't go crazy trying to get the cheapest everything. I even bought DDR3 ram when I needed DDR4, and even though I only needed 4GB, the local store only had 8GB so I paid a lot more for it. I just wanted to get it running.

I really like it, but it certainly is not a get rich scheme. It's going to take quite a bit of time to start seeing real profit. I mined ETH for a while, but decided to speculatively mine a different coin with a very small market cap for a while.

I definitely like it because I like having new coins coming in. I like being able to use them to buy bags of whatever I want. Right now I'm using new coins I'm getting, not just from mining but from Steem and other staking coins, to invest back into different types of staking coins. I could just put them into more Steem, or keep new coins in their same stake, but I want to diversify my holdings a lot.

This is kind of counter to what might be the commonly accepted advice of picking a few things you like, or trying to use alts as a way to increase bitcoin, but I think it makes sense. Bitcoin worries me - a lot. I won't go into why, but I think that assuming BTC will always be king is a mistake. I don't see why the public sentiment couldn't just very, very quickly shift to something else, and the BTC miners could follow suite. I think it's a good idea to hedge against that.

And also, there are so many freaking alts that are exploding right now, at such a fast pace. It's impossible to know which ones will eventually succeed. So I'm playing it all by ear, but I'm accumulating a bunch of different bags. Ever heard of Denarius? Atmos? Triangles? PlatinumBAR? Ark? Lux? Welp, I bought some of all those with profits from Steem and from Monkey (seriously check out the monkey project though).

I'm rambling and off topic now so I'll leave it at that.