Some help with building a mining rig?

in #mining7 years ago

After a lot of time spent doing research into mining, I've decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it a go. The plan is to start off small, and hopefully build on it over the next 2-3 years. However, there's a few things that I'm hoping some of you might be able to advise me on. The plan right now is to build a small rig to do a sort of "proof of concept" experiment. Once that's paid off, I should have additional capital to go to a larger setup, with 10-20 GPUs on a backplane. With that, I'm trying to keep this initial rig to a relatively low budget, aiming to pay it off in about 5-6 months. With that, here's the idea:


1. GPU selection

I figured I'd start off with what seems to be the trickiest aspect of the whole thing. With AMD cards desperately scarce and their prices rising, I've been looking into some NVidia options. Keeping within the budget, going with 3 x EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB SSC seems to be a pretty economical decision. They can be OC'd to ~23MHs on Ether, which looks pretty good to me. They're readily available, and price looks good. I did consider a few othrs, like the 1050 Ti, and a 1070/1060 combo, but 3x1060 3Gb seems to be the best option, especially if I can get one of the models with Samsung memory in it, as that seems to be better performing. I also can't seem to find any decent information on the new 9Gbps 6Gb models. Whether they can put out a better hashrate, I don't know, but the one I mentioned seems to be pretty good.


1a. Expansion plans

Although I know I have to "walk before you run", the plan is to hang on for those new P104-100 cards to be released before I expand. But they're very much on my radar right now.


2. Other hardware considerations

I've seen some pretty... creative.... solutions to utilizing all the lanes on a motherboard for GPUs. However, my plan is to avoid hanging 47 1/2 GPUs from a clothesline cooled by the wind. If this rig works out, I'm going to be expanding this pretty rapidly. The plan is to put this rig in a proper chassis, with proper cooling. So, I'm considering a liquid cooling solution. My thoughts on this are, if I'm going to be overclocking the 1060s to get up to the 23MHs range, liquid cooling might be the way to go. Any thoughts on this?

I'm also planning on using a GIGABYTE GA-X99-UD3P mobo. It's a nice price, supports the Xeon processor I'm planning on using, and has enough slots to get me up and running. Plus, if I expand to using a backplane, I'll still have space for the PCI bus. Any other suggestions for a mobo that's similarly priced and will support Xeon 2011 series processors would be greatly welcomed!


3. Managing my return?

Eventually, assuming I get some sort of a return, I'm going to want to withdraw some money. I'm currently using coinbase and quadriga (because quadriga works in Canada). However, I'm doing some research into the coin-based Visa/Visa Debit cards. There seems to be a new one of those every week! So I'm struggling to find the "best" one. The biggest problem I'm having with them is that some of the ones that seem to be very good, have some hefty charges for any forex transactions. As I'm living in Canada, dealing in USD or EUR is not really an option, so getting charged 2-3% per transaction adds up pretty fast. Any suggestions on "banking solutions"?


Other than those queries, my hardware is all fairly standard. As mentioned before, I've been doing a lot of research on this, reading through a lot of message boards, online guides etc. I think I've got a fairly good grasp of it, but it's also kinda new territory for me! So any help, tips, advice would be greatly appreciated!

I'm aiming to buy the hardware in the next week or two, so I'll be keeping you all updated too!

-n

Sort:  

Word of advice... rememeber the only point in containing the GPUs in a closed case is to contain the hot air, so you can remove it efficiently via an isolated venting system.

Good luck trying to find the cards mate AMD globally sold our in a week! Nvidia are trying now but they have a BS statement I hear, that they will approach large miners first with the new P104-100/P106-100 GPUs. so unless you plan to buy 1000 + cards in a single order then theres no luck mate :(

Really annoying and hoping Nvidia will not isolate the sales like this.

Yeah I've heard that too, but I haven't seen it on an official statement from NVidia, so I'm of the opinion that it's bs for now. There's a few websites already "selling" the Pallit ones, which again, I'm inclined to call bs on.
However, the choice of going with 3 x ASUS 1060 3Gb for now seems to be my best bet. There's a lot of people on various message boards etc with proof that it's mining at 21-23Mhs with a bit of tweaking.

Thanks for the heads up on the heat thing. That's where I'm considering a liquid cooling option. By my estimations, I could have liquid cooling for the 3 GPUs, which would have 2 fans on the top of the chassis venting the heat. I THINK it'll allow me to still have everything in a neat little case, while still having sufficient cooling. My other background is in 3d work (architectural vizualisation), and that solution has been proven to be very efficient, so I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

Again, many thanks for the tips and help!

Good luck with your mining :)

Thanks very much! It's a new one for me, but I have plenty of optimism, and knowledge is power. The more research I can do now, the more pitfalls I can avoid!

follow and upvote me i am doing that for you
its a very informative topic ,a best piece of information you really deserve for upvoting on that post keep it up my bro nice work cheers i am supporting to you its a very helpful topic following you my bro

Thanks buddy! There's a great community here for mining, and lots of very knowledgeable people, so I'm hoping it all works out!

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.20
TRX 0.14
JST 0.030
BTC 68666.90
ETH 3251.63
USDT 1.00
SBD 2.67