My Very FIRST Mining Rig
Hi SteemIt!
I want to take this opportunity to share with you my experience so far building my first mining rig. That’s right…I popped my mining rig cherry. And believe me, it hasn’t been all that easy. There’s a lot of trial and error, tinkering, failing, rebuilding, etc…that goes into mining.
Here’s my set up so far:
I’m using a ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 Socket AM3+ DDR3 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 AMD 990FX ATX Motherboard
EVGA 850 BQ, 80+ BRONZE 850W, Semi Modular, Power Supply
Cooler Master Hyper T2 - Compact CPU Cooler with Dual Looped Direct Contact Heatpipes, INTEL/AMD with AM4 Support
AMD FD8350FRHKBOX FX-8350 FX-Series 8-Core Processor Corsair Vengeance Blue 16 GB (2x8 GB) DDR3 1600MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory which is probably more than I need, but since I have…I’m using it. And finally…the beauties: Sapphire 11265-05-20G Radeon PULSE RX 580 8GB GDDR5 DUAL HDMI / DVI-D / DUAL DP OC with Backplate (UEFI) PCI-E Graphics Card Graphic Card (Micron Memory) And Sapphire 11265-01-20G Radeon NITRO+ RX 580 8GB GDDR5 DUAL HDMI / DVI-D / DUAL DP with backplate (UEFI) PCI-E Graphics Card (Samsung Memory) I overclocked each one using Sapphire Trixx overclocking utility. I also Bios Modded each one using mods that I found on YouTube. If you want my modded Bio Files let me know and I’m happy to send to you. Most of these parts came from my original gaming rig, which I’m now rebuilding. I'll post about my gaming rig another day. I had to buy the power supply and GPUs. I got the GPUs on eBay but damn was it hard to find cards that weren’t outrageously overpriced. What a world to live in right now huh?!?! The hardest thing for me was figuring out what settings to overclock the cards to while maintaining stability. I think I’ve finally found out the settings that work best for my system. All of your components play a factor into your hashrates and power usage; heating setup (i.e., where you place your rig in your house), power supply, memory, motherboard, bios mods, etc… Settings for my Pulse RX 580 8 GB Card: Note the temperature. The cooling mechanism on this card is no where near the Nitro+…but I’m getting a slightly better hashrate with it…thanks to the Bios Mod I used, I think. Settings for my Nitro+ RX 580 8 GB: Now to my hashrates. I’m only mining Pirl with these cards at this time. I’ve mined Feathercoin as well in the past, which is the Neoscrypt algorithm, to get a benchmark. I get ~1.4 Mh/s using about 280 Watts mining Feathercoin w/nsgminer. But I use them mostly to mine Pirl, an Ethereum based coin. I use Claymore’s Dual Ethereum miner v10.0 for AMD cards. Here are my hashrates: GPU0 is the Nitro+ and GPU1 is the Pulse. I’m using about 235 W combined (Pulse 112W and Nitro+ 123W) for a combined hashrate of 63 Mh/s. This, according to WhatToMine, will profit about $8.67 per day and about 4.5 Pirl. See below: Something is going on with the DevFee on this miner. My hashrate on the Pulse drops substantially when mining the DevFee. The epoch setting is #162 and I think that plays into your hashrate. Essentially, the difficulty of the DevFee hashrate is driven by what it's mining...and it's mining Ethereum specifically in the example. So the DAG file for Ethereum is way bigger at epoch #162 than Pirl, which is at epoch #20. And the Pulse card takes a huge hit. This is greatly important when determining what to mine and what card to buy...so do your homework! The best thing about my rig is that I can scale up to 4, maybe 5, cards. 5 might be too many for my Power Supply and my motherboard might not be able to handle/recognize 5 cards. But 4 should be no problem. The only problem will be finding more cards! Thanks for checking out my blog and my first mining rig! Let me know if you have any suggestions Thanks! If you liked what you read and want to read more, please hit that I included affiliate links in this post, so if you want to purchase any of the items I listed, do me a solid and click on the link from here. Doesn’t cost you anything extra and goes a long way in supporting the blog. Thank you!
Note the temperate on this one.
Chris
button.
Great to see such commitment to the crypto world. Fantastic work and hopefully mine (pun intended) will be up and running in the not so distant future. Keep up the good work and have a follow. Let's build this community!
Followed! Thanks for the comment!
Have you tried 1150-1190core and 2250-2275memory, should lower the power consumption to around 80-100? 2200 Is usually the max for those cards, you are lucky to get them that high stable. I have mined Eth for almost 2 years now and i have noticed that you dont get the most shares because your hashrate is higher, lets say you get 31mhs on a pretty aggressive overclock and than lower the clockspeeds (30mhs) to get it more stable and that way get more shares. I liked the post so upvoted :)
So after 21 hours of mining at a slightly lower settings I have some data to report. after 39 hours under the setting above in the article I was getting 1.856 shares/min (63 Mh/s)....and after 21 hours at reduced settings I'm getting 1.870 shares/min (62.5 Mh/s)...which is better! The epoch is higher now as well (which increases difficulty, albeit slightly). So you may be on to something! I reduced the core clock to 1300 and memory clock to 2250 for each card.
Do both cards get the same amount of shares? I was thinking of the problem when it goes to mine devfee. I dont remember if you could see how many shares every card is getting on Claymore v10.0
great question...I'll try to look through the history to see if each are reporting shares about the same rate.
I have tried lower power consumption before (as low as 1050 mhz) and it seemed marginal the amount I was saving in electricity...I only pay .07 for electricity so the high hashrate seemed better. I'll tinker around with it some more. I just got a Watt reader for my electrical outlet so I can see exactly what the cards are drawing vs what the software is reporting.... I do get the sense from my mining pool that I'm not reporting as many shares as my hashrate would suggest...so I'll try lower settings for awhile to see if I can get more shares/hashrate. thanks for the suggestions!