Will This Be An Effective Mining Rig?

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Franklin_4

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Hi guys,

A friend of mine bought Ethereum a while back when it was dirt cheap. He has made a lot of money buying/trading e-money. He knows i build computers, and we got to talking this weekend. He wants to invest some of his money in a homeowner's mining rig. Nothing CRAZY, but something he can get started with, and upgrade in the furture. I am trying to get an idea of what i'll need to make this happen for him.


Heres the rough draft of what im thinking....

intel i-7 7700k Kaby Lake or Ryzen 7 1700

ASUS ROG Maximus IX or ASRock Fatal1ty X370

Ill probably start him with dual 1070s or 1060s, with the knowledge that we can upgrade to 4 or 6 GPUs in the future.

How much RAM should i opt for? Im thinking 16gb will be enough, but idk how important RAM is to mining. Should we go for 32 or 64gb?

We'll probably use a small SSD (250gb samsung evo or something like that). Only thing installed will be the OS and the mining program(s). I think i'll stick to a 2.5", even though m.2's are faster. Since it will be running non-stop, i dont want the m.2 to overheat. Should this be a worry or should i go m.2?

Anything critical i should know before diving into this? The main reasons I'd consider a Ryzen7 over i7 is the power consumption, and from what i have heard it has great productivity, so im thinking this means multi-threading might be better for mining? not sure...

again, were not looking to become millionaires here, so please dont tell me i NEED the brand new i9 7920 or i NEED 6 1080tis, Looking to do an enthusiast build for some fun. We both work fulltime jobs and have reasonable income lol/
 
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FYI, Nvidia cards were pretty bad for mining until Pascal, so that 950 will be pretty terrible. I don't think it's even possible to mine Eth with it due to not enough VRAM.

For a dedicated mining rig you may want to look into vBIOS modding. There you can fine tune stuff like memory frequency and timings to optimize performance. However, this would be optimized to a specific algorithm, so would only be most effective for specific coin(s). I never did this because I was using my daily PC. You'd have to look for guides on how to do this, but I don't know how easy they'd be to find for less popular algorithms and less popular graphics cards.

Other than that, you can just use MSI Afterburner (for AMD/Nvidia) or Wattman (AMD only). You'd...
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TJ Hooker

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CPU is overkill for a mining rig, an i3 or Ryzen 3 would be plenty. Don't think you need more than 8GB or RAM either. M.2 vs 2.5" doesn't matter, can safely go with whatever is cheaper.

You do realize you'll only earn like $2-3 a day (assuming it's running 24h/day) at most even with dual 1070s right? Your friend may be better off just continuing to buy/sell cryptocurrency directly.
 
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Franklin_4

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he will definitely continue to buy and sell, however, he wants to get more into it. lurking cryptocurrency forums isnt enough for him anymore haha. thanks for the info on CPU likely being overkill but i think we might set it up to simultaneously do CPU & GPU mining. hashrates for the R7 seemed pretty good... Also, we'll porbably focus on mining some of the smaller currencies, with hopes that they will blow up in the near future. we wont be mining bitcoin or ethereum or other top 5 cryptocurrnecies. (i think).

can anyone confirm that a ryzen3 is plenty of CPU and lots of RAM isnt necessary?

Also, is linux the only platform for mining? I figured it would run on Win10 as well, but every forum ive been reading is all about linux.
 
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TJ Hooker

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Well, if you're doing CPU mining then that obviously changes the CPU (and possible RAM) requirements. That being said, CPU mining is significantly less profitable than GPU mining. To the point where it's probably more profitable to take the extra money you're spending on a more powerful CPU and spend it towards more GPU compute power.

You can use Windows 10 for mining. I think most people tend to use Linux for dedicated mining rigs because it's free.
 
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Franklin_4

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Yeh im thinking were gonna do a Ryzen 5 with 2 1070s. We wont decide til mid november, theres a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid and research to be done. I think in the meantime i might install some mining software on my R5/950 build just to get somewhat acquainted with the operation.

@TJ, have you done any mining yourself?
 
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TJ Hooker

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Yeah, I did a bit of eth mining for a little while. Didn't have a dedicated mining rig, just used my normal desktop (6700K, RX 580). Never bothered with CPU mining. I sort of tapered off due to the weather getting really warm so I didn't want to be heating up my apartment anymore. Didn't pick it back up after the weather cooled off because by then profitability had tanked.
 
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Franklin_4

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right on. do you know if its possible to do both CPU and GPU mining simultaneously with the same rig?

Like mine eth with a couple 1070s while letting the CPU mine litecoin or something?

again, let me stress, were not trying to get rich. we are interested in the who economy/culture surrounding cryptocurrency.
 
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Franklin_4

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wht program did u use?
 
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TJ Hooker

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Well, I was lazy so for the most part I just used Nicehash. They take a cut of your profits, but you get an application with a nice GUI that can be used to mine a variety of different coins and does all the config for you. Unfortunately all their payouts are in bitcoin, so if you're looking to mine lesser known coins in the hopes they'll increase in value, you'd have to then exchange bitcoin for them. They also have a minimum payout of 0.01 BTC if I recall correctly, which is like 50+ USD these days. So it can take a while to get a payout, depending on your hashing power.

Other than that I used claymore's dual eth miner for mining eth + decred for a bit.
 
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Franklin_4

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also, how the heck do i go about OC'ing a GPU? im kinda willing to run my gtx950 into the ground experimenting before we invest in a dedicated miner. Planning on upgrading to a 580 or 1060 soon anyway, so forfeiting my 950 in the name of cryptocurrency is no biggie to me personally.
 
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TJ Hooker

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FYI, Nvidia cards were pretty bad for mining until Pascal, so that 950 will be pretty terrible. I don't think it's even possible to mine Eth with it due to not enough VRAM.

For a dedicated mining rig you may want to look into vBIOS modding. There you can fine tune stuff like memory frequency and timings to optimize performance. However, this would be optimized to a specific algorithm, so would only be most effective for specific coin(s). I never did this because I was using my daily PC. You'd have to look for guides on how to do this, but I don't know how easy they'd be to find for less popular algorithms and less popular graphics cards.

Other than that, you can just use MSI Afterburner (for AMD/Nvidia) or Wattman (AMD only). You'd need to find the optimal frequency/voltage/VRAM speed to balance performance and power for a given algorithm. You can also typically set all these parameters as part of the config file for you miner.

As I said, there are plenty of guides out there, you really need to just spend some time doing your own research. It might make things easier if you decide on a specific coin you want to mine, and then go from there.
 
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Franklin_4

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thanks bud. ive been doing a lot of google research the last couple weeks. appreciate your input.





 
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