Bitcoin Forum

So one thing I've noticed in my time in this forum is how many of the experts here recommend 6-GPU builds instead of recommending 12-GPU builds.

Is this because of personal preference, or do you think that you should start small as a beginner? Because obviously, 6-GPU builds are less cost efficient than planning for expansion from the beginning.

Let me know what your thoughts are!

I still prefer 8 or 12 build if available. Cause I don't see any problem with that. Just don't push it to max, so will got no problem there.

It would always depend on your expertise, if you're confident enough to do the 12 GPU builds then why not, its proven not a plug and play scenarios to make on this build and a challenging one,  I'm not against it, however, what I always consider is that once in a while a rig may fail and so as all of your 12GPU also idled, compared to 6GPU with two builds, you still have one that running when the other one fails.

Some people have lots of rigs that could potentialy be unstable from time to time, and go down.

Also, you may not have time to check these many rigs often. So in this circumstance, well then it makes more sense to have rigs with less GPUs.

People that have more time to babysit their rigs and/or have less rigs may not be bothered by this. So they may want to have rigs with more GPUs, as this will save you money because you don't have to buy so many other components.

That said. There are ways that you can set your PC up to startup running the miner software after auto-login. This way if your computer becomes unstable and it restarts unexpectedly, it will automatically start mining again once it restarts.

Also if you spend some extra time tuning your GPUs, you can make it 99% stable.

My personal preference is, the more GPUs on one rig the better.  ;D

Its kind like HAREM. Though sometimes got problem there.

Yes.  Especially if you have limited experience with building computers from their constituent parts.

I guess the answer is... would you rather troubleshoot 12 different GPUs or risers (risers can cause stability issues)... or would you rather troubleshoot 6?

Always buy best item, so you wont need to troubleshoot.

^^^^ This....

You get what you pay for.

Personally I love 8 GPU rigs to me that's the sweet spot.

Your argument for 6 is one that appeals to me. Essentially "silo"-ing your rigs. Thanks!

I have limited experience building anything with more than 2 GPUs. As in no experience haha. But building from components is not foreign to me.

Go for that, much better than 6 and of course less troublesome than 12. Of course you can add more later if you use H110/B250 motherboard.

I prefer 6-8 cards.  This way if you run into any issue you have less cards to troubleshoot and generally you dont run into power issues or having to use a lot of splitters or molex connection to make everything work. I try to take the safest route possible.

In particular how many watts will consume of single vega? I just want to build vega but need some info about this card specially how many power will this card eating..

Around 150-180w.

The "ideal" number of cards is clearly a matter of personal preference, in terms of how various factors are weighed/prioritized.


On one hand, having more cards in one rig reduces the impact of the overhead costs associated with the motherboard/CPU/RAM/storage device/etc. (Items that are necessary, but do not directly contribute to the hashrate, and thus do not contribute to the revenue stream.) This is better for both efficiency in terms of the amount spent on the rig "base" (excluding the need for additional risers and PSUs, and possibly a more expensive motherboard), in addition to efficiency in terms of electricity use for the given hashrate.


On the other hand, adding more cards gradually becomes more of a headache as far as the initial setup is concerned. The "limits" here vary based on motherboard choice and other factors. For example, the difference between setting up 3 and 4 cards on an Asrock H81 Pro BTC is negligible compared to the difference between setting up 6 vs. 7 cards. (Since 7 would require the use of a splitter device, and those are generally hit-and-miss.)

The ASUS B250 Mining Expert has had its own headaches, since mining-specific P106 cards are needed if one wishes to make full use of the available slots.

Non-mining specific motherboards can, depending on the board, be even bigger headaches when attempting to utilize all of the physically available slots, or throwing in one or more M2 to PCIe adapters.

Setup difficulty is a combination of the limitations of the specific hardware, and those of the OS/drivers.


Additionally, more cards in one rig does put more eggs in one basket. If any component of the rig "base" fails, then you suffer a greater loss than if you had split the cards among multiple rigs. (If you are constantly available to make repairs on your rigs, then this is less of an issue.)

There is also an argument to be made for multiple rigs allowing for more, albeit independent, points of failure.
(Having more components to run multiple rigs increases the chance that A failure occurs somewhere, but reduces the potential impact of a failure.)


Overall, weighing the various factors is something specific to the situation of each individual.

A lot of it comes down to cost, especially for new people who are unfamiliar with mining.

When I built my 5 card rig there also wasn't an option to buy a 12 card Mobo but if there was back then I may have bought one to make it more future-proof and have the option to add more GPU's later.

The mother board you need to choose is the matter for extending the number of cards more in the mining you have installed or you need to. So always goes to the 19x mining mother board or 12x mother board. If you want to select the less number of card supported board in the extension time you have to face the issue like buying another mother board so make it simple before that itself.
You may have 6 or 12 cards anything would be fine option to choose for mining rig set up.

I am of the personal peference that there should be 1 psu per rig, as this makes it a lot easier to manage and diagnose .
There are some chinese brand 3600 double atx psus available that can run many cards
 But yeah its more of a peference , Cause in my country its really cheap to get 5-6 slotted 1-2 gen i5 cpu + processor + 4 gb ram + 160gb hdd  in 50$
and these are old sli boards and u can run  2 cards directly on board (although not recommended if you dont have proper support for cards )