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Everyone's got such nice rigs hardware-wise, not necessarily cosmetically, but you never hear about the not so great ones....until now :P  This is tale of two PCs.

This all started at the pawn shop so you can see where this is going already  :D :D :D  One of my customers needed a 17" or larger LCD monitor for as cheap as possible and they sold the one I wanted that had been there for like 3 weeks.  So they had 0 left except a $110 Vista emachines PC that came with a 17" monitor.  So I figured...

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p227/wizzerd911/4f3ba4f3-55d0-44b7-9114-325a3f928bb3.jpg

I sold the monitor for about $70 so now I've got a $40 emachines PC.  It actually has a pentium dual with 4 MB L2 in an LGA 775 socket.  Not bad!  It had a 16x slot too so I figured hey, let's get mining.  My actual PC with the GTS450 wasn't quite cutting it.  So I reinstalled the OS and I knew Vista was pretty scary and I primarily deal with Windows 7 and XP but it really summed it up nicely when right out of the first boot, I tried to open the browser and it immediately crashed.  It's like Windows ME all over again.  The case was torn to hell and I wanted all emachine branding gone ASAP so weeks before, I had put it in a brand new minimal case to resell btw.  I also upgraded the RAM to 2 GB (it was running on 1, ugh!).

So I get a sapphire 5830 in the mail off newegg a few days ago and put it in and just for fun, I wanted to see if it would pay to attempt running it off the stock power supply.  Remember, this is an emachines power supply.  They're the most legendary emachines part of all time and not in a good way :P so as soon as the machine turns on with both molex to 6 pin adapters attached, feel tons of heat out the back of the PSU and it really smelled like hot metal.  Soon, so did my whole basement.  It ran stable though so I left it for a few hours and it didn't melt down ;D But that's mega sketchy for the long term!  A graphics card like that eats power like...

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p227/wizzerd911/om-nom-nom.gif

The performance was good enough that I decided to prepare to possibly put in more cards.  Cuz I need MOOOOOOAR MEGAHASHEZ/s!!!! So I went to a local computer shop that I know had an 80+ silver certified 900W Coolermaster Ultimate PSU on clearance for a mere $100!!!  The retail price they wanted was $185 btw (which is high but still).  Now if you're thinking wow, this sounds like it's not a ghetto rig.  WRONG.  It isn't modular!  This is a four 12V channel PSU and it's not modular.  It has an electronmagnetic fire hose coming out of it rofl.  I didn't count the cables but it's around 15-20 lol.  So needless to say, most of them are outside the case atm :P  But at max mining speed it's at 12.32V so that's not even fair how much better it is than most I work with.

To put in any more cards, I'd need an entire new computer basically.  All the rest of the slots on this piece of crap emachiens are old school PCI not PCI-E.  So I ran the numbers and comparing my purchase of the PSU already to at least have a stable mining rig with 1 card to a triple card setup, it was a total....

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p227/wizzerd911/funny-pictures-hamster-is-excited.jpg

It will pay for itself in significantly less days than the single card!  And that includes the fact that I have to buy a new motherboard, 3 PCI-E risers, a processor, and some DDR3 that somehow I don't have any spare sticks of anywhere.  You'll notice some parts missing from that list :P I'm a computer repairer full time so I have lots of basically free parts laying around :P so it's getting a SATA optical drive rented to it and a hitachi hard drive which I don't trust to put in a customer's computer and it's getting rented a copy of XP actually too lol.  They're not transferrable but MS can send me a written complaint in cake form if they so desire :P  I'm over-ordering so just in case of anything going wrong, I can resell this custom built PC to a customer with the mining stuff removed.  So it's getting a new pentium G dual 1155 socket in an all solid capacitor ASUS or MSI board.

How is rig 2.0 going to out-ghetto the old one if it's that nice?  Simple :P Is it going in a custom ghetto rigged, partially wooden frame case?  I've got an angle grinder with metal cutting attachment and 10 year old full tower case full of hell yes! :P  I'm gonna cut out selective parts to keep it grounded to the PSU and have a nice metal sheet with risers from the back end of the case and a switch assembly and hard drive mounting frame still intact.  So I think the wooden gheeto frame, hybrid 1- year old metal semi-case with like 20 wires hanging out and 3 cards on risers running with no optical drive and a 160GB hitachi SATA II drive might just out-ghetto the emachines PC lol.  Only time will tell...and pictures :D lots of pictures to come hopefully! :D  until then, llama pop rocks time

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p227/wizzerd911/funny-pictures-omgz-listen-pop-rockz.jpg

wtf did i just read?

also, photos of said rig.

oh dear.... don't worry mate, we've all posted drunk some time before, nothing to be ashamed of  ;D

Nice pictures..  ;D

lol I don't drink but it was like 1:00 AM :P I wanted to post about my totally ghetto setups but it would have been super dull without funny pics  ;D :D hehehehe.  I got the hardware btw so pics of the frame will come soon.  Everyone on the entire planet is out of 5830's though so that's delaying it significantly.

Once my "man cave" is complete, I plan on trying to get my old Power Mac 8600 back up and running with OS 10.(whatever will run on it (it did have 10.1 before I had to shut 'er down due to space)) and seeing if I can't get a CPU miner working, just for shits and grins.
 
I'm also hoping someone gets really bored and makes a CPU miner that works on the 68020 processor, and I'll see if my Mac LC that has A/UX on it to behave (although I've forgotten root password, and don't have installers anymore, so that will be fun to try to even get logged in).
 
If someone made a CPU miner that ran on System 7 (or 8 or 9) that would totally rock, too.

The last respectable charts I saw said that all CPU miners except maybe an ARM chip (which wasn't on any chart) and most Nvidia cards don't beat the cost of electricity.  So if you use it as a creative, efficient, helpful way to heat that room then that's cool.  Otherwise it's not exactly worth it.

I've been doing distributed networking projects for years, so the "waste" of the electricity for me wouldn't be a big deal, since I got *zero* return on my CPU usage for those.   So, while informative, and I thank you for that, it will fall on deaf ears :)

Someone was mentioning that you could possibly use PCI to PCI-e adapters to run a mining card on a P3 era machine, I would call that pretty ghetto. Or maybe you could hook up your mining card into the mini pci-e slot of an old netbook somehow, with power for the card coming from another PSU. That would also get you pretty good power consumption figures I would think.

tl:dr

heeey don't call my 1U P4 based xeon rack server with a PCI to PCI-e adaptor for ghetto :<  ;D


nobody cares that you didn't read it

I actually posted some "too close to see the real ghettoness" pics in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34968.0

You CAN see the wood however :P but it really looks better than it is when ya crop it like that  ;D Everyone's gonna be all like ZOMGz! Wood n wire ties! So unstable!  But uh...how much does your rig move? lol.  Mine has worked flawlessly for like 2-3 weeks.  I'll get better pics later.

And yes,

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p227/wizzerd911/9db2df2c-e606-4023-b4f4-da9bea7c69de.jpg