Yeah lol that was how I felt. I actually felt the urge to look around to make sure nobody noticed what a noob i am.

Yet here I am, posting about it. Food for thought. Food for thought.

Heh. Seems like we are in exactly the same spot. Scroll up a few posts and you'll see..it's like you copy pasted my words

Well that green plastic box has a ...certain charme... I seriously doubt it's open enough to provide 4 7950's with enough cool air. What temperatures do you get after half an hour ?

As I  understand it, one should aim to keep the temperature under 80 degrees c. Above 90 you are really starting to do damage.

My prototype runs up to 74c, and that's with only 2 7950's and no case at all.

Turns out one of the powercables was not all the way in. Oooooops

First, I'd like to share a tip. Just a little something to make life easier for noobs like us.

- If you can't get MSI Afterburner to unlock everything ( that happens for some people, even if you follow all the steps ), download Sapphire TriXX. It doesn't need any unlocking it all, just install it and you're good to go. I have Sapphire 7950's, but it will probably work for other cards too.

Now for an update on how my rig is coming along : Well, it works. Not much to look at yet because I don't have risers yet, so right now it's just a mobo on plastic with 2 7950's connected. Once I find a crate and get my risers I'll post a picture. I had a big headache with the motherboard seemingly not detecting multiple GPU's, and was about to disassemble everything and get a new mobo, when I noticed one of the powercables wasn't connected. That was a big relief and , yes, more then a little bit emberassing. I don't mind sharing that though. Always remember, it's rule number one in hardware troubleshooting. Check all cables caaaaaaarefully. 

My current hurdle is to make the system run with stability. Right now, the card that is NOT hooked up to the screen has no problems. It keeps chugging along at a modest 558 khash/sec. The primary GPU, however, has problems.

-I get visual  artifacts on screen, ( probably due to the settings GUIminer scripts send to the GPU )
- Windows reports a problem with the gpu driver
- Catalyst reports a disabled driver
- after a while the haashrate drops to around 270khash/sec, a little while longer, 7khash/sec ( but Afterburner reports 0 activity on the card. I guess at that point the GPU is asleep and is simply dreaming of mining litecoins hahah

Can anyone help me with thse problems ?

TacoTime, as promised, I've sent my first ever mined litecoin to the adres in GUIminer-script. Thanks for all the info and programming you provide !

I have no idea how to do that. Can you throw me a link ?


EDIT : ah, it's in GUIminer-script itself.  After adding more miners, I still can only see ONE 7950 ( tahiti ) GPU. While PCI-E slot 2 and 4 are both connected to one. I feel like i'm missing something more basic. Like the board isn't detecting the cards. I have the board from your noob thread, the z77

Hi everyone.

I have been messing around with my first rig today. I put everything together using TacoTime's noob built https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=163306.0

I don't have riser cables yet, so I decided to try without first. I plugged in my three 7950's, installed .net framework ( needed for catalyst ) installed Catalyst and that add on for it ( sorry forgot the name ), and fired up the GUiminer-script.

To my surpreeeese I could only select gpu 0.0 and gpu 0.1. No third card to be found.

Does anyone know why this is ? Should I install more drivers, make a bios setting or tweak some manual setting on the Mobo ?

Any tips would be much appreciated.

Kind regards from holland

I changed the .cfg to what it says in the instruction, but when I open afterburner the volt setting is still greyed out.

There's a "enable low level hardware acces interface" option with a drop down box with "kernel" and "user" option, is that what you mean in step 5 ?

Thank you so much for writing this, TacoTime. I built my first rig after your Noob instructions thread, named it TacoMiner.

Well, TacoMiner is running now at 561 K/hs, which is nice but it seems like only one of the 3 7950's is working.

How do I turn the other 2 on ?

The first LTC I mine will go to you

That's what they always say.....in a bubble Really, thats THE classic line.

People, I have a strong feeling in my nether regions that the rate will drop to the 2-3 dollar area and stay there until I finish my TacoMiner.

Then it'll slowly rise to 10 bucks over a few months.

I'm very worried about the difficulty rising big time too, though. Right now, LTC is 439.81% more profitable to mine then BTC. I imagine a lot of people are installing LTC miners.

source : http://dustcoin.com/mining

About to assemble my first rig. I'll call it the TacoMiner, as a tribute.

Last question : can I use a flash drive instead of the SATA HD ? I want to start with a windows system first though, I need to study up before I can use the linux command line interface.

Your interest rate is pathetic, sorry.

I think i'm just going to get a slightly bigger crate instead of messing around with molten plastic hahah

Has anyone tried this built yet ? I ordered all the parts. I have to look around for a nice crate though, we don't have Home Depot here in The Netherlands.

When I start building I'll post some pics.

Be careful MKEGuy ! I'm sure there's a good reason why it's not viable for a long term solution. Can the motherboard keep powering 4 cards like that without, eventually, burning out somewhere ?

Taco we need your wisdom

Thanks for that noob built. I'm going to try it out ASAP.

Two questions :

1 How about airflow for the mobo ? I've read that there's parts on it that need some airflow to keep them from overheating.

2 Could you elaborate a bit on why using a powered riser is so much hassle ?


I did some math and all the parts for the machine , except for the GPU's,  cost €366.  If you add another GPU you would divide that cost by 4 instead of 3, €91 instead of €122 per GPU. I guess this is not a big enough number to risk frying a rig over though

And I also did not take into account how much more a more powerfull PSU costs. But you could use the same Mobo if you use 4 7950's, right ?

Thanks for all the feedback so far. I've never done this so I don't know what I'm talking about but.... I don't understand why a case makes such a big negative difference for cooling.

If there's multiple fans blowing air in and multiple fans blowing air out, shouldn't there actually be MORE airflow then an open air setup ?

LOL