Thanks for all the replies guys. I'll post some updates when I have some.

I'll share my thoughts on some of the rigs posted.

@shibob I did look at just using L channel initially as its costs are a lot lower. I think it works in some cases but found that isn't as easy to make adjustments so it works really well for on type of GPU, but the rear rail is fixed and wouldn't accommodate longer/shorter cards as easily. This particular issue is one of the main troubles with the main stream extruded case that you find on ebay/amazon. The rear rail will hit the GPU or the riser cards so the position needs to be adjustable in my opinion. Looks like you have quite a few of the same rigs so for your setup I have no doubt that the L channel material is less expensive.

One thing in particular that I am doing is adding plastic feet. You can buy this for the extrusion but I've designed my own part for this. If you frequently need to move a rig, or place it on a nice table, the metal frames will eat your table tops! The plastic feet really make a difference. No reason why you couldn't do this on the L channel either. This is just one of the little details I've added after playing with the case (and ending up with scratches on my work tables).



I did see the server style cases as well and have a friend looking at those as they have around the same cost as the cases I'm designing. You hit on the main issue which is cooling. The dense layout of the cables really limits airflow and you end up with a lot of trapped heat. If you try to exhaust this, you need to have higher CFM fans that push the air through and overall it seems like the enclosure is fighting purpose.

For my design I wanted to make sure I could move the heat away from the cards w/o it being a power hog. Before the chassis I was running big 20" fans to move air across the rigs, but from a power perspective that is quite expensive and on top of that it wasn't that effective. With the four 120mm fans I have now on the rig, the cards are running much cooler now and it also moves the heat away from the chassis. The GPUs act as channel to guide the air through from the rear to the front of the case. It also picks up any of the rising heat off the motherboard but thats fairly minimal.

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a design for a 6 GPU rig and wanted to share what I'm doing. First off, I know that there are some pretty good rigs out there already. I studied a lot of the open frame designs out there and I found little short comings here and there on the existing enclosures so these the design has been evolving, tweaking/improving various aspects, I'll share some of the details of this on a future post. Mostly designing my own since

The rig design is pretty straight forward based on extruded aluminum for a solid build with adjustable rails. The motherboard tray and fan brackets are currently laser cut and I do have a few parts I'm testing with 3d printing.

Dimensions of the 6 GPU rig is: 520mm x 350mm x 360mm (W x H x D)

Design:


Assembly:


First Prototype:


Learned a lot from the first real prototype. In particular, I can see some real issues with some of the existing rigs out there that have fixed rails especially for the GPU support. I had to adjust the back rail so that the GPUs would sit nicely on them w/o interfering with the risers.

The PSUs right now sit on the front rails and hang off in the back. Not really a problem yet, but I could add another rail there to support the PSUs. I'm also in the middle of looking into alternate PSU options for mining rigs so that may have a big impact on how I mount and handle PSUs.

The motherboard tray is really nice to have and I'm glad I decided to add that instead of mounting stand-offs directly to the rails. What I did notice was that there is a LOT of stress on the MBs when installing things like the ATX power connector so I think its good to secure the MB onto the tray with all the standoffs.

Right now I'm improving how the GFX cards sit on the rear rail so they don't move around so much. I've also got some MBs that can support more than 6 GPUs so I may start playing with larger rigs too.

Just wanted to share what I have so far and see if anyone has any feedback!

Bump as I still have not been able to solve this issue.

Just an update:

Bios does see all the cards, but when I booted into ubuntu and started claymore dual miner, it would only mine on 6 cards no matter what I did. Its hard to tell from lspci if the issue is with ubuntu or not.

BTW I did try EFI and legacy bootloaders and the results were the same. Has anyone managed to get more than 6 AMD gpus running on the TB250-BTC-PRO?

FYI I am running both the pro and non pro versions just fine with 6GPUS but I had to disable the IGPU.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Hey guys,

I just recently got the TB250-BTC-Pro and have been trying to get more than 6 cards running on it without any luck and was wondering if someone might be able to help me diagnose.

The BIOS is setup for EFI boot and I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 64bit and boots via EFI just fine. I can see all the cards from the BIOS startup screen but when I boot into ubuntu and claymore starts up it only shows 6 cards (I am trying with 8 cards).

7 of the cards are RX580s from XFX and 1 is an RX580 from Sapphire

lspci only shows 6 cards but I think others have mentioned this isn't necessarily an issue.

lshw output seems to show all the cards but i'm not entirely sure how to read it.

Other than that, I don't know what/how to check why its not seeing the other cards. Appreciate any ideas on this.

http://vi2.com/assets/lspci.txt

http://vi2.com/assets/lshw.txt

Thanks for all the great feedback guys. So I'm definitely looking at building the cases now as I do have access to the necessary tools. I'm also aiming towards the open-air cases as that is how I have been running my equipment. These are a few that I have running based on servers I had around which is why I was thinking server style first but definitely think open-air is a better design.







Going to go research open-air case designs. Going to put together some design criteria. So far I think this is important:

- Make sure they are easy to move (servers/cases are heavy/difficult to move). Should be easy to pick up (no cables/parts hanging/loose). <- This one is important as I see many people just "hanging" GFX cards. Right now my GFX cards can fall over/damage them so I think securing them is important and I see this on several of the nicer open air rigs.

- Dual / larger power supplies. One of the challenges I have with all my rigs is the second power supply. This is a hassle so either the rig needs to hold two power supplies or handle a larger power supply. I see some HP server power supplies being used. Seems like a good idea but would like some thoughts on this.

- angle stock vs extrusion. Hmm this is a tough one, for me I have access to extrusion at a reasonable cost as my company buys it in bulk and so I can get it at a decent price right now. Angle stock would work too but I feel like it would be a lot "rougher" Plus the extrusion slots make it easy to attach parts so I'm thinking it would be a good way to make the case easy to adjust.

Some questions

Is it better to do a stacked design with MB/power supply on the bottom and GFX cards on top? This seems to be the norm. I was originally thinking of it being flat with mobo behind (or in front depending on orientation) and GFX in the back, but maybe this is because I have been looking at server cases. I think the stacked design makes sense if I want to be able to throw the case on a wire rack which is the plan as they are sturdy, easy to manage cables on them, can be mobile if I need to move a whole shelf.

How many people stack their rigs? I've seen some pics of some big mining farms and they don't stack them. i feel like it would be a hassle to do maintenance if the rigs were stacked on top of each other.

Size of rigs? I was originally planning for 6 GPUs, but seems like it wouldn't be much effort to scale it to 8 or 10 GPUs. What do people typically build?

Hi all,

Over the last two months I've been slowly adding some graphics cards to mine altcoins (ETH) grabbing old hardware where possible and sticking cards in them. I've ended up with several machines ranging from just 1 GPU up to 4 GPUs. I've got around 10 GPUs now and am getting a new mobo since I'm out of PCIe slots. I started looking at consolidating these since its difficult to manage and was wondering what others are doing for some small mining ops.

I was considering a mining rig case but I see them going for around $150 for the case usually + shipping. I've done a lot of mechanical design and it seems silly for these rig enclosures to cost more than around $75. I could build them myself but thought I should ask here first.

Thanks!