A few weeks ago I pitched the idea to my wife about building a mining rig.. she was very sckeptical to say the least.
once we went over a ROI spreadsheet I made she actually agreed to spend $4k (CDN) to build one.. I was shocked she went for it to be honest.
So I started watching and reading as much as i could to make the best decisions.
I own a store called
www.makerparts.ca and I sell V-slot aluminum extrusions.. so I used this to create a custom frame.
used my 3d printer to make some custom brackets to hang the cards.
I decided to go with a more vertical design, instead of the traditional horizontal one. ive seen everywhere.. it was a risk but I figured i could always reconfigure the frame it it didnt work out.
I wanted to go with 8 1060 6Gb cards.. settled on the MSI Gaming X 1060 6GB, due to the oversized cooling on it. and it was one of the few cards i could actually get locally.. once i visited 5 shops
At first I purchased a Asus Z270-A Prime motherboard but I found it hard to deal with, cards were not showing up. the first 16x slot was not responding..
it was a pain in the ass to be honest.. so i ended up returning it to newegg.ca
I was able to grab a Asus B250 Mining Expert and that has worked beautifully.. first shot.. all 8 cards working without issue. the board is barebones otherwise. very basic.. wish it has a build in power button and many more onboard 3pin Case fan plug.. how about 10 more lol.
I overdid it with fans.. Added 8 of the cheapest 120mm fans i could find. blowing onto the cards and also two 200mm fans on top sucking hot air out.
8GB ram, a Celeron 3930, Dual Evga 750W G2 power supplies plus I purchased several more Molex power cables directly from evga as i didnt want to power the PCI risers with SATA,
Its a pretty tight package and heavy! I do like the staggered GPU placement and everything runs very cool.
final GPU Spacing is more open then shown in these photos
Currently pulling about 1150 watts when running nicehash,
havent really tuned the GPus much.. except for running at 80% power and +400 mem clock
Id like to hear your thoughts on this setup.