hello, you can easily do calculations to determine required airflow based upon size of your room/s and watts/btu's of your gpu (close estimate). Talk to an experienced commercial hvac installer in your area. You start with a rough idea of watts, estimate btu's per card, use the internet to find avg and high temps for your area, and then calculate cfm (cubic feet per minute or metric equivalent) you will need to maintain the temps.

 maybe more experienced miners will share acceptable temp ranges & settings they run their specific cards at (in mid/large scale operations) during summer? rx 470/480/570/580 would interest me the most, as well as results LONG TERM with older generation r9 290x/gtx 970/etc cards that have been running for a few years at this point- anyone ?? of course ballpark figures would be helpful!

probably the solution can be either with OR without a/c

when considering your location, I would suggest that thermal mass (large concrete slab or concrete/brick building is good) & amount of building insulation (more insulation, takes longer time for building to heat up in the daytime) might provide an advantage as far as regulating temperatures. as well as large filtered intake & exhaust area/s.

I am small scale on my 3rd rig, but want to standardize everything, and ultimately realized right away that it would run more smoothly if I switched over fully to Linux. To be clear I am NOT interested in simplemining, ethos, pimppos, etc, but a standard ubutu (of one variety or another) installation that I set up specific to my needs. I am comfortable with Linux & Windows, and command line interface, etc.

Anyways, this will never be a huge farm, maybe 6-10 rigs max, 7/8gpu's each...similar but not identical hardware. I don't need to network boot the os or anything like that.

I currently can order refurbished western digital 7200rpm 250gb hdd's for under $15, and 64gb-128gb usb sticks for about the same price or not much more.  ssd's are not on the table, as I am willing to be patient waiting for reboot/etc during setup.


Which would you go with if you wanted to standardize everything?


Currently I have 1 rig running on Windows 10, nicehash (for testing/optimizing gpu's) and the other 2 on Ubuntu server, w/ multipoolminer / miningpoolhub. I want the Linux installation flexible to use different mining software if I choose, for multiple coins.  

I know there will be some manual work required to configure each rig.  And I have already (mostly) figured out gpu tweaking in Ubuntu without the help of afterburner etc, so that big hurdle is (mostly) past.

I know I should be able to set up/clone hdd's easily, but I am not quite as familiar with which Linux distros are best to run on a usb stick, and which are easiest to set up in "persistence" mode on a usb stick.  I would have extras (a backup of the drive on hand), ready to swap out if I ran into problems, either with hdd or usb stick.

ANY thoughts or advice very greatly appreciated! Thank you