Hey All,
I'm trying to help my nephew out with learning about mining and everything that goes along with it: research, reading, getting it wrong, persistence, etc. I was thinking about getting him an
S7-LN or S7, but I already have the stuff below.
Any insights on mining Ethereum with a Gigabyte Aorus Radeon 580, 4GB, 256-bit GDDR5, using a Dell Optiplex 780 Tower with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93GHz with 4GB of memory? It has Windows 10 64 on it. I have them gathering dust.
As far as I remember, the Dell has two PCI slots, one PCIe x16 slot, and one PCIe x1 slot, for a total of four.
I assume the card I have is a no-brainer, but how many would the machine operate, with risers or whatnot if necessary? Will the Dell be able to power the one 580 internally since it is only one? Or, do we need an external power supply even for that? Any thoughts, tips, tricks, pitfalls, etc?
I want him to figure it out as he goes, learning along the way, but I don't want to encourage him further if the tower will only run one (two, three, seventeen?) cards. Plus, I don't want him talking (read: suckering) his mom into buying him an expensive new card that he can't use.
The machine won't be used for anything else so the optical drive can come out and it can be stripped down and left open for airflow.
I'm reading up to make sure I point him in the right direction, but any ideas, suggestions, threads, pointers greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.