Ethereum with Aorus Radeon RX 580 and Dell Optiplex 780 Tower 2.9GHz

[brush242]

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.

[chup]

You can hit the wall with internal power supply, it has 240W for 12V line but divided in two lines, so You will have to find balance connecting power supply for the GPU. And undervolt/underclock it because in full power it can take more power than PSU can supply to complete system. Probably You would have to make choice of integrated GPU for booting the system, because RX580 prefers systems with UEFI BIOS in order to be primary GPU.

[brush242]

Thanks Chup!

Are you saying that I will have to boot the machine normally, with whatever GPU is in there, then switch to the 580?

Any thoughts on how many cards the machine can run, total?

Thanks again!

[brush242]

Crap, feels like learning about mining BTC from scratch all over again.

Heh.