My second ZEC + XMR+ ETH thread builds info links thoughts and photos.

[philipma1957]

Maybe Not sure.

It is hard for me to keep up with it because I know I must shut down most of the gear on May 1st.

  My summer power rate kicks in I jump from  12.7 to 17.7

but

 winter   the 12.7 -3 for heat is 9.7
summer the 17.7 +2 for ac is 19.7

So I can not mine much  from May to Oct 1

right now it has 23 cards on 6 rigs



it is 90f in the garage




it is 83 f in the den  and 32 f outside the house.  I get a big benefit from the heat in the winter it allows the expansion of gear.

[arielbit]

@phil

take a look at roof ventilation.



here is a video that shows how it works using smoke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRJh7jqXRQA

note: there are also evap coolers that are installed in the roof.

preparing for summer early would be best..


P.S. good to know i wasn't the only one with messy rigs out here 

[philipma1957]

@phil

take a look at roof ventilation.



here is a video that shows how it works using smoke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRJh7jqXRQA

note: there are also evap coolers that are installed in the roof.

preparing for summer early would be best..


P.S. good to know i wasn't the only one with messy rigs out here 

wire management and I do not see eye to eye.

[arielbit]

@ phil

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)



note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

[Nikolaj]

1. About 20-25% each person back then. Now, depends on how much we earned and how much to put back in, when we reach a certain ROI on investment.

2. SRR - this is cheaper alternative than buying a switched PDU.

3. I think its up to you and your goals. Any business has risks - the trick is managing, adapting and overcoming risks. So it depends what you want to achieve and what can you afford (dont sell the house) etc.

4. 50 years and above... age is just a number.... so much still to explore and learn. BTC & the blockchain, FINTECH, etc -- so exciting, so why not be part of that future. Mining ASICS... there is only Bitmain and Canaan - yes unfortunately.... quality control is still unregulated in the world of mining vs standard IT HW like server, network, CPUs, GPUs etc..... But to be fair, HW like S9 while not exactly perfect is a quite a machine. Same for A7s - its latest but has its quirks.... $/TH ratio is not as great as S9, while Bitmain's RMA process is not exactly a picnic - expect 1 month or more turnaround time. I guess that's part of the "agony and excitement" if you're a miner -- otherwise Bitcointalk.org will be collecting digital dust.

5. One of the investor is in the security business so yeah... we have to be vigilant at all times - plenty of bad guys out there. Our farm is not big just a small farm but we do run it like a business. GPU farm uses a combination of several tools like... Claymore's Ethman and AwesomeMiner.com. Of recent, I am also testing SimpleMining Linux deployment to further simplify things but I think we can't escape from Windows that soon because of GPU driver support, miner's preferences, learning curve etc.

6. Standardized on G2-EVGA 1000, 1300 and 1600 PSUs. Heat will always be the miner's nightmare - 4 slots or 6 slots format - the problem is the same because it runs 24x7. Always, undervolt to avoid overheating with plenty of fan RPMs -- better replace GPU fan vs replace a burnt GPU -- that's the cardinal rule IMHO. Also, Claymore's temp controls are excellent, so I use alot of his control switches. The 4 slot Biostars are target temp at 77c and hard stop mining at 95c. My wooden chop stick trick below is perfect solution for the moment and keeps them at check at 77-80c

Good job guys, and good luck with your operation. Nice approach

 

[Nikolaj]

@ phil

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)



note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

well.. that's .. just.. creative  

You've got balls of steel for sure

[philipma1957]

@ phil

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)



note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

well.. that's .. just.. creative  

You've got balls of steel for sure

yeah it does look good.  In a sick wheel kind of way



My issue in the summer is the base kwatt number goes from 12.7 to 17.7

 so even If I move them all to the shed using an ethernet cable and a power line which means no extra ac bill 4 fans =

at least 300 watts or 7 kwatts a day that is 210 kwatts at 17.7 cents or 38 bucks plus the extra 5 cents a kwatt for the gear

figure 3000 kwatts 150 + 37 or just about 200  more then when it is the winter prices and my heating bill drops 100

so summer power cost is 300 usd extra  for these 5 months  may june july august and sept.  I usually sell gear end of march or april due to this.

[ps_jb]

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)

It looks to me how Antoni Gaudi designed Sagrada Familia:

[citronick]

@ phil

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)



note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

great ventilation this - also easy to troubleshoot!

any feedback from your room mate or spouse?

[Hotmetal]

philipma1957 & citronick: What GPU's are you guys using and why?

i am a big fan of the rx 470 by mis

The RX480's come in at about the same price here. You recon it's worth going that route instead of the 470's?

[philipma1957]

philipma1957 & citronick: What GPU's are you guys using and why?

i am a big fan of the rx 470 by mis

The RX480's come in at about the same price here. You recon it's worth going that route instead of the 470's?

If they are really close in price go for it.

Even more so if,your,power is cheap.

[arielbit]

@ phil

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)

note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

great ventilation this - also easy to troubleshoot!

any feedback from your room mate or spouse?

they don't like going inside the room except me (because of heat and noise), so everything is fine...

i sleep at the room beside this one...beside my bed passes the wire (THHN AWG 6) that powers these rigs, where a clamp meter is placed, so i can easily know if a rig is down just by looking at the amps, i check before i sleep or anytime of the day (even if i am laying down the bed the clamp meter is within reach).

[QuintLeo]

My issue in the summer is the base kwatt number goes from 12.7 to 17.7

 I thought I had it bad in Iowa with summer rates bumping me from around 7.5 to over 14 (all up) from mid-June to mid-Sept.

 That was the entire reason I decided to move to the "land of low cost electric" last summer - though I made the DECISION to do so a couple years back, it took me a while to get the finances into place.

 I also had the advantage that I didn't have anything serious to hold me in place in Iowa - the entire reason I'd moved there hadn't been operative for years.

[QuintLeo]

I have started to streamline the GPU farm into Biostar Z170 4-PCI riserless format

Do you think these MBs can be used for 4 GPUs?

http://a.co/i1sB4TF
http://a.co/dvemM6M
http://a.co/4xfxdVj

 Those should all work - but tend to be more expensive than the Biostar option.

 Personally, I'd prefer to find a good board with *3* PCI-E slots with proper spacing to leave an "open" space between each card, but all of the motherboard makers want to cram the 2'nd and 3'd card too close together (or want you to pay SERIOUS $$$ for a board with 5+ slots on it).

 Putting an ITX-type "short" card in the third slot on a common 3-slot board (or better yet, a low profile card) works well enough for good cooling. I keep wondering when Gigabyte (or someone) is going to introduce a "short" RX480 or RX470 board, they don't eat as much power as the Gigabyte ITX-type short 1070 board.

 If AMD can put a RX480 on a True Single Slot fairly short board (WX7100), someone should manage it easily on a "ITX-short" double-slot card.

[QuintLeo]

So, I am getting ready to strap-mod the bios on my 2nd mining rig. However, I realized that I need to know the device numbers of each of the 5 GPUs in order to do this, since the actual bios flash command line specifies the device to flash.

This was not a concern on rig#1 because this has 4 identical MSI 470s in it.  However, on rig #2 I have 1 sapphire nitro 470 8GB in the mix, so I need to make sure I am flashing the correct cards.  It may actually be that that sapphire takes the same strap-mod (more on that later) but i really need to know how to identify which device number windows as assigned to each of my 5 GPUs.

If someone could point me to a resource of education on this or suggest a way to easily identify them on Windows 7 I would appreciate it.

For instance, what determines which device # is assigned? Is it the order you install the cards? Or the PCIe slot they are plugged into? Or, is it something else?

The PCIe slots on my ASRock BTC R2 Mobo are numbered 1-6 from right to left, with the lone x16 slot (currently unoccupied) being slot #2.  However, when I go into device manager and check the properties for each GPU, it shows only PCI Bus 2-6 for the 5 GPUs, meaning it shows nothing as PCI Bus 1, but I really don't know how that correlates anyway since I know the device #s I am looking for begin with 0, so am assuming i should be looking for device #s 0-5, not 1-6.  FYI, my lone Sapphire is plugged into PCIe slot #4 (3rd installed slot from the right) and I am pretty sure (but not 100% confident) that it was also the 3rd GPU I installed.  Should this mean that this is device #2 (after 0 and 1)?  or, is it not that straight forward. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

do not be stupid  pull the sapphire  and just flash  the other cards. (all the same correct?) msi rx 470's


then flash the sapphire by itself.  and I am really pretty sure you need a different bios to flash it or brick city

Well yeah, obviously I could pull that orphan Sapphire as you mention, but I would rather avoid that if possible for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I had a hell of a time getting 5 GPUs working on this rig so aside from eventually trying to get a 6th working in that x16 slot, I'm not eager to start unplugging and re-plugging cards in case it screws things up again.

The other reason is this... I am even unsure how pulling that card would affect my device numbers? For instance, will windows re-number the GPUs after reboot only based on the now 4 that are plugged in?  meaning they would then be 0, 1, 2 & 3? 

Is windows really so lame that it doesn't have a utility or easy way to ID which GPU it assigned which device number?  It seems more likely that there is a way, I just can't figure it out.

 Partly Windows IS that lame, partly limitation of the device drivers, partly that there are very few folks that run more than ONE card per machine so it is a very low priority for M$, AMD, or NVidia to bother trying to fix.

 Best way to flash the cards is do ONE AT A TIME - only one in the rig you are using to flash them with - that way you only have to worry about bricking one card at a time, and can verify that the flash for each card worked.

[QuintLeo]

4. 50 years and above... age is just a number....

6. Standardized on G2-EVGA 1000, 1300 and 1600 PSUs.

 4. Tell that to my arthritis. 8-/

 6. Standardization is a good thing.
 I wish my motley assortment of mining gear was more standardized, and am working towards that goal with my new builds, but when I started with the ETH and later ZEC mining it was "take what I have, get it up running and working" on a rather wide assortment of existing gear largely left over from my Scrypt mining days then add to that as I could afford to.

 I do have 3 "clusters" of standardised gear - my group of old Sempron based rigs (single-card unfortunately, but bought the MBs/CPUs/RAM as a group about a decade back and no point in not USING them), my A2 "cluster", and my "new 3-card rigs".

 I've standardised on Seasonic PSUs (mostly the X-series, but I have a few SMALL supplies around too) - been running them for decades, some going back to before EVGA started selling power supplies.
 Nothing against the EVGA G2 series, those seem to be a quite robust design too, but Seasonic and I have HISTORY (almost all very good, and the only bad ever has been infant mortality).
 

[Hotmetal]

Partly Windows IS that lame, partly limitation of the device drivers, partly that there are very few folks that run more than ONE card per machine so it is a very low priority for M$, AMD, or NVidia to bother trying to fix.

 Best way to flash the cards is do ONE AT A TIME - only one in the rig you are using to flash them with - that way you only have to worry about bricking one card at a time, and can verify that the flash for each card worked.

I think Claymore mentioned that it isn't a Windows problem and more an OpenCL problem.
If it was a Windows issue, AB / Trixx etc would all show different orders of GPUs.

[philipma1957]

I have started to streamline the GPU farm into Biostar Z170 4-PCI riserless format

Do you think these MBs can be used for 4 GPUs?

http://a.co/i1sB4TF
http://a.co/dvemM6M
http://a.co/4xfxdVj

 Those should all work - but tend to be more expensive than the Biostar option.

 Personally, I'd prefer to find a good board with *3* PCI-E slots with proper spacing to leave an "open" space between each card, but all of the motherboard makers want to cram the 2'nd and 3'd card too close together (or want you to pay SERIOUS $$$ for a board with 5+ slots on it).

 Putting an ITX-type "short" card in the third slot on a common 3-slot board (or better yet, a low profile card) works well enough for good cooling. I keep wondering when Gigabyte (or someone) is going to introduce a "short" RX480 or RX470 board, they don't eat as much power as the Gigabyte ITX-type short 1070 board.

 If AMD can put a RX480 on a True Single Slot fairly short board (WX7100), someone should manage it easily on a "ITX-short" double-slot card.

I ordered the evga

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188178

135+10 tax = 145 - 20 rebate = 125

 It comes today. 

I have 5 biostar  the best I ever did was  119 + 9 tax = 128 - 20 rebate = 108

For 17 bucks extra I will test it.

There is a small rx 480  it comes inside here


http://store.hp.com/us/en/PDPStdView?catalogId=10051&urlLangId=-1&langId=-1&productId=1501157&storeId=10151

[vapourminer]

i think if you could give more space between your cards you can run them all in summer, and with a good ventilation of course

take a look at my spider-man rigs..(there are others that are not spider-man below but they are fewer)
https://s28.postimg.org/8k193yri5/IMAG0055.jpg

note:
there is also a fan and cards at the other side, didn't fit in picture....it was a fan for exhaust to an open window.

i can install another rig or two just above the window because the air is cooler there (i opened a attic manhole just near it)

this setup should get an award . just not sure what kind

[citronick]

I have started to streamline the GPU farm into Biostar Z170 4-PCI riserless format

<snipped>

I ordered the evga

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188178

135+10 tax = 145 - 20 rebate = 125

 It comes today.  

I have 5 biostar  the best I ever did was  119 + 9 tax = 128 - 20 rebate = 108

For 17 bucks extra I will test it.

There is a small rx 480  it comes inside here


http://store.hp.com/us/en/PDPStdView?catalogId=10051&urlLangId=-1&langId=-1&productId=1501157&storeId=10151

Hi Phil - have you got the EVGA mobo yet - pls do review the spacing - seems that this mobo has better clearance compared to the Biostar. Thanks

BTW, I moved all my rigs to selling hash at Nicehash Equihash/ZCASH and Cryptonite/XMR market to fully leverage the nice rise of BTC now at 809$. Poloniex and Shapeshift is taking too much from me over time - rather cut off all of that and go to Nicehash and get paid directly in BTC. It may work out to be the same but at least I get BTC upfront.