Custom Spec Mining

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

Lately I have been drawn towards the idea of designing and perhaps even manufacturing a custom mining unit. My question is what skills would I require to create a custom mining rig? I assume the process is fairly difficult and would require programming skills and so on? Could I realistically create a rig for under £1000 that would be adequate once the next mining difficulty increases (no point developing for old standards). I am just a designer so I realize I am probably a little naive in terms of this idea, I just want to invest my money into a worthy idea and create something practical. Could I simply piece together standard PC parts and have a capable mining rig up and running?

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[Operatr]

Totally, I'm building one myself as a GPU rig as well as future support for ASIC devices whenver they ship out (im in the queue).

Once ASIC power gets cranked up GPU mining will start dying as the difficulty will increase dramatically. Though, Litecoins and other Bitcoin derivitives are still in GPU stage, so you can mine something else too. LTC is cheap right now, but imagine if someday it grows to where Bitcoin is now riding the coattails.



My rig is as follows, all in all coming in for around $800 so far not including a case (building that myself) http://www.blockburner.net/garden-party-bitcoin-mining-rig-build-begins/ -

Motherboard

GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

I chose this board as the price point was decent, fairly solid brand, and can accept 4 full size PCI-x16 cards for future expansion.

Processor

AMD Sempron 145 Sargas 2.8GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Desktop Processor SDX145HBGMBOX

Nothing too special is needed here, as the CPU won’t be doing a whole lot in terms of block crunching. I can still be viable to generate a little extra Litecoin cheddar though, but GPUs are still better at it by far.

Memory

G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL9S-2GBNT

Again nothing special, 2gb should be just fine to let the OS breathe deep.

Power

SILVERSTONE ST85F-P 850W ATX 12V v2.3 / EPS 12V 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply

 

This beast should allow expansion to run all 4 graphics cards eventually. Just as a computer builder, it is never a good idea to skimp on your power supply.

HDD

I wanted to run this thing from a flash drive, it cost about $8 for an 8gb stick, and is so generic I’m not going to bother to look up the exact one I ordered.

Video Cards

So far, 2x Sapphire Dual X 7850s were ordered just today for a hashing capacity of around 600-700 MHash/s, eventually Ill add 2 more to up to around 1.5 Ghash/s

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

Thanks for the reply, that sounds like a good setup and actually appears to have similar dimensions to my BitPhantom design . I might have to get the dimensions of those or similar components and create a new design with at a realistic scale. The ASIC chips look promising however there is a lot of speculation they are a scam? I guess I could develop a Litecoin rig however I am unsure about Litecoin's at the moment.

*edit*

I have just had a thought, I currently have this PC setup.

Motherboard:
H55M-LE (1PCI slot)

GPU:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Processor:
Intel Core i7  870@2.93GHz

Memory:
8GB Ram

Power Supply:
600W

What if I upgraded the motherboard (for x4 PCI), power supply (to 850W) and added an additional GTX 560 Ti to the new motherboard? Would this setup work well?

[pheaonix]

asics are not a scam, they are a type of technology. many of the companies offering them are scams though. avalon is a safe bet, but good luck getting one. not sure if it is worth buying into BFL at this point.

i am keeping a close eye to these forums though because the hard part about ASIC is the chips themselves, and we have started a project based around building boards that will readily accept the chips once they are shipped to a more local distributor.

i think you are hedged well if you think you can sell off the PC easily or actually will use it.

[jerethdaminer]

amd cards are better for mining, mining is about brute force not finesse amd ships with more core hence will do more work nvidia is better at everythingelse

[MashRinx]

If you are talking mining ONLY, Operatr's specs are probably closer to what you want that your OP:

- Cheapest CPU you can find.  If you want to also CPU-mine Litecoin, you may want to spend more here.  CPU-mining of Litecoin is a less-viable option than it used to be though.

- Decent MB ( has the PCIx slots you need for the cards you want to run)  have multiple ASRock 970 Extreme 4 MBs personally.  have had very good experience with them, overall.

- Inexpensive 2 GB of RAM

spend the rest that you can afford on the GPUs (AMD) that you want to run and the PSU that you need to power them.

Keep in mind that with the delivery of ASIC hardware, BTC mining difficulty WILL continue to rise, and more than likely it will continue to rise DRASTICALLY, so the amount of BTC you can mine today on a certain GPU setup may be much lower in 30/60/90 days.  Depending on what the price does in that same time-frame, your profitability may look very different as well.

[jerethdaminer]

which is the real killer but its the way of things come up with a problem and people will race to make something solve it faster

my new coin can only work on cpus due to bleh,  hacked gpu to run it,  well now it is immune to this, modify x to fit and so on and so forth