Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[sundownz]

So far two days in & the Dell T5500 is totally stable setup as pictured above.

[Storx]

few days ago i had a sata power connector from the T5500 looked deformed and extremely hot on a gpu that kept dropping out... i have since soldered the wires directly to the riser pins using some 4 wire cable i purchased from local homedepot....

[presi404]

Here is the final setup... each Riser is powered from a different "string" of wires from the power supply.

I am using both factory 6-pin plugs to two GPUs.

Then I am using the 8-pin CPU plug for the other two GPUs.

http://sundownaudio.com/BITCOIN%20PICS/0627171315_resized.jpg

Just check from time to time the heat in those connections.
I tend to avoid extra conversion cables in my rigs.

[CryptoBey]

So far two days in & the Dell T5500 is totally stable setup as pictured above.

Hello thanks for sharing your secret. What are you mining and what do u get hashrates? Is it same with a normal Rig or lower than it? "Bcoz of DDR3 system"

[sundownz]

So far two days in & the Dell T5500 is totally stable setup as pictured above.

Hello thanks for sharing your secret. What are you mining and what do u get hashrates? Is it same with a normal Rig or lower than it? "Bcoz of DDR3 system"

My hash-rates are the same as what I see on the forums from others with similar hardware & mods (I have not BIOS modded any of my cards at this time). They are also on par with all of my "home built" systems that are equally equipped.

I actually shared my whole setup the other day -- I will copy that below.

----------

Once I fill both racks will have 35 machines... I have 11 other computers that are being used daily around my home & my office (almost all of which are machines I built in 2013 when I first did mining that I have simply updated the GPUs).

Of the 24 on the racks I will have:

6x Fully "Home Built" Computers
15x HP Z400 Refurbished Workstations
3x Dell T5500 Refurbished Workstations


* First rack pretty much done. I will be neatening the power cords on the back side soon.


* Second rack under construction... I have all the GPUs -- just waiting on other parts to come in.


* Current Results on Nice Hash (from yesterday).

In total this is what I will be running when all 35 machines are going :

Radeon RX480/580 : 27
Radeon 7970 : 1
Radeon 7850 : 2
Radeon RX560 : 4
Geforce 1060 : 22
Geforce 1070 : 13
Geforce 1080 : 27

TOTAL = 96 GPUs

I have a few other cards that I need to make homes for... 8x Radeon RX560, 2x Radeon 7950, 2x Geforce 1070, 1x Geforce 750 Ti, 1x Radeon R9 270X, and one more Geforce 1080.

So once I figure all that out a total of 111 GPUs.

I may go ahead & set up a third rack for all of these cards.

[CryptoBey]

@sundownz Thank you for answering me. You have a mining factory Good luck for future

[Storx]

Good stuff man, i wish i had the space and POWER to run more rigs.. i currently have 18 x 1080ti's running 4 per card rig mostly... i just cant seem to find any type of warehouse space worth the price to rent and the few i have found they require me to keep the roll down doors shut, which makes it a cooling nightmare....

[sundownz]

Good stuff man, i wish i had the space and POWER to run more rigs.. i currently have 18 x 1080ti's running 4 per card rig mostly... i just cant seem to find any type of warehouse space worth the price to rent and the few i have found they require me to keep the roll down doors shut, which makes it a cooling nightmare....

Indeed. Luckily I already have a huge warehouse for my business & it has quite a bit of electrical capacity available -- just had to run wires for new outlets.

[rs1x]

Just wanted to stop in and thank OP.  I stumbled upon this thread, purchased a Z400 from newegg, it came a few days later and was pretty much plug and play.  I have 4 XFX RX 570's running with this box, with little effort.

[Storx]

little word of advice in regards to the T5500 combined with GTX1080ti's... i noticed a HUGE drop in hashpower between the T5500 i bought with 12GB of memory $188 version and the one with 4GB only the cheaper $163 one on like half my algo's i mine... so i looked into it... ccminer was using 100% of the memory on the 4GB rig on some algo's while only using like 40% on the other.. i moved 4GB over and it fixed the issue i was having.. gained back the missing hashrate drop...

[rs1x]

Went back to purchase another Z400 @ Newegg and they are sold out 

[sundownz]

little word of advice in regards to the T5500 combined with GTX1080ti's... i noticed a HUGE drop in hashpower between the T5500 i bought with 12GB of memory $188 version and the one with 4GB only the cheaper $163 one on like half my algo's i mine... so i looked into it... ccminer was using 100% of the memory on the 4GB rig on some algo's while only using like 40% on the other.. i moved 4GB over and it fixed the issue i was having.. gained back the missing hashrate drop...

Indeed. I have upgraded all of mine to minimum 6 GB of RAM.

[sundownz]

Went back to purchase another Z400 @ Newegg and they are sold out 

You may have to look around a bit to find them under a different item number:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883284915&cm_re=HP_Z400-_-83-284-915-_-Product

Here is another one -- a bit more money but also a faster CPU.

I've seen the cheaper ones come in & out of stock a few times since I started buying them.

[evakka]

@sundownz
At first, congrats for your farm and also for sharing all your work.

I have a question and because your are dealing with older systems you may have an idea...
I am using an old HTPC, Scaleo E,
https://u.cubeupload.com/jonaz81a/Scaleoe2.jpg

which has 3 pcie slots and plugged in two 280x cards with powered risers.
HDD sata 170gb, ram 1,5 GB
Windows 10, claymore for zec
Virtual memory on HDD, 16gb

The cards are undervolted and in the wall plug the power is 550w.
I have changed two PSU's, a 80 certified 650w and a corsair cx750w.

The issue is that the system stays on only for 30' and then shuts down on its own without any errors

Any ideas???

[sundownz]

@sundownz
At first, congrats for your farm and also for sharing all your work.

I have a question and because your are dealing with older systems you may have an idea...
I am using an old HTPC, Scaleo E,
https://u.cubeupload.com/jonaz81a/Scaleoe2.jpg

which has 3 pcie slots and plugged in two 280x cards with powered risers.
HDD sata 170gb, ram 1,5 GB
Windows 10, claymore for zec
Virtual memory on HDD, 16gb

The cards are undervolted and in the wall plug the power is 550w.
I have changed two PSU's, a 80 certified 650w and a corsair cx750w.

The issue is that the system stays on only for 30' and then shuts down on its own without any errors

Any ideas???

This isn't good news -- but I did have one of my Dell T5500s doing that. It would shut off after anywhere from 1 to 20 hours (I returned it & Newegg refunded me).

While I did not spend the time to find the culprit it simply must be bad hardware -- probably motherboard as I changed the PSU to a spare I had to rule that out & also changed the RAM to different sticks.

Based on some speculation on Google searches I assume it may be bad capacitors on the motherboard.

[evakka]

@sundownz
At first, congrats for your farm and also for sharing all your work.

I have a question and because your are dealing with older systems you may have an idea...
I am using an old HTPC, Scaleo E,
https://u.cubeupload.com/jonaz81a/Scaleoe2.jpg

which has 3 pcie slots and plugged in two 280x cards with powered risers.
HDD sata 170gb, ram 1,5 GB
Windows 10, claymore for zec
Virtual memory on HDD, 16gb

The cards are undervolted and in the wall plug the power is 550w.
I have changed two PSU's, a 80 certified 650w and a corsair cx750w.

The issue is that the system stays on only for 30' and then shuts down on its own without any errors

Any ideas???

This isn't good news -- but I did have one of my Dell T5500s doing that. It would shut off after anywhere from 1 to 20 hours (I returned it & Newegg refunded me).

While I did not spend the time to find the culprit it simply must be bad hardware -- probably motherboard as I changed the PSU to a spare I had to rule that out & also changed the RAM to different sticks.

Based on some speculation on Google searches I assume it may be bad capacitors on the motherboard.

Thanks for your post
I guess you are correct, this is an old motherboard and these issues can occur

[rs1x]

I ended up grabbing a Z400 from Ebay with no OS.  Grabbed a $20 win10 license from softwareswap.  So I have $100 in this bad boy and running great.  A tad more work but about $80 less than newegg.

[Storx]

I ended up grabbing a Z400 from Ebay with no OS.  Grabbed a $20 win10 license from softwareswap.  So I have $100 in this bad boy and running great.  A tad more work but about $80 less than newegg.

you dont need an OS license, i run most of my machines with unactivated windows on USB stick, i found the internal HD on them were using way to much energy mining full time i dropped about 20watts off the plug switching to USB stick, plus its very simple to just mass copy the usb sticks on my main pc for future builds.....
https://www.amazon.com/PNY-Attache-Flash-Drive-P-FD64GATT03-GE/dp/B0063GKG6I/ref=sr_1_6?s=pc&rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1500435546&sr=1-6&keywords=64gb%2Busb%2Bdrive&refinements=p_n_size_browse-bin%3A10285016011%2Cp_85%3A2470955011%2Cp_72%3A1248879011&th=1

[sundownz]

I ended up grabbing a Z400 from Ebay with no OS.  Grabbed a $20 win10 license from softwareswap.  So I have $100 in this bad boy and running great.  A tad more work but about $80 less than newegg.

That's awesome =)

All of mine are running strong no issues -- extremely stable systems.

[sundownz]

My first two racks of dedicated machines are full... with these plus the others scattered around the office / at home I have 101 total GPUs online.

I've swapped cards in a few of the systems earlier to reduce the amount of AMD cards I am running... it's likely I will swap almost all of the AMD cards to GTX 1060s or 1080s.