Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[mittooss]

Very good idea, thanks for sharing. Our senior members should help us to learn deeper.

[sundownz]

This is the one I got -- just one of them right now.

So far just been using the CPUs

Did you measure the power consumption of this one by any chance — mining cryptonight? Been thinking about trying one of these, but scared that they'll eat like 300W or something.

It is a power hog -- running all 40 CPU cores on Cryptonite the system draws nearly 800 watts (IIRC... I'll double check when I get to the shop in a few).

Although, it draws quite a bit just sitting there at idle... there may be ways to optimize that which I haven't found yet.

[wacko]

It is a power hog -- running all 40 CPU cores on Cryptonite the system draws nearly 800 watts (IIRC... I'll double check when I get to the shop in a few).

Holy crap, that's a lot more than I could even imagine. It's still profitable I guess with the current prices, but for those with limited power (myself included) that's probably a no go. Thanks for the info!

[sundownz]

This is the one I got -- just one of them right now.

So far just been using the CPUs

Did you measure the power consumption of this one by any chance — mining cryptonight? Been thinking about trying one of these, but scared that they'll eat like 300W or something.

It is a power hog -- running all 40 CPU cores on Cryptonite the system draws nearly 800 watts (IIRC... I'll double check when I get to the shop in a few).

Although, it draws quite a bit just sitting there at idle... there may be ways to optimize that which I haven't found yet.

Double checked... low to mid 500s just sitting there then about 800-watts with all 40-cores running.

I imagine there has to be some way to get the "idle" power draw down -- but I don't know it. At least not yet, haha.

[wacko]

Double checked... low to mid 500s just sitting there then about 800-watts with all 40-cores running.

I imagine there has to be some way to get the "idle" power draw down -- but I don't know it. At least not yet, haha.

I can't even think of anything that would draw 500W idle there. Maybe some extra controllers enabled that you could disable or remove? Maybe some crazy high-rpm fans? Most of the server boards I've seen don't have that many power-saving options in their BIOSes. Maybe some kind of C1E option there to make the CPUs drop the multiplier and voltage while idling, but then again, if you're cpu mining with this one, then it won't save much.

[sundownz]

** Package of XEON X5660 CPUs. I do CPU mining on these and these chips are CHEAP on E-Bay and 3x faster than the one that comes in them & also draw less power.

This has paid off nicely... so far have mined 600k INTENSE coins (CryptoNight) on my CPUs alone.

Current value ~$3400+ USD.

So... I figured out... don't waste time using any miner other than XMRig.

I went from ~170 to ~230 per X5660 switching up CPU miners (just using the regular "cpuminer" program before).

Still hanging out on Intense... value not as high as my last post but I think it has huge potential.

-----

Only issue is getting it to load on system boot -- as it needs to be ran as admin for "huge pages" to work (without huge pages it's no faster).

So... you need to use Windows Task scheduler... make a task that starts at "USER LOGIN" (NOT System boot)... and tell it to "run with highest priveledge" -- and it will start correctly. Just putting a normal shortcut in the startup folder doesn't work.

[senseless]

Double checked... low to mid 500s just sitting there then about 800-watts with all 40-cores running.

The CPUs are TDP of around 130W (520W max). I wonder if it's those high RPM fans? Seems like there's something eating up 300W.

[lexele]

Hi there,
is anyone here running 4 vegas on a dell T5500. I wouls like to be sure it works somehow.

On mine It runs fine with three, but fourth card gives me nightmares. Artifacts and crash on miner start ( it's not a card in particular, I switched them). Even if fourth card is plugged but not in the mining config, it crashes.

I thought about crossfire&ULPS disabling, but It didn't help. Changing miner soft does not change anything either.

Any ideas?

[sundownz]

I am diversifying my farm a little... due to my interest in Cryptonight I bought some RX570/580 cards on Black Friday & Cyber Monday ($229 or less per card)... as well as 3x VEGA64 cards (these are beasts... landed three for $549.99 each).

And last night I found a deal I couldn't pass up on the higher-end EVGA 1070 Ti FTW2 model for $469 each... got 9 of those on order. May have been a mis-print as B&H photo changed it to $499.99 this morning:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1369702-REG/evga_08g_p4_6775_kr_geforce_gtx_1070_ti.html

-----

I also found several deals on 850-watt PSUs so I will be using a lot of those... which will be great for the 1070Ti FTW cards (each needs 2x 8-pin) since the 850s have 6x PCI-E plugs and I will run three per system.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182324
** These were $89.99 on Cyber Monday

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0723W13838
** Also caught a random deal on these for $89.99 a few weeks ago

-----

So I am continuing my philosophy of only buying stuff at a good deal =)

[sundownz]

Another deal I caught... my 3x VEGA-64 system is drawing more than I'd like even on the 850-watt supplies.

Wanting to keep the load ~85% or less so I bought one 1200-watt supply... killer deal $191.99 for Rosewill Quark 1200!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VS8728G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So... in the future I will only buy VEGA-56 as power draw is ~50 watts less each for about the same Cryptonight performance.  Those will run on my 850-watt supplies.

[Branko]

Hi there,
is anyone here running 4 vegas on a dell T5500. I wouls like to be sure it works somehow.

On mine It runs fine with three, but fourth card gives me nightmares. Artifacts and crash on miner start ( it's not a card in particular, I switched them). Even if fourth card is plugged but not in the mining config, it crashes.

I thought about crossfire&ULPS disabling, but It didn't help. Changing miner soft does not change anything either.

Any ideas?

Is there physical space inside that box for all those cards, or you use risers?

[wacko]

Another deal I caught... my 3x VEGA-64 system is drawing more than I'd like even on the 850-watt supplies.

Wanting to keep the load ~85% or less so I bought one 1200-watt supply... killer deal $191.99 for Rosewill Quark 1200!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VS8728G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So... in the future I will only buy VEGA-56 as power draw is ~50 watts less each for about the same Cryptonight performance.  Those will run on my 850-watt supplies.

From what I've heard a properly tuned Vega should draw ~ 150W on cryptonight. Don't have any Vega's myself though, but don't have any reasons to doubt the people I've heard it from. 3 of those shouldn't draw much more than 500W.

[lexele]

Hi there,
is anyone here running 4 vegas on a dell T5500. I wouls like to be sure it works somehow.

On mine It runs fine with three, but fourth card gives me nightmares. Artifacts and crash on miner start ( it's not a card in particular, I switched them). Even if fourth card is plugged but not in the mining config, it crashes.

I thought about crossfire&ULPS disabling, but It didn't help. Changing miner soft does not change anything either.

Any ideas?

Is there physical space inside that box for all those cards, or you use risers?

risers of course.
And I found a strange workarround to make all cards mine, although the fourth card mines only at 1600 vs 1900+ for the other three.

[lexele]

Another deal I caught... my 3x VEGA-64 system is drawing more than I'd like even on the 850-watt supplies.

Wanting to keep the load ~85% or less so I bought one 1200-watt supply... killer deal $191.99 for Rosewill Quark 1200!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VS8728G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So... in the future I will only buy VEGA-56 as power draw is ~50 watts less each for about the same Cryptonight performance.  Those will run on my 850-watt supplies.

From what I've heard a properly tuned Vega should draw ~ 150W on cryptonight. Don't have any Vega's myself though, but don't have any reasons to doubt the people I've heard it from. 3 of those shouldn't draw much more than 500W.

160W actually, and three of them with system (dell t5500) I have 545W at the wall.
I have currently four cards running less than 700W whole rig with a eVGA G2 1000W PSU

[megarounder]

Oh Alright.I would say you have made a really good profit in other words already.I saw the links you have posted, All the hardware is already out of Stock.

Good Luck

[sundownz]

Another deal I caught... my 3x VEGA-64 system is drawing more than I'd like even on the 850-watt supplies.

Wanting to keep the load ~85% or less so I bought one 1200-watt supply... killer deal $191.99 for Rosewill Quark 1200!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VS8728G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So... in the future I will only buy VEGA-56 as power draw is ~50 watts less each for about the same Cryptonight performance.  Those will run on my 850-watt supplies.

From what I've heard a properly tuned Vega should draw ~ 150W on cryptonight. Don't have any Vega's myself though, but don't have any reasons to doubt the people I've heard it from. 3 of those shouldn't draw much more than 500W.

The VEGA-56 will do with ~150 watt -- the VEGA-64 takes ~50 watts more (booooooo)... sadly I haven't been able to buy any VEGA-56 cards:

http://www.gandalph3000.com/cast_xmr/howto-mine-monero-rx-vega/

I also use my CPU at full tilt on Cryptonight... which puts me right at ~850-900 or so watts on the total system (GPUs + CPU + System in General) to max them out -- I am going for the ~2kh figure so ~250 per card.

[shibob]

Thank for sharing your great ideas.
All of my rigs are using DDR4 and I'm going to build more, but DDR4 RAM is a way more expensive now while I could find some cheap 2nd hand DDR3. But I wonder are there any lost in performance when using DDR3 rather than DDR4?

[wacko]

But I wonder are there any lost in performance when using DDR3 rather than DDR4?

Zero difference between DDR3 and DDR4 for mining purposes.

[shibob]

But I wonder are there any lost in performance when using DDR3 rather than DDR4?

Zero difference between DDR3 and DDR4 for mining purposes.

Thank you very much! I will take a try and see how it's going.

[wacko]

Thank you very much! I will take a try and see how it's going.

Keep in mind though that there's a lot more DDR4 motherboards out there that can support 8+ GPUs per rig. I used to run z97 boards for exactly the same reason as yours — old ddr3 was cheaper than new ddr4 (it was "free" for me since I already had some ddr3 sticks). But with the newer z270 boards it is possible to run 9 cards without any splitters (7 pci-e slots + 2 m2 slots), while my previous msi z97 gaming 5 would only allow 7 GPUs and wouldn't recognize the 8th card connected to the m2 slot. So in the end it made sense to just upgrade and pay some extra for ddr4 because having 2 more cards per rig resulted in bigger savings.

Still, in terms of memory speed, there's no difference between ddr3 and ddr4 for gpu mining. Can even use ddr2 as well, the system ram speed just doesn't matter. But there might be some other reasons to go with more recent boards.