Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[spinx]

I've tried 2008R2, no go.  I'm currently on Server 2016 using drivers for 2008 and 2012 plus Win 10 64 bit drivers for the Nvidia cards.

Great minds must think alike.  I bought a couple 12V to 5V converters myself.  It's how I'm adapting the power feed that was for the SAS array to drive cards based off the onboard PSUs.  I'm going to place an order from China as I can get the for a fraction of the cost, just have to deal with the wait.  I ordered enough to cover me for a server or two for now.

Wait, I just realized those are lipo converters from the RC world, you fly too?

I tried Server 2016 and got stuck on the first installation of lan driver, so i ditch that for now, going to try 2012 server tomorrow as it should have official support from the "Service Pack for ProLiant" http://h17007.www1.hpe.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/service_pack/spp/index.aspx .

I don't fly, got it from a friend, i believe is from a custom drone project

[1714863121]

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[1714863121]

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[PharmEcis]

Currently have 4 1060s in the DL580 G7, 2 in the case and 2 via risers.  If I hadn't shorted out 2 pairs of wires on the SAS power cable, I'd probably have a few more via risers but at this point, I've basically run out of cards other than a 6950 and a 780.  All my new cards are up.  Now to find more cards! lol)

[greyday]

nsummy I am WAY jealous of those numbers. But for around $310 total and drawing 43W for 360h/s, I'm content enough (though if I buy any more, I would hold out for the i7s for SURE).

Yeah those numbers are nice. I can't get those on windows, it will bounce to 550, then rapidly just drop down to 250. Very weird.


I also tried installing linux but it was an epic fail. I have no clue how to deploy xmr-stak on linux. I'm sure someone would have gotten a laugh seeing me trying to navigate through it all knowing zero about linux lol.

Ah well.

Try commenting out the memory thing (I posted about it previously, can't remember it this second but it's one of the steps suggested in the guide). That solved that same problem for mine.

EDIT TO ADD: here it is: this may be a linux or Iris specific thing, but (at least on the i5) doing the suggested change to sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf dropped my start from 359 to 320, and eventually my hashrate dropped to 180. Commenting it out brought everything back to 359 and stable, so I suggest testing it if you want, but it doesn't seem necessary (if you are still getting locked RAM messages, I was able to get rid of them by sudo running the miner, but I don't think they had an effect on hashrate)

I'm going to try out your suggestion.  VyperBTC and I have been exchanging a few messages and we are both experiencing the same issue with hashrate dropping.  It starts out fine, but eventually it will drop to the upper 200s.  At first I thought maybe the processor was too hot and throttling, but restarting the miner fixes it so I don't think that is the issue.  

I've tried it but it didn't help unfortunately. I'm not sure how it would effect performance programming a script to close out and sudo start the xmr-stak every 15-30min. That's not getting to the root of the issue, it's just a bandage to get around the actual issue of why the hell is it happening lol

Well at least my problem isn't happening every 15 minutes.  More like letting it run for 15 hours then it happens  Actually though I just thought of something.  Did you ever go into the bios and enable turbo mode?  I think without that, the processor does actually throttle and that might explain why it happens so quickly for you.

No i didn't - the only thing i did was enable power on if power loss. I'll change that and see if it helps, thanks!

Are all of you running on Windows? Because I'm on Lubuntu, and now have 4 of the i5 version and all are running stable at 359mh/s with no drop...

[VyprBTC]

nsummy I am WAY jealous of those numbers. But for around $310 total and drawing 43W for 360h/s, I'm content enough (though if I buy any more, I would hold out for the i7s for SURE).

Yeah those numbers are nice. I can't get those on windows, it will bounce to 550, then rapidly just drop down to 250. Very weird.


I also tried installing linux but it was an epic fail. I have no clue how to deploy xmr-stak on linux. I'm sure someone would have gotten a laugh seeing me trying to navigate through it all knowing zero about linux lol.

Ah well.

Try commenting out the memory thing (I posted about it previously, can't remember it this second but it's one of the steps suggested in the guide). That solved that same problem for mine.

EDIT TO ADD: here it is: this may be a linux or Iris specific thing, but (at least on the i5) doing the suggested change to sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf dropped my start from 359 to 320, and eventually my hashrate dropped to 180. Commenting it out brought everything back to 359 and stable, so I suggest testing it if you want, but it doesn't seem necessary (if you are still getting locked RAM messages, I was able to get rid of them by sudo running the miner, but I don't think they had an effect on hashrate)

I'm going to try out your suggestion.  VyperBTC and I have been exchanging a few messages and we are both experiencing the same issue with hashrate dropping.  It starts out fine, but eventually it will drop to the upper 200s.  At first I thought maybe the processor was too hot and throttling, but restarting the miner fixes it so I don't think that is the issue.  

I've tried it but it didn't help unfortunately. I'm not sure how it would effect performance programming a script to close out and sudo start the xmr-stak every 15-30min. That's not getting to the root of the issue, it's just a bandage to get around the actual issue of why the hell is it happening lol

Well at least my problem isn't happening every 15 minutes.  More like letting it run for 15 hours then it happens  Actually though I just thought of something.  Did you ever go into the bios and enable turbo mode?  I think without that, the processor does actually throttle and that might explain why it happens so quickly for you.

No i didn't - the only thing i did was enable power on if power loss. I'll change that and see if it helps, thanks!

Are all of you running on Windows? Because I'm on Lubuntu, and now have 4 of the i5 version and all are running stable at 359mh/s with no drop...

I moved it to linux mint, haven't done the turbo thing yet though but the i7 is hasing at 250 lol. wtf.

[greyday]

Are all of you running on Windows? Because I'm on Lubuntu, and now have 4 of the i5 version and all are running stable at 359mh/s with no drop...

I moved it to linux mint, haven't done the turbo thing yet though but the i7 is hasing at 250 lol. wtf.

Huh. My lowest running i5 has dropped only 7-8 (to 352). One is still running at 100%, and I haven't even moved them to the basement yet...

[PharmEcis]

The DL580 is back under it's own power and running 4 1060s.  Even with the drive controller disabled and the array physically disconnected, I'm pulling 1085W with all 4 PSU's plugged in.  If I unplug 2 PSUs, it drops to about 1025W w/ the 1060's +175/500.  Stock vcore so power usage only went up 25W or so w/ OC.  That's not exactly efficient.  LOL  Box currently has X7542s so no AES and only like 240H/s for a total of 1280W of power draw with EWBF cuda miner going too.  The penalty draw for the 4 CPU's and 8 memory cartridges has to be supplemented by CPU work and currently, with the CPUs I have, I do no work.  If the 8837's I have that don't boot can do 1600H/s like stated prior, that would definitely help offset the increased energy cost.  I have 4 1060's in a Z97 setup that I'll throw the meter on tonight or tomorrow to see what it's pulling to compare.

My biggest fear is I'll get a bunch of rigs ready to go and then have no cards to fill them.  : |

[VyprBTC]

Are you guys running Windows Server or will Win Enterprise work fine with these server builds? Curious.

[PharmEcis]

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, what should have been a painless procedure that has swallowed the better part of a day to figure out is finally complete.  The DL580 G7 is rocking the E7 8837's.  All in all, it required what should have been easy.  A BIOS update.  Thanks HP.  <waves middle finger>

Spinx, what settings are you using for the miner?  I'm currently seeing about 1K/s w/ the default config from launching it and letting it figure itself out.

[VyprBTC]

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, what should have been a painless procedure that has swallowed the better part of a day to figure out is finally complete.  The DL580 G7 is rocking the E7 8837's.  All in all, it required what should have been easy.  A BIOS update.  Thanks HP.  <waves middle finger>

Spinx, what settings are you using for the miner?  I'm currently seeing about 1K/s w/ the default config from launching it and letting it figure itself out.

Good to hear it was finally figured out!

What OS did you end up running?

[PharmEcis]

Currently on Server '16.  

This thing draws some juice.  In order to test the load w/ only one killawatt, I had all 4 power plugs plugged into a strip.  Under full load it tripped the built in breaker in the strip.  I've got the server back on 2 120v circuits to run but now I need another killawatt to really know how much power things thing is consuming.

240v upgrades soon.  I already have some 16a PDUs but I'm trying to hold off with them until I start deploying in the container so I don't do things twice.

[PharmEcis]

So last night I got home around 2AM and noticed that the DL580 I had just left wasn't showing up in the zcash pool.  I thought the breaker tripped again because I couldn't reach out and remote control it so I went to sleep because I wasn't going back to fix it.  I get back to the server late this morning and find it still running.  I hadn't checked the tracker for ITNS and it showed the server working all night long.  Somehow this box was still doing work in the EWBF miner but it wasn't registering with flypool even though it was submitting results?  I restart the client and it's now registering as an active worker.  No changes to the config file, just a restart.  Is this common or was this a fluke?

I'm currently getting about 1.25KH/s on the CPU's with CPU usage set to 92.  This gives me 30T which so far has given me the best bang for KH/s w/o impacting the GPU side.  The chips have 32MB L2 and 96MB L3.  I tried setting # of cores to half of L2 but that was only 650H/s or so.

[SQ1]

http://www.ebay.fr/itm/PC-Gigabyte-Brix-GB-BSi7HA-6500-Intel-Core-i7-6500U-2x-2-50GHz-GB-BSi7HA-6500/152714522870?hash=item238e7eb0f6:g:SW0AAOSw8-xZ2AHF

Minimal since it has no GPU assist w/ only Intel HD video and not Iris Pro w/ 128mb of RAM.

Thanks! Is there something in the product number that says "Iris Pro thingy"?

i7's that have Iris are
5950HQ
5850HQ
5750HQ
5755C
5775R

i5's that have Iris are
5675C
5675R
5575R

There is more to the list than this
There are a bunch of Skylake processors with them:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Mainstream_and_high-end_desktop_processors
Along with Haswell:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Desktop_processors

Additionally some of the Xeon E3 V4 processors have it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9532/the-intel-broadwell-xeon-e3-v4-review-95w-65w-35w-1285-1285l-1265

I couldn't find any CPU that would work on an ATX mother board, am I mistaken?

Yeah you are mistaken. There are plenty aval that will work on any Z97 or H97 mobo provided the BIOS is up to date and supports those CPU's per manufacturer.

If one had like 50 Z97/H97 mobos, they could make a killing. Unfortunately you need mobo, ram, HDD/flash drive and PSU. But I can still stomp that $250 Brix deal into the dust with what ive found.

What did you find that beats the Brix deal? I cant find one that's anywhere close to 249.

[spinx]

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, what should have been a painless procedure that has swallowed the better part of a day to figure out is finally complete.  The DL580 G7 is rocking the E7 8837's.  All in all, it required what should have been easy.  A BIOS update.  Thanks HP.  <waves middle finger>

Spinx, what settings are you using for the miner?  I'm currently seeing about 1K/s w/ the default config from launching it and letting it figure itself out.

"On my rig, I have 4x E7-8837 cpu's, which are 8 cores each, no hypherthreading, so 32 physical cores total.
Each cpu has 24Mb cache, so 24Mb/2Mb=12 threads for mining on each cpu.
To get 12 total threads running on the 8 cores, I run two threads on 4 of the cores, and one thread each on the other 4 cores = 8 total cores of the cpu..
To run two threads I set 'low_power_mode=true', and to run one thread I set 'low_power_mode=false'.
So for each cpu, this is what I do on my E7-8837:

Code:

{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

Then I duplicate that configuration four times for the other 3 cores.
This is also the suggested configuration from xmr-stak-cpu.
My experience is that a core running a single thread will hash 30/s to 40/s, and a core running two threads will be 60/s to 70/s.
If the hash rate drops to 20/s, it is because too many threads are running and the cpu cache is being swapped out when the threads run. That means it is inefficient and the total hash rate is lower.
I attached a picture showing all 32 cores running, and 48 threads running, hashing about 1650/s. My xmr-stak-cpu version 2 cpu.txt configuration file looks like this."

Code:

"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 8 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 9 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 11 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 12 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 13 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 14 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 15 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 16 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 17 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 18 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 19 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 20 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 21 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 22 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 23 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 24 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 25 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 26 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 27 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 28 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 29 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 30 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 31 },

],

[Calatravo]

So, the conclusion of all the benchmarks I've read is: find an architecture that uses an AMD CPU

Yes and no.  If you are talking about modern desktop processors, Ryzen wins out, the main reason being because it includes the SHA instruction set.  Probably the Epycs on the server side too, but they have barely released those to the market.  If you are interested in making a run at mining cryptonight the best bet is to find an old server on ebay with multiple xeon chips in it (The HP DL580 G7 was mentioned earlier in the thread).   The rub with the Ryzen chips are that the motherboards are expensive.

My HP DL580 G7 with 4 x E7-8837 does about 1600H/s on cryptonight.

how much power from the wall? thx

I can measure this tomorrow, i guess around 800W, not sure tho.

800 w without any GPU?

[Amstellodamois]

"On my rig, I have 4x E7-8837 cpu's, which are 8 cores each, no hypherthreading, so 32 physical cores total.
Each cpu has 24Mb cache, so 24Mb/2Mb=12 threads for mining on each cpu.
To get 12 total threads running on the 8 cores, I run two threads on 4 of the cores, and one thread each on the other 4 cores = 8 total cores of the cpu..

I didn't know you could run 12 threads on an 8 core without hyperthreading. That's brilliant!

[senseless]

Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2772135.msg28578662#msg28578662

[AsJoshScreams]

This is one good idea! Thanks for the tip!

[spinx]

Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2772135.msg28578662#msg28578662

What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

[senseless]

Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2772135.msg28578662#msg28578662

What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself. I think you should also be able to power the riser from the external PSU -- I've never done that before though.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1

Also, I'm pretty sure that the expansion boards don't use any 5V. I know I've stuck a 6 pin PCI-E molex from a PSU directly into an expansion board and it worked fine. Maybe it's just the expansion boards you got?

[spinx]

Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2772135.msg28578662#msg28578662

What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1

Thanks a lot for this clarification. I tried booting up with SMOS with 2 cards mounted directly on the motherboard, but SMOS would only detect 1. What OS would you runt with 12 AMD RX cards in my G7?