Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[jakkwb]

The DL385s with the AMD 6220 does have AES, but seriously eats watts. Not cost effective right now.

[PharmEcis]

Ah, the spec sheet only listed 6100 series for that box.  Hrm, I have one of those.  I might have to find some CPUs

[jakkwb]

"I am mining cryptonight at 800+ h/s with the dual 6220 cpus"

Hmm. Best I could get was about 660 mining Monero with XMR-stak (no GPUS in it or attached to it). But I had Win7 pro on my 385.

Yah, if i could get 800, I would put it back in service.

[Michael20]

Why Cryptonight on 1070ti's? There are double-tripple more $ on Equihash or NeoScrypt.

@sundownz
Have you overview on cpu and hashrate and wattage from each of your cpu's? And in which plattform they are.

Have 2 HP Proliant DL385 G7's everything is working perfect except I cannot for the life of my figure out have to get them to
connect to the network. Lan or Wan just trying to run an OS from a thumbdrive to mine with the CPU's no luck with anything
Ubuntu or any of the standard ones. Been through every bios setting, anyone have any idea why I can not get this thing on
the network, I am sure it is something simple and stupid, have years of experience with computer, linux and trouble shooting
but right now I am out of ideas. Any help is appreciated.

Are you plugged into the iLo port or an actual network port?  If you noticed there are FIVE Ethernet jacks on the back of the server.  iLo port is also Ethernet but it will not get you on the network.  It is access to the subsystem that runs before the server actually boots an OS which gives you full control for monitoring, remote deployment etc.  Looking from the back, you should be plugged into the furthest network jack to the right, labeled #1.

Also, that box is going to pull more wattage than produce hash.  Only 61xx series Opterons with no AES in that box.

Thank you for the reply, I already figured it out, I was trying to run HIVE OS to mine off a thumb drive assuming they were using ubuntu as a base os, apperently not or at least not the full version, HIVE OS apperently doesn't have a nic driver for the DL385 as soon as I loaded Ubuntu Desktop I pulled an ip. Also I am not to worried about the watts its pulls, I am mining cryptonight at 800+ h/s with the dual 6220 cpus and running 4 1070tis of a usb splitter powered by the free extra 750watt psu it came with for another 2.1 k/sols. Thing hardly pulls 700watts at the wall.

[jakkwb]

Lastimp: When you get time to mess with it again, if you don't mind, let me know what you are doing to get better hashrates. I tried lots of things, but could not get what you are getting.

[sundownz]

I'm installing a main lug in my basement to bring in 240v for my antminer a3.  I just popped open my main breaker for the first time and I can say without a doubt I wish the electrician who did the initial wiring would have made it as organized as yours did hahaha.

Also, why are you using shelving instead of racks?  Seems like some racks and pdus would take up much less room.

Probably cost.  From the looks of the pictures, he has lots and lots of empty space in his warehouse.  Those shelving units are probably around $100 a piece or so.  Way cheaper than even used racks.

I'm using similar racks because I had a ton of them from my prior business.

You can get 42U frames on ebay for $100. I'm going that route.

Keep in mind though, you'll need rack mount kits for those servers.  If the servers don't come with them, you won't be able to drop the servers into the rack.

Indeed. I chose not to get rack mount kits with my servers to save on the price (they gave me a discount for that).

Also... all of my other racks are this type so I wanted to keep it uniform #OCD -- plus if I sell off all my mining gear I will simply use these racks elsewhere in my warehouse.

[sundownz]

Awesome job... Just one question.. Do you have air conditioning in this place? I think I will be necessary. The wood panels do not help..

I do not have AC but I will be installing a large 48" fan to intake air and several other fans to blow air out into the main warehouse space... at the opposite side of the building we have several 48" exhaust fans already that will create a nice airflow through my mining room.

[sundownz]

Putting server in rack will safe space. So you can adding more server.

For me space is a non-issue -- my overall building is 100,000  ft^2 -- but yes, if space was a premium I would have looked into the standard server racks.

[sundownz]

My 5th mining rack of PCs is nearly done... and soon will have two racks (24 systems) of the Dell servers running.

Probably will be another week to get the last 12 of the Dell systems going... and then starting on my 6th rack of PCs... I have enough GPUs to do close to 75% of the 6th rack.

[greyday]

For those running the 5775r/5575rs and are having the hashrate drop issue: I am now running multiples of each of these (6 of the i5, 4 of the i7) and I have found that the i5 tends to drop 3-5 while the i7s will drop 100-200 in 24 hrs. My i5s will run for weeks without losing much, the i7s will need xmr-stak restarted most days. Not a huge problem, mind, but I assume it's related to the virtual cores, as the way I have them set up overheating isn't an issue. If anyone has found a solution (beyond writing a reboot script based on hashrate, which I am planning to get to), let me know.

[itmanvn]

My 5th mining rack of PCs is nearly done... and soon will have two racks (24 systems) of the Dell servers running.

Probably will be another week to get the last 12 of the Dell systems going... and then starting on my 6th rack of PCs... I have enough GPUs to do close to 75% of the 6th rack.

any update man? 

[nsummy]

For those running the 5775r/5575rs and are having the hashrate drop issue: I am now running multiples of each of these (6 of the i5, 4 of the i7) and I have found that the i5 tends to drop 3-5 while the i7s will drop 100-200 in 24 hrs. My i5s will run for weeks without losing much, the i7s will need xmr-stak restarted most days. Not a huge problem, mind, but I assume it's related to the virtual cores, as the way I have them set up overheating isn't an issue. If anyone has found a solution (beyond writing a reboot script based on hashrate, which I am planning to get to), let me know.

I can't remember if I posted this on this thread or not but I opened up an issue regarding this a few weeks ago.  Frustrating that the dev hasn't acknowledged it.  https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak/issues/1046

[Ultegra134]

I've built a small miner myself too, without spending a whole fortune to do so. I'm using two AMD R7 260X (Overclocked from the factory) which I bought, used, for dirty cheap from Ebay (Something like $50-60 each). They don't feature high-end performance like the R9 Or Titan series but they have low power consumption (100-110 Watts on full load each). Therefore, having a high performance to power ratio.

I'm considering to purchase a few more of these in the future, depending on how well the GPU mining "industry" goes.

[Juggar]

I've built a small miner myself too, without spending a whole fortune to do so. I'm using two AMD R7 260X (Overclocked from the factory) which I bought, used, for dirty cheap from Ebay (Something like $50-60 each). They don't feature high-end performance like the R9 Or Titan series but they have low power consumption (100-110 Watts on full load each). Therefore, having a high performance to power ratio.

I'm considering to purchase a few more of these in the future, depending on how well the GPU mining "industry" goes.

Thats not low power consumption lol at least not in 2018.

[greyday]

I've built a small miner myself too, without spending a whole fortune to do so. I'm using two AMD R7 260X (Overclocked from the factory) which I bought, used, for dirty cheap from Ebay (Something like $50-60 each). They don't feature high-end performance like the R9 Or Titan series but they have low power consumption (100-110 Watts on full load each). Therefore, having a high performance to power ratio.

I'm considering to purchase a few more of these in the future, depending on how well the GPU mining "industry" goes.

Thats not low power consumption lol at least not in 2018.

Agreed. My 1060s run at around 75W each, and my 1070s run 95-105...

[dhouse]

I've built a small miner myself too, without spending a whole fortune to do so. I'm using two AMD R7 260X (Overclocked from the factory) which I bought, used, for dirty cheap from Ebay (Something like $50-60 each). They don't feature high-end performance like the R9 Or Titan series but they have low power consumption (100-110 Watts on full load each). Therefore, having a high performance to power ratio.

I'm considering to purchase a few more of these in the future, depending on how well the GPU mining "industry" goes.

Thats not low power consumption lol at least not in 2018.

Agreed. My 1060s run at around 75W each, and my 1070s run 95-105...

boy i really gotta get around to learning how to mod my bios, my 4 rx580 rig is using like 700w 

[greyday]

I've built a small miner myself too, without spending a whole fortune to do so. I'm using two AMD R7 260X (Overclocked from the factory) which I bought, used, for dirty cheap from Ebay (Something like $50-60 each). They don't feature high-end performance like the R9 Or Titan series but they have low power consumption (100-110 Watts on full load each). Therefore, having a high performance to power ratio.

I'm considering to purchase a few more of these in the future, depending on how well the GPU mining "industry" goes.

Thats not low power consumption lol at least not in 2018.

Agreed. My 1060s run at around 75W each, and my 1070s run 95-105...

boy i really gotta get around to learning how to mod my bios, my 4 rx580 rig is using like 700w 

I use ethOS, so I do all my setting adjustments in the config files. But 580s run hot anyway, I can't get mine down below around 115 or so...

[ManicMiner23]

Hi All.

I was following this thread since some time ago, why? I've started to mine using z400 workstations. The system have a strange behavior. I have a rig with 3x 1070 gtx, mining eth using claymore dual, I know, maybe there are more profitable options, but, eth algo on nvidia cards allows to reduce power consumption, heat and noise, and for me this is a key point also.

The strange behavior is that when I boot up the system and I start to mine using claymore miner, at the beggining, for some hours, between 12 and 24 hours the system seems to be faster than the "estimated hashrate" in +15 +20% this happened lot of times, after some hours the system performance goes down, and starts to makes peaks and valleys.

I've tested conservative oc for the memory, just +400 to discard this is a problem of the oc settings, I've tested in two different z400 workstations, with different risers, and the behavior is always the same. The gpu's are all the time under 60ºC, so I don`t think is a temp problem.

At this point I have no clue about where can be the problem. so any help would be appreciated.

I know there's something called luck, but I've seen this behavior lot of times, so is not somthing that happens radomly.

Thanks in advance.

[sundownz]

My 5th mining rack of PCs is nearly done... and soon will have two racks (24 systems) of the Dell servers running.

Probably will be another week to get the last 12 of the Dell systems going... and then starting on my 6th rack of PCs... I have enough GPUs to do close to 75% of the 6th rack.

any update man? 

Been going slower than I had hoped... been very busy with my main business.

But the 5th rack of GPU rigs is 100% done and the 2nd rack of Dell servers is 50% done.

I am starting on the 6th rack of GPU rigs tomorrow.

[MinersRus]

I have one of the DELL Servers rolling... getting ~2100 H/S out of the box first try.

Using ~675 watts or so.

What config are you using? I finally got setup today and am only getting 1500 h/s from the Dell server on Ubuntu 16 and XMR-STAK-CPU

This is my config :

"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "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" : 8 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 9 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "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" : 16 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 17 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 18 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "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" : 24 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 25 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 26 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "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" : 32 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 33 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 34 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 35 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 36 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 37 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 38 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 40 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 41 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 42 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 43 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 44 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 45 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 46 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 48 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 49 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 50 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 51 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 52 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 53 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 54 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 56 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 57 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 58 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 59 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 60 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 61 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 62 },

],

In your initial post #475 you stated "servers are loaded with 4x 12-Core AMD Opteron 6300 series CPUs each".
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1955358.msg29265925#msg29265925

That would imply that a maximum of 48 cores. Since the above is showing 63 cores being used that would mean that the CPUs must be 16-Core Opterons.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/TYPE-Opteron%206300%20series.html

I am confused in the above XMR-STAK settings. XMR-STAK tuning states that for optimal settings that each thread uses 2MB of cache.

The 16-Core Opterons have 16MB L2 Cache and 16MB L3 Cache.

So 8 threads fit into the 16MB L2 and/or 16MB L3 Cache.

I have a dual Opteron 6348 system that I have tuned for best power/performance using XMR-STAK.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206348%20-%20OS6348WKTCGHK.html

These have 12-Core, 12MB L2, 16MB L3.

My optimal settings are for each processor:

"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 2, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 8 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 2, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },

    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 12 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 14 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 16 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 1, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 18 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 2, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 20 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 2, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 22 },
],

The Opteron 6348's are running at 3.1 GHz using this setting and the 1x threads produce 66 H/s and the 2x threads produce 76 H/s. If I try to change one more of the 1x threads to 2x the resultant hash rate drops overall. Note the above settings fit exactly into the 16MB L3 cache so that additional thread (1x to 2x) overflowed the L3 cache and caused the drop in hash rate.

I did try the settings you use (all 12 cores on each Opteron at 1x thread) and the resultant hash rate for each Opteron is slightly higher (456 vs 416) but the power consumption shoots much much higher causing much more heat which then causes the fans to spin faster and louder.

For the sake of longevity and power usage I am continuing to use my settings above.

The system I have is a Supermicro H8DGI-F Server that has 6 PCIe slots. I currently have 3 of them filled with Nvidia GTX 750 GPUs which results in an overall hash rate of 1547: CPUs (832) and GPUs (715).