Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[sundownz06]

I haven't heard of ROIcoin until you mentioned it.

On the subject on ROIcoin is there a market (exchange) where they can be traded to BTC?

ROICoin is relatively new. I just discovered it myself a few weeks ago. It is listed on a few small exchanges, but the problem is no one is currently trading. Everybody is depositing due to the huge returns. The original deposits are maturing in the next few months, so consensus is that the market will start opening up as miners start selling to recoup costs. The devs are also pursuing listings. There has been some bad luck with exchanges in the past, so they're being cautious on choice of new ones.

As for power used on these beasts, I'm currently paying that out of my pocket. Of all the coins I've researched and mined this one stands way out above the rest for me. I see a tremendous opportunity. I also believe this thing will take off and become a top coin in the future. I might add that the target audience are the GPU miners with their CPU's not doing much to contribute to their endeavors. Not many miners are dedicated to just mining ROI as I am.

The thing to do would be to research ROI. I have, and I'm impressed! And do the math on deposits.....

I am mining some ROI Coin as well -- seems intriguing... I won't put a huge amount of my resources on it but I think a small amount is worth it.

[1713490816]

1713490816

[sundownz06]

On the R815s... I am doing roughly double my power cost on Webchain as of now too -- so they are also holding on. Totally stopped mining Monero.

Do you mine Webchain and sell some or all of it?

I have 7x HP DL580's and 5x R815's powered off as they are unprofitable on Monero but if I could mine Webchain and exchange it to BTC and then get BTC to Coinbase that would be great. I am a small time miner and have to pay my electric bill from my mining operations.

I am holding a good chunk of it but I have sold a few 1000 dollars worth.

[sundownz06]

With the price of Monero XMR falling below $100 (currently at $95) I have shut down all my HP DL580 and Dell R815 Servers. They are no longer profitable at that price. Also it doesn't help that the temperatures are now above 100 degrees again here in Texas as that causes all the server fans to run at 100%.

I will keep my four Vega 56's mining but that is all I will be running until the price rises above $120 or Fall/Winter comes.

Profit is quite bad now on the R815s -- I'm looking at 10 cents a day as of now on XMR, haha. I had a pretty darn good run with them initially... I mined 67 coins of XMR since 4 months ago... sold them along the way.

I will keep them on as long as it's above zero... and perhaps even a bit below zero on speculative coins... I already converted 11 of my R815s and all my AMD cards to XTL (Stellite) as a bit of a speculative gamble. May put the rest of my R815s back onto ITNS coin which is my other speculative coin.

-----

But I am still very pleased with my HP Z400s -- they've been handling the summer heat well.

Further update on the Z400s... still all going strong.

I've really only had hard drive failure issues on the refurb Z400 systems... and that is a cheap fix.

-----

On the R815s... I am doing roughly double my power cost on Webchain as of now too -- so they are also holding on. Totally stopped mining Monero.

Heat from my mining operation is heating three major areas of my warehouse -- so that is super nice for winter =)

[mys5droid]

I get hardware for free. I go to Canadian Tire in the electronics bin outside... I feel uncomfortable just walking up and robbing it of all the computers, so I bring a piece of electronics garbage with me and exchange 1 for 1

Most are shit but you can find decent parts for free

You wont get much power efficient hardware there though, you will end up negative profits...

I just mine as an easy way in to the market, so even if I am mining at minus 15 cents profit, I really don't care.

[PharmEcis]

Jacob, check your PM. 

[sundownz06]

The Z400s and Dell R815s are still doing great. Also the two Dell towers I built have been solid.

I am starting to see some of my very first power supplies going out on me... but Rosewill has a 5-year warranty and covers them reliably.

Also some random GPU failures here and there.

Interestingly... my broken PNY 1080 cards sell on e-bay for around $200 or so every time. I can't explain such a high value... but I've sold 4 since the warranty expired.

----------

I am moving quite a bit of power back to LTHN coin... they say their full VPN client will be ready this month.

I've also mined a fair amount of BitTube which rallied 40% today... wish I had mined more! Haha.

[MinersRus]

For HP DL580 G7 miners that are here I have done some testing on it for the upcoming Monero RandomX mining fork this October.

For those who don't know RandomX:

https://github.com/tevador/RandomX

RandomX is a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm that is optimized for general-purpose CPUs. RandomX uses random code execution (hence the name) together with several memory-hard techniques to minimize the efficiency advantage of specialized hardware.

RandomX design
https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md

My test system is a HP DL580 G7 system has the following configuration:

4x Xeon E7-8837
4X E7 Memory Cartridges with 4x PC3-10600R 4GB memory sticks installed in the white slots. One of the Memory Cartridges must be installed for each processor.

Ubuntu 16.04 with single GTX 750 for video. Only CPU's used for mining no GPU's.

I did these commands to download and clone and compile the RandomX benchmark.

git clone https://github.com/tevador/RandomX.git
cd RandomX
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DARCH=native ..
make

Be sure to enable LargePages to be at least 4800:

sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=4800

Be sure numactl is installed:
sudo apt install numactl

Long story short since NUMA is still not in the benchmark RandomX miner you need to benchmark using this command:

seq 0 3 | xargs -P 0 -I node numactl -N node ./randomx-benchmark --mine --largePages --jit --nonces 100000 --init 8 --threads 8

That command runs four benchmarks each assigned to only one processor and that processor only uses its local memory.

This is the results I have obtained:

Code:

Running benchmark (100000 nonces) ...
Calculated result: 9b22794882187000d62c6d2b228fab5e585767aaaa5eb74905b0c7c00fcbdad8
Performance: 2319.77 hashes per second
Calculated result: 9b22794882187000d62c6d2b228fab5e585767aaaa5eb74905b0c7c00fcbdad8
Performance: 2296.53 hashes per second
Calculated result: 9b22794882187000d62c6d2b228fab5e585767aaaa5eb74905b0c7c00fcbdad8
Performance: 2289.64 hashes per second
Calculated result: 9b22794882187000d62c6d2b228fab5e585767aaaa5eb74905b0c7c00fcbdad8
Performance: 2280.22 hashes per second

That is a total of 9186 H/s for the four processors or an average of 2296 H/s for each Xeon E7-8837.

As users of the HP DL580 G7 know it is somewhat of a power hog.

This is the power usage(s):

Idle: 275 Watts
Running RandomX benchmark from above: 720 Watts

These power numbers are from the sudo hpasmcli -s "show powersupply" command and HP Software I have previously mentioned.
I have a single 94% efficient power supply in the system so actual power consumed at the meter should be about 766 Watts.

This link (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX) shows that a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 gets about 4100 H/s so the 9186 H/s is about equal to 2.25 Ryzen 7 1700's.

[MinersRus]

Good news for Dell R815 owners. RandomX puts these servers back in the mining Monero game.

RandomX testing on a DELL R815 with 4x Opteron 6238's

Opteron 6238 Specs:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206238.html

sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=9600

seq 0 7 | xargs -P 0 -I node numactl -N node ./randomx-benchmark --mine --largePages --jit --nonces 100000 --init 6 --threads 6

Produces:

Code:

Running benchmark (100000 nonces) ...                                                                                                                                                        
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1068.57 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1067.57 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1067.37 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1067.33 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1066.09 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1066.65 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1066.14 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      
Calculated result: d6660144e9a2e68bf47d7cc8afc206672e72f82dfff69fe0d974531e85f7504f                                                                                                          
Performance: 1064.69 hashes per second                                                                                                                                                      

Or a total hashrate of 8534 H/s

If you have Opterons with 16 cores change the above command to have --init 8 --threads 8


------------------------------------------


EDIT: I forgot about doing the: sudo ./TurionPowerControl -psmax 1

This brings the total hashrate to 9427 H/s or about 10.5% faster

Also tested 4x Opteron 6234's with TurionPowerControl -psmax 1: 8832 H/s

[PharmEcis]

Hey hey hey good to see some of us are still at it and made it through this very very short winter...  (still don't believe we are totally out of it yet!)

My R815's have been idle for months since Swap forked from CN Superfast to C29s except for a short period for Wownero's fork a few weeks ago where I was slaughtering solo blocks for two days.  My Proliant boxes have been hosting GPUs but not CPU mining.  I've been slowly moving to smaller less dense rigs and I'm also moving into FPGA's.

I almost got rid of all my GPUs but my electric is cheap (avg'd 6.7c per KWh last month).  I've been moving towards FPGAs since last year.  Hasn't worked out exactly as hoped but still have faith.

I am ready to turn these guys on for the XMR fork, but as you stated, profit is yet to be seen.

I've learned a bunch since I started.  This thread is one of the first social media things I had involvement in for mining.  Considering that I was a total noob just a year and a half ago, it's kind of funny to think that I'm one of the founders for a coin now. 

I still lurk but at this point, I think the days of our old server iron making money are more than likely over.  We might have periods of profitability but it's time to scrap these hunks of junk. 

[MinersRus]

Hey hey hey good to see some of us are still at it and made it through this very very short winter...  (still don't believe we are totally out of it yet!)

My R815's have been idle for months since Swap forked from CN Superfast to C29s except for a short period for Wownero's fork a few weeks ago where I was slaughtering solo blocks for two days.

Mine have been idle except for updating Ubuntu and for Testing RandomX.

My Proliant boxes have been hosting GPUs but not CPU mining.  I've been slowly moving to smaller less dense rigs and I'm also moving into FPGA's.

I almost got rid of all my GPUs but my electric is cheap (avg'd 6.7c per KWh last month).  I've been moving towards FPGAs since last year.  Hasn't worked out exactly as hoped but still have faith.

I plan to sell off the seven HP DL580 G7's and the GTX 750's I have. As you mentioned the HP DL580 G7 in a 4U case is pretty dense and the Dell R815's in a 2U case produce more RandomX H/s than the HP DL580 G7 at lower power.

WOW your electric rate of 6.7c per KWh is fantastic. My two year plan just expired June 19th and it was down to 6.8c per KWh in June. Previous months were 6.9c, 6.9, 6.9 and 7.5c per KWh. It looks like OnCore rates have been dropping which was the reason for the drops. That said I had to renew and the best plan I found was 22% higher at 8.3c per KWh. It is a three year plan so I am locked to that until June 2022. A bunch of plans I rejected had rates for over 2000 KWh per month jumping to 14c (or more) per KWh. Those plans would be a killer for mining.

I am ready to turn these guys on for the XMR fork, but as you stated, profit is yet to be seen.

October can't get here fast enough.

In the mean time I am upgrading the five Dell R815's that I have with Opteron's that are faster and/or have more cores so that those servers produce even higher RandomX H/s.

Three of my R815's have quad Opteron 6238's and the other two have quad Opteron 6234's.

I managed to pick up:

4x 16-core Opteron 6378's for total of $69.29
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206378%20-%20OS6378WKTGGHK.html

These are only 100 MHz slower than the Opteron 6380's that you have in your R815's. The Opteron 6378 will be about 3.6% slower.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206380%20-%20OS6380WKTGGHK.html

I also picked up:
10x 12-core Opteron 6348's for total of $64.10

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

and

2x 16-core Opteron 6276's for total of $17.71

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206276.html

I have a Dual Opteron Supermicro Server that currently has 2x Opteron 6348's in it.

I plan to replace the two 12-core Opteron 6348's with the two newly purchased 16-core Opteron 6276's.
That system should be 11.8% faster with those changes.

The two current R815's that have quad 12-core Opteron 6234's will be upgraded to quad 12-core Opteron 6348's
Those systems should be 14.8% faster with those changes.

The other four 12-core Opteron 6348's will be used in a new purchase of an R815.

We might have periods of profitability but it's time to scrap these hunks of junk.

With the upcoming Monero Fork to RandomX I don't believe that the Dell R815's are junk because GPU mining will be futile and CPU mining will rain supreme for RandomX.

Take a look at these RandomX GPU RandomX H/s results
https://github.com/SChernykh/RandomX_CUDA

A single Opteron 6238 produces 2356 H/s where as a Titan V only produces 2199 H/s.
And a single Opteron 6348 produces 2653 H/s where as a Tesla V100 only produces 2524 H/s.

AMD GPU mining of RandomX is even worse. A Vega 64 can only get 1200 H/s on RandomX.

[MinersRus]

I just upgraded one Dell R815 from quad 12-core Opteron 6238's to quad 12-core Opteron 6348's and retested.

sudo ./TurionPowerControl -psmax 1

seq 0 7 | xargs -P 0 -I node numactl -N node ./randomx-benchmark --mine --largePages --jit --nonces 100000 --init 6 --threads 6

4x 12-core Opteron 6238's produces 1178 H/s per node or 9424 H/s overall

4x 12-core Opteron 6348's produces 1326.5 H/s per node or 10612 H/s overall +12.6% higher

The clock speed difference between the 6238 (2900 MHz) and the 6348 (3100 MHz) is 200 MHz. That works out to be 6.9% faster for the 6348 so the additional 5.7% gain for the 6348 must be because of architectural changes.

Those architectural changes are detailed here: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328-3.html

AMD Opteron 6238 specifications: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206238.html
AMD Opteron 6348 specifications: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-Opteron%206348%20-%20OS6348WKTCGHK.html

So if given a choice pick the 6300 series Opteron's over the 6200 series.

This link (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX) shows that a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 gets about 4100 H/s so the 10612 H/s is about equal to 2.59 Ryzen 7 1700's.

[PharmEcis]

My personal opinion is XMR is gonna fuck something up, RandomX isn't going to be the magic bullet they think it will and they will eventually be forced to embrace ASICs.

New AMD chips are also putting out 1/2 the hash of a full R815 on a single chip for a 1/3 of the juice.

I'm hoping they will make something, but I really feel like these servers along with a lot of other things I bought over a year ago were a fools folly.

[mingdao]

Guys,
I am playing around with Proliant G7 4x E7-4870 and I cannot figure out the cpu threads config for XMR-STAK.
Getting either thread 0 error or very low hashrate.
Can you please share the config? Thanks in advance

[nsummy]

What coin are you mining?

[mingdao]

What coin are you mining?

XMR on CnR

[MinersRus]

Guys,
I am playing around with Proliant G7 4x E7-4870 and I cannot figure out the cpu threads config for XMR-STAK.
Getting either thread 0 error or very low hashrate.

What is your OS (Linux or Windows) version number?

Post your Nvidia.txt config file here so I can look at it and give you some help.

[MinersRus]

My personal opinion is XMR is gonna fuck something up, RandomX isn't going to be the magic bullet they think it will and they will eventually be forced to embrace ASICs.

Well they have put in a lot of work in RandomX and have made some changes to it to further harden it to be ASIC resistant until the code freeze in April.

Specification: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/specs.md
Design: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md
Possible ASIC design: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/issues/11
Single-chip ASIC design: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/issues/31

New AMD chips are also putting out 1/2 the hash of a full R815 on a single chip for a 1/3 of the juice.

And for those miners they will have to purchase new AMD CPU's and motherboards. Those are costs we don't have to experience as we already have the hardware.

I am doing some minor (and cheap) upgrades to the Dell R815's by purchasing some Opteron Upgrades that will pay out for higher Hash rates and lower power.

Purchased 10x AMD 12-core 6348 Opteron's for a total of $64.10. These along with 2x 12-core 6348 Opteron's from a Supermicro server will going in three of my Dell R815 servers.
Purchased 8x AMD 16-core 6378 Opteron's for a total of $69.29. These will be going into my other two Dell R815 servers.
Purchased 2x AMD 16-core 6376 Opteron's for a total of $24.67. These will be going into the Supermicro server that had the 6348 Opteron's in it.

As for power used. Yes it will be higher power and "Hashes per watt" will be lower but if the profit is high enough then that works for me.

This is what I am measuring for a Dell R815 Server with 4x AMD 12-core 6348 Opterons:

Idle Power: 265 watts
Mining Power: 865 watts - That is after the warmup period. It starts at 800 watts and slowly climbs and peaks at the 865 watt number.

RandomX Hash rate: 10629 H/s overall or 2657 H/s for each AMD 12-core 6348 Opteron.

Dell R815 Server RandomX "Hashes per watt": 12.3

I'm hoping they will make something, but I really feel like these servers along with a lot of other things I bought over a year ago were a fools folly.

We should make some profit mining RandomX on the Dell R815's. Not so much (or at all on the HP DL580 G7's).

Also remember that no one should be mining RandomX with GPU's and that botnet mining should be also a thing in the past and that a lot of current miners have Celerons for their processors driving large GPU mining rigs. Those Celerons are pretty useless for RandomX mining.

[mingdao]

Guys,
I am playing around with Proliant G7 4x E7-4870 and I cannot figure out the cpu threads config for XMR-STAK.
Getting either thread 0 error or very low hashrate.

What is your OS (Linux or Windows) version number?

Post your Nvidia.txt config file here so I can look at it and give you some help.

Hi. I booted HiveOS on this machine from the USB drive.

[MinersRus]

Guys,
I am playing around with Proliant G7 4x E7-4870 and I cannot figure out the cpu threads config for XMR-STAK.
Getting either thread 0 error or very low hashrate.

What is your OS (Linux or Windows) version number?

Post your Nvidia.txt config file here so I can look at it and give you some help.

Hi. I booted HiveOS on this machine from the USB drive.

I no longer mine using HiveOS so I suggest going to the HiveOS Forum and asking them for help.

https://forum.hiveos.farm

[mingdao]

Guys,
I am playing around with Proliant G7 4x E7-4870 and I cannot figure out the cpu threads config for XMR-STAK.
Getting either thread 0 error or very low hashrate.

What is your OS (Linux or Windows) version number?

Post your Nvidia.txt config file here so I can look at it and give you some help.

Hi. I booted HiveOS on this machine from the USB drive.

I no longer mine using HiveOS so I suggest going to the HiveOS Forum and asking them for help.
https://forum.hiveos.farm

Ar you using plain Ubuntu?