Cheap Mining Rig - Pentium D Sufficient?

[Ace5high]

Im building a new cheap mining rig based off an old ASRock 775XFIRE-ESATA2 Pentium D motherboard I had lying around...

I know that GPU is really the only important thing but wasn't sure how much FSB, RAM, and general motherboard/CPU really comes into play...

The motherboard actually has two PCI e slots but is overall outdated with a Pentium D 3.4  DDR2 etc...

Will the slow motherboard/ram/fsb or cpu not be able to reach the full potential of like 2 HD 5850/5870's??  Thanks for any tips from you more experienced Miners!

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[swordfish6975]

I have 3 HD 7950s in  a p5ld2 with a Pentium 4 3.00GHz

to directly answer your question, yes

[Ace5high]

I have 3 HD 7950s in  a p5ld2 with a Pentium 4 3.00GHz

to directly answer your question, yes

Cool! but are you hashing at proper 7950 speeds?

[snowcrashed]

Hashing speed has almost nothing to do with your CPU speed.  As long as the processor is capable of running the OS/mining software efficiently, you're good to go.

[GenTarkin]

yeah its sufficient, but power effecient...thats another matter =P

[swordfish6975]

I have 3 HD 7950s in  a p5ld2 with a Pentium 4 3.00GHz

to directly answer your question, yes

Cool! but are you hashing at proper 7950 speeds?

same speeds per card that i get under windows.

[rograz]

yeah its sufficient, but power effecient...thats another matter =P

Ye, power saving features at idle wasn't really high on Intel's agenda back then. The P4 architecture was supposed to break 10GHz eventually, DAMN YOU PHYSICS.

[ReCat]

Whatever you do. NEVER get a pentium D on a mining rig. Those are central heating units, not CPU's. Spend an extra 2 dollars and get a low end core 2 duo. One of those with a 800MHz FSB. They generally work just fine on LGA775 pentium 4 mobos and they use a half/third the electricity, and even has 2x the processing power!


Edit: One like this, for example. http://www.ebay.com/itm/F8-INTEL-CORE-2-DUO-E4300-1-8GHz-PROCESSOR-CPU-SL9TB-LGA775-2MB-800MHz-/140984908768

[Ace5high]

Whatever you do. NEVER get a pentium D on a mining rig. Those are central heating units, not CPU's. Spend an extra 2 dollars and get a low end core 2 duo. One of those with a 800MHz FSB. They generally work just fine on LGA775 pentium 4 mobos and they use a half/third the electricity, and even has 2x the processing power!


Edit: One like this, for example. http://www.ebay.com/itm/F8-INTEL-CORE-2-DUO-E4300-1-8GHz-PROCESSOR-CPU-SL9TB-LGA775-2MB-800MHz-/140984908768

Thanks for that tip! Unfortunately I already bought a Pentium D, then again it was only a $9 mistake 

So will the core duo work on this baby?  http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASRock-775XFIRE-ESATA2-Pentium-D-SKT-775-Mainboard-w-ATI-CrossFire-DDR2-SATA2-/230840434937?pt=Motherboards&hash=item35bf2980f9

If so, this might just end up being the cheapest 2 GPU rig possible!

[ReCat]

Provided it's one of the 800MHZ FSB core 2 duos, and you update the bios. Maybe. You can't know for sure, though. It should, though.

[Ace5high]

Well I have both pcu's so ill try them both and report back 

[monkeymonkey]

I don't expect CPU/MB matters much.  I've got a 7 year old MB sporting a crappy Celeron and with 2x7970s installed it cranks out 1.3Gh. 

-s

[Operatr]

I just have a el-cheapo Sempron 145 with 2 Gb of cheap GSkill RAM running my rig. The proc and memory dont have to be anything particularly special as the GPUs are really doing the work. Though for overall system speed it doesn't hurt to have adequate resources so you don't have to spend 10 years waiting for it to boot up or to log in.

[Ace5high]

Thanks guys, now what about OS? Ive got Win 7, Vista, XP etc etc etc.. Does OS have any real effect? Some more stable than others?

[ewitte]

I'm planning on running at least 4.5GH/s off a Raspberry Pi.  CPU doesn't matter all that much.

[deslok]

performance wise it'll be fine but power usage wise ... you'll be throwing 95+ watts down the drain easily and giving yourself extra heat you don't need to head with, a core 2 celeron should be cheap to come by same for a motherboard for it and easier to cool.

[ReCat]

Yeah. What I suggest doing is getting a low-end core 2 duo, and disabling one of the cores. They typically draw 65 watts on full load, so if you disable a core that's roughly halving the power usage, as well as if you disable speedstep, that will make the CPU run at the slowest stepping speed, which will save you a lot of unneeded heat being generated. Est 10-30 watts will be your new total.


CPU doesn't really matter when it comes to mining, because as others have said, in other words, the CPU and mobo only are running as a controller for your GPU, which is in a sense, a computer in it's own right. (With it's own RAM and CPU) All your CPU and mobo must function for is routing the commands to the card, and getting the results from the card, really.

[ewitte]

I use a Celeron G550 on my main mining rig.

[Operatr]

Thanks guys, now what about OS? Ive got Win 7, Vista, XP etc etc etc.. Does OS have any real effect? Some more stable than others?

I just run CGMiner in Win 7, works just fine. As long as it can run cgminer or similar the OS doesn't matter much, though for system security and such I would recommend something current.


Before I came to Windows however I did attempt to use Ubuntu, as with previous experiences with Linux I was tearing my hair out by the end trying to get it to run right, which it never did. I was never able to get a compatible ATI driver to function, which led to GUI problems (where it no longer was loading), and other strange issues, and this was all brand new hardware. There are certainly methods to accomplish this but after a day's worth of trying I had enough. So out came my Windows 7 disc and I've just been mining on that since without issue.

This is why Windows runs 90% of the world, as Linux is just a pain in the ass and always has been.

[ReCat]

Running CGMiner in windows often leads in reports of it freezing randomly after 9 hours and problems when using multi-gpu configurations, although sometimes you may get lucky and avoid these issues.

I suggest you run something like centOS enterprise linux, which people report high stability and reliability with. (no crashing) However as how the poster above indicates, it takes more work. Generally if you are tech savvy and patient enough, though, your best bet is linux.

(By the way, Ubuntu sucks)