Everyone's got such nice rigs hardware-wise, not necessarily cosmetically, but you never hear about the not so great ones....until now
This is tale of two PCs.
This all started at the pawn shop so you can see where this is going already
One of my customers needed a 17" or larger LCD monitor for as cheap as possible and they sold the one I wanted that had been there for like 3 weeks. So they had 0 left except a $110 Vista emachines PC that came with a 17" monitor. So I figured...
I sold the monitor for about $70 so now I've got a $40 emachines PC. It actually has a pentium dual with 4 MB L2 in an LGA 775 socket. Not bad! It had a 16x slot too so I figured hey, let's get mining. My actual PC with the GTS450 wasn't quite cutting it. So I reinstalled the OS and I knew Vista was pretty scary and I primarily deal with Windows 7 and XP but it really summed it up nicely when right out of the first boot, I tried to open the browser and it immediately crashed. It's like Windows ME all over again. The case was torn to hell and I wanted all emachine branding gone ASAP so weeks before, I had put it in a brand new minimal case to resell btw. I also upgraded the RAM to 2 GB (it was running on 1, ugh!).
So I get a sapphire 5830 in the mail off newegg a few days ago and put it in and just for fun, I wanted to see if it would pay to attempt running it off the stock power supply. Remember, this is an emachines power supply. They're the most legendary emachines part of all time and not in a good way
so as soon as the machine turns on with both molex to 6 pin adapters attached, feel tons of heat out the back of the PSU and it really smelled like hot metal. Soon, so did my whole basement. It ran stable though so I left it for a few hours and it didn't melt down
But that's
mega sketchy for the long term! A graphics card like that eats power like...
The performance was good enough that I decided to prepare to possibly put in more cards. Cuz I need MOOOOOOAR MEGAHASHEZ/s!!!! So I went to a local computer shop that I know had an 80+ silver certified 900W Coolermaster Ultimate PSU on clearance for a mere $100!!! The retail price they wanted was $185 btw (which is high but still). Now if you're thinking wow, this sounds like it's not a ghetto rig. WRONG.
It isn't modular! This is a four 12V channel PSU and it's not modular. It has an electronmagnetic fire hose coming out of it rofl. I didn't count the cables but it's around 15-20 lol. So needless to say, most of them are outside the case atm
But at max mining speed it's at 12.32V so that's not even fair how much better it is than most I work with.
To put in any more cards, I'd need an entire new computer basically. All the rest of the slots on this piece of crap emachiens are old school PCI not PCI-E. So I ran the numbers and comparing my purchase of the PSU already to at least have a stable mining rig with 1 card to a triple card setup, it was a total....
It will pay for itself in significantly less days than the single card! And that includes the fact that I have to buy a new motherboard, 3 PCI-E risers, a processor, and some DDR3 that somehow I don't have any spare sticks of anywhere. You'll notice some parts missing from that list
I'm a computer repairer full time so I have lots of basically free parts laying around
so it's getting a SATA optical drive rented to it and a hitachi hard drive which I don't trust to put in a customer's computer and it's getting rented a copy of XP actually too lol. They're not transferrable but MS can send me a written complaint in cake form if they so desire
I'm over-ordering so just in case of anything going wrong, I can resell this custom built PC to a customer with the mining stuff removed. So it's getting a new pentium G dual 1155 socket in an all solid capacitor ASUS or MSI board.
How is rig 2.0 going to out-ghetto the old one if it's that nice? Simple
Is it going in a custom ghetto rigged, partially wooden frame case? I've got an angle grinder with metal cutting attachment and 10 year old full tower case full of
hell yes! I'm gonna cut out selective parts to keep it grounded to the PSU and have a nice metal sheet with risers from the back end of the case and a switch assembly and hard drive mounting frame still intact. So I think the wooden gheeto frame, hybrid 1- year old metal semi-case with like 20 wires hanging out and 3 cards on risers running with no optical drive and a 160GB hitachi SATA II drive might just out-ghetto the emachines PC lol. Only time will tell...and pictures
lots of pictures to come hopefully!
until then, llama pop rocks time
