Newbie building his first GPU rig, few questions here...

[pastet89]

Hi guys,

I am planning the shopping needed for my first mining rig. I am following this guide:

http://rumorscity.com/2013/12/15/how-to-build-your-own-litecoin-mining-rig/

A friend suggested that I take instead the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H motherboard. He belives only one difference is that the second one can not be overclocked but is 50 EUR less in price. Do you guys think I will be OK with it and is any overclocking process done with the motherboard and will I loose some hashing rate if I get the second model?

Second question is, unfortunately, I can not find any good PSU with 1250W here, so again my friend suggests to take Corsair 1000W. Do you think it will be enough?

Also looking @ the instructions regarding the hard drive for Linux I am amazed to see that it requires just a USB-drive.
Do you think that this is enough? I mean, at least 8GB seems too less for me even to install Linux itself, what to say about further needed space.
I have read other manuals which suggest to use SSD disk, but they are quite expensive. Can a normal or at least hybrid SATA3 be used?

Thanks.

[Wipeout2097]

The Evga Supernova 1300W PSU is good and not too expensive.

A normal hard drive can be used, even laptop sized afaik. No need for SSD or hybrid. People recommend small SSD's because they end up costing a bit less than a 500GB HD while installing and booting faster. Also, you'd not want downtime on a 1500€ rig due to the 50€ hd failure

I have one rig with Windows 7 64 SP1 loading from a 32 GB Sandisk Extreme USB pen that I had before, learned how at www.rmprepusb.com . A cheap 32gb USB will work, but preparation, installation and boot are sloooow.

It requires 6 GB ram because W7 stubbornly refuses to create a swap file on the usb

[pastet89]

Thank you very much, man.

What about motherboard, will it be OK?

[Wipeout2097]

Thank you very much, man.

What about motherboard, will it be OK?

Yeah, I didn't reply to the mb part, I'm not sure. I'd suggest the cheaper one because system level OC has no effect on mining.

What happens though is that OC friendly motherboards have components rated for the extra stress, including better capacitors, more phases, better cooling, etc... Elsewhere I read about boards having issues detecting the 4th or 5th GPU and serious problems with more. Sometimes it's disabled PCI-e connectors when the adjacent is used, others is PCI-e related problems until you disable integrated audio and firewire or disable some power saving options ...

In other words, between those 2, I'd choose the cheaper one. If any of those 2 is actually a good choice for mining in the first place, that I don't know.


Still related with storage; if you intend to solo mine, you will need some extra disk-space for the blockchains. Otherwise 30 GB is plenty for a mining rig with OS and lots of of utilities installed.

[pastet89]

Thanks again.

Now, I have a bit concern about few more things. As I can see, same geenral model name "Gigabyte R9 280x" have different sub-models names, such as GA-VC-R928XOC-3GD, GV-R928XOC-3GD, R928XOC-3GD. Also a friend of mine told me that the serial nimber of same models varies as well and can make up to 20% difference in his opinion. So how do I know which exactly card to buy?

And another most important question is: how the hell can I connect 5 cards to a single mobo? 

[Wipeout2097]

Search this forum for "PCI-e risers". There are new ones with USB cabling and more flexibility.

Regarding the cards models, I believed that having Hynix vrams was a guarantee of good mining performance but it seems some can come mis-configured. The best you can do is make an agreement with an hardware store which allows you to exchange the cards if they give bad performance.

In alternative, go to: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=12369.0 . Please search the thread for a suitable bios before posting or donate upfront, asking for him to configure it. I've seen newbies behaving like brainless leeches and pissing off people that contributed to the scene, including who offered custom faster .bin files.

[pastet89]

Thank you very much!!
I can just not understand how am I supposed to run this program on Linux.