What is the worst motherboard I could buy for mining?

[lightfoot]

Ok, in a moment of utter stupidity I bought a broken ATI Radeon 5770 card on Ebay. Yes, I know it's garbage and broken. Yes I'm bored so I will just fix it.

But I realize the only computer I have that might have a PCI/16 slot is a 2006 era Mac G5. And that's a bit... old... to compile anything on anymore.

So the question: What is the cheapest, most useless, most pointless board I can buy that I can plug into a Corsair and a cheap-ass IDE hard drive. Hell, I could probably find a 600mb ESDI drive in the junk pile. But the point is to run something simple, small, cheap, cheap, and did I mention cheap to plug this card into and get it running.

Because I just know my next step is going to be one of those spaghetti miners with 20 GPUs mining fucking DOGE 24*7 (*). So why not start at the utter bottom of the barrel.

Thanks!
C

* DOGE! TO DA MOON!!!!!!!!!!!! MORE HAZ COINZ!!!!!!!!!

Ahem.

[BeepBeep2]

Ok, in a moment of utter stupidity I bought a broken ATI Radeon 5770 card on Ebay. Yes, I know it's garbage and broken. Yes I'm bored so I will just fix it.

But I realize the only computer I have that might have a PCI/16 slot is a 2006 era Mac G5. And that's a bit... old... to compile anything on anymore.

So the question: What is the cheapest, most useless, most pointless board I can buy that I can plug into a Corsair and a cheap-ass IDE hard drive. Hell, I could probably find a 600mb ESDI drive in the junk pile. But the point is to run something simple, small, cheap, cheap, and did I mention cheap to plug this card into and get it running.

Because I just know my next step is going to be one of those spaghetti miners with 20 GPUs mining fucking DOGE 24*7 (*). So why not start at the utter bottom of the barrel.

Thanks!
C

* DOGE! TO DA MOON!!!!!!!!!!!! MORE HAZ COINZ!!!!!!!!!

Ahem.

Find an old AM2 motherboard with NVIDIA 570/590 chipset or something used on ebay. Probably $20-30. Should support 2-3 cards, actually. Pair with a cheap $15-30 Athlon 64 X2 4x00+/5x00+6000/6400 etc, 2-4GB DDR2 and get going.

[HellDiverUK]

You can buy an Asus board with an E2-2000 APU on it.  It has a HD7xxx GPU and a PCI-E slot. 

[lightfoot]

Ok, I'm going to get started. I tell you though, if I can buy blown GPUs for peanuts and fix them due to my skillz then my life is going to be a fucking mess.

Time will tell.

C

[nybbler905]

Well... the ' cheapest ' mining rig I've got is a dual core Coppermine board with AGP.  It was FREE with a half decent power supply, fan on each CPU, 10/100 ethernet card and most importantly USB on the back and 2 connectors inside.  The USB connections also have JUMPERS to turn off being powered from the motherboard.  Why is that important?  It didn't blow when modding a powered USB hub and got the power/ground backwards!!

OK, plugged in for 1 second and it got hot so unplugged and was lucky not to blow the chip in the hub either...

For the mining I've been doing, ASIC is the way to go and/or using the PCIx to USB adapters ( and the multi-PSU cards/adapters ) to get half decent hashing with almost totaly dead cards.

So far, the total investment is less than $300.00 Canadian and barely made enough to get 1 ( ONE ) AntMiner added to the system.  I'm looking to spend more on Solar Cells and car batteries to get off the grid since the push to the Smart Meters by my local electric company.

If you had to buy, THIS WOULD BE THE WORST RIG TO BUY!!!!!!

It's amazing what can be done from free/salvaged parts tho 

[lightfoot]

Indeed. I looked at my old Compaq Deskpro (the one with the 486 chip that I upgraded to a Pentium 63, worst chip ever) but it's only got an ISA bus so that won't work. Now I wish I hadn't junked some of my old tower servers from the 80's, but you can't keep everything forever.

My current mining heads for 200gh of BFL weirdness is a pair of IBM x41 laptops running Windows 8.1. They actually run well, which is beyond weird.

And I just bought a 7850 on Ebay for $50, so now I have more stuff to screw with. Which means I need a board with TWO PCIx slots. :-)

C