What should a gpu miner have in his bag of tricks?

Going to make A thread 🧵 for gpu miners.

listing cheap easy tools 🧰 for us gpu miners.

1) a few screwdrivers
2) a wire stripper
3) a digital meter
4) a psu tester.
5) a kwatt meter

software

windows 10
smos
hive os

these are very likely the minimum you need

other software

msi afterburner

many would say bios flashing software.

spacer

please feel free to add your ideas.

How about spare parts? Having extra working power packs and risers can erase headaches when they comes, they always come one day or months later, the convenience of swapping parts makes life easier for miners, don't you think? I have complete tool box and others but without spare parts you will get to a point of confusion

For rigs: Several universal risers, test/reserve PSU and motherboard - better PC test bench, USB-flash/HDD with mining OS.
For support: 50-100 meters of UTP and power cable.
Software: latest and old versions of NVIDIA and AMD drivers.

If i remember some more - i`ll correct this post

Quote from: mak013 on December 29, 2020, 05:59:14 AM

If you are a real crypto miner you must have everything extra, power cables can burn at any time, RAM can give up at anytime, risers connection can fail and need replacement, it's always a good move to have an extra for parts, can't even remember how many times I've change power cables and risers now

What is handy is to have a wire crimp tool and the pins for your PSUs. Also having different wire guages helps, along with different male/female connectors like MOLEX, PCIe. This way when you accidently burn a wire on a PSU, you can easily replace it. You can also do many things such as make custom wiring to power the USB risers so they don't melt wires. These are dirt cheap on Aliexpress and so are the pins that you can crimp on. Wires you can buy pretty much anywhere. There are videos on Youtube of custom wiring and shows you how to use the crimp tool properly.

Another must for miners is, an air compressor. Simply because you need to clean out the dust from time to time. Before I had an air compressor I would buy the compressed air, however they lately gone up in price >$5 for a single can which lasts maybe one use. Air compressor you can pretty much not have to worry about running out of air. Just make sure you don't set PSI too high or you will make PCB components fly off or you will kill the bearings if you spin a fan too fast.

Thermal paste (MX5)

Air compressor for cleaning heatsinks.

Simple rig resetter's from SMOS (optional but very very helpful if rigs not on site)

Smoke detector, by prevention.

Mining software app can be handle when you aren't around at home, you can easily see what's going on with your miners and what their temps are too, for example ethmonitoring.com app, there are others out there too, I think nicehash have one too

this is can be removed.. "4) a psu tester" ..nothing beats a rig as a psu tester.

very important -- a test rig composed of
  - 1 riser
  - 1 gpu
  - a motherboard
  - a processor
  - a hdd or a ssd
  - a psu

what this "test rig" can do?

so you can know what is fucking up your other rigs, if ever you pinpointed the problem and you just want to make sure. you can test these(one at a time):

- risers
- gpus
- psus
- motherboards
- cpus
- hdds or ssds

note: this test rig is mining 24/7 as to ascertain that all the components are working, and when you plug parts to be tested you'll be able to compare Wink

one cpu for test bench, raspberry pi for remote management and online wallet, bor, usb wifi and some knowledge in electrical parts

portable monitor for easy troubleshouting, and the last is nice chair for rest a while

Smart wifi switches are very nice. I can restart the rig remotely when it freezes. I monitor power consumption too.

Quote from: sereze on December 29, 2020, 02:24:39 PM

Smart wifi switches are very nice. I can restart the rig remotely when it freezes. I monitor power consumption too.

They are god send!

Ive been using them for years and have saved me so many trips to the moning warehouse

Mine even have watt meters built in that log the power usage.

I love this thread! Thank you for starting it, and for those who are contributing to it. I was thinking of starting a thread basically asking the question that Phil answered in the title. I have been reading and asking lots of questions as a newbie getting started. I'm doing my due diligence, and hoping to start building a small mining room in my basement early next year. The way I was going to pose my question was basically if you were able to take what you've learned by building your rigs over time, and had the ability to buy everything (but the GPUs maybe! hahaha) all in one stroke a build your setup the best way possible, what would it look like?

The vision I have for what I'd like to do, involves running a dedicated 30amp 240v line into my basement, which I believe would support 4 rigs, 8 cards each, provided I could ever actually get my hands on 32 GPUs (leaning towards 3060Ti if they become available for a decent price, right?)

What tools and tricks would you use to set all that up? I'm thinking 4 identical mobos, sets of risers, same CPU, etc., trying to build 4 identical racks so that all the processes are the same, just cloning the setup for efficiency's sake. What power supplies have proven the most reliable? Would you put a Killawatt on every PSU and leave them there permanently to monitor? Would you craft some external air flow to draw in cold outside air in the winter and pipe the hot air into the home to get some heating out of it? What would your investment look like if you were able to build a full rack of GPUs at one shot - even if you just got each rig up and running and added cards slowly as you found them to become available?

My day job is all about creating processes, redundancies for production, fail safes, and automation. I'm trying to apply what I know there, to how I could build an excellent mining garden (the word farm seems to big for what I could do!) that is reliable, efficient, tidy cable management, etc.

I think this thread is going to have a lot of useful information for this process, thanks again!

Amp circuit breakers are very good too, you can conveniently leave your home and remotely spy on your mining rig through apps and see if is still mining, circuit breakers works wonder if there is a very high current that can destroy your rigs

Quote from: miner29 on December 29, 2020, 02:27:53 PM

Quote from: sereze on December 29, 2020, 02:24:39 PM

Smart wifi switches are very nice. I can restart the rig remotely when it freezes. I monitor power consumption too.

They are god send!

Ive been using them for years and have saved me so many trips to the moning warehouse

Mine even have watt meters built in that log the power usage.

nice these are the best I have 4 of them from digital logger.

you can buy them used on ebay.

this is a great model for 1x 30 amp 240 circuit

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-Loggers-EPCR3-Ethernet-Power-Controller/114598321218?

Quote from: philipma1957 on December 29, 2020, 05:20:38 AM

Going to make A thread 🧵 for gpu miners.

The most important thing that a miner should have are arms that grow from the shoulders, not arms that grow from the ass.
If the miner does not know how to do anything, then in Russia colleagues tell him that his hands grow out of his ass.
I never had a psu tester, so when testing the power supply, I connected several hard drives and other devices to it and checked all voltages with a multimeter.
Should I tell you what I use instead of an expensive wire cleaning tool?

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