Pictures of your mining rigs!

[opentoe]

Are those FPGA boards?

[Isokivi]

Are those FPGA boards?

Yes, those are Enterpoints Cairnsmore boards (4 spartans per board), stacked and fans mounted on the sides, the strandard construction has them on the top.

[gyverlb]

I have this dream where I bought 280 Lancelots from Ngzhang instead, and traded them in for the same number of Avalons...

Sometimes you pick the right horse, and other times you don't.

Hum, don't feel down. The trade-in still isn't possible.

Ans as long as the boards are generating income, it may be safer to buy Avalon full price and wait for them mining with something that still is quite profitable.

[Gator-hex]

I suspect the bASIC funds went on buying something like this.
Not many people understand pre-order arbitrage scam = free equipment loan.
Try to refund in devalued dollars, and if they insist on BTC, you'll mine them in some time.  

[Gator-hex]

It could be.  But BTC might have gone the other direction just as easily.

Reward halving ensures BTC prices will always go up. 

[tosku]

I do believe I have had the largest mining setup that didn't involve ripping off investors.  For a while it was about 0.5% of the total network hashpower.  The only other single players of that scale were Giga, and Amazingrando.

How about Artforz? He should have been pulling more than a few percent of the hashing power himself at some time.

[BBQKorv]

This is the array of ~140 Cairnsmore CM1 boards I built last summer.  The last time I had all of them hashing on a single pool they were pumping out around 115 GH/s.  Power demand is 6.5 kW, not including cooling.  I've moved them to a better location for summer, which is why I'm comfortable posting now

When I saw Skyfall I laughed at the lame crypto gear the movie's villian had.  



I'd like to give a little shout out of thanks to all the folks at BFL and especially Inaba!  Without you this would never have been as profitable as it is today.  How you might ask?  Well:

• They took millions in preorder money that otherwise would have been spent on hashpower that exists and competes with me off the market for nearly a year now, and continue to do so today
• They scared lots of other folks away from making the investment I did, since it was obviously a money loser when they would ship in October
• They are so unbelievable incompetent, they still haven't shipped!  Meanwhile these babys are chunking out $600 / day
• When they finally do ship, their incompetence means they won't ship much and it will be many, many months before difficulty catches up with my electric bill

Thats what I like to see, this goes instantly to my "hardcore hardware" category. If you want to share, how long did it take to 100% ROI that gear?

[Turok]

I am mining for a while, but was always using my work computer.

Finally, I decided to get a new dedicated miner. It has one MSI 7970 and Asus Ares 2, so basically little more than 3 x 7970.
I know you may argue that Asics are comming so there was no point investing into a GPU rig, but once the BitCoin difficulty is too high, I will mine other coins.
This rig will also have BFL asics connected to it in the future (hopefully ).

This is how it looks like:

http://imageshack.us/a/img856/1151/img0130sn.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img526/2088/img0128uz.jpg
http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/1745/img0129hfq.jpg

[philips]

Looks like some kind of Borg device.
Wicked.

[minedeep]

Looks like some kind of Borg device.
Wicked.

Here you go.

http://www.aerocool.com.tw/strike-x/chassis/218.html

[redmist]

I am fortunate enough to have a shop with space for me to setup my mining rigs.  So far I've just gone with the open "bench" setup to save on costs and to make cooling easy.

In the photo you can see the bench with three rigs (a mix of 5870, 5970 and one older 5840) on the floor is the Bitcoin solo server running in -server mode, which also has 2 5870's.  There are a couple of other machines in my office with 5870's elsewhere.  I am at 3.8G/hash and adding about 1/g/hash per week buying up cheap used cards via craigslist.

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

What PSU do you have for each of your rigs? Just asking out of curiosity, as my rig (x3 5850's) has a 800Watt PSU.
Wondering if I got too much or not?

[minedeep]

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

I'm actually doing the same right now.  How far along are you with it?  I'm stripping it down to use openbox wm and using 12.10 w/ 3.8.2 kernel.  Having it set up to load into ram so that I can pull the stick and boot another machine.  Also apache and psql with a web interface so you can log in over LAN and check status.  The web interface is whats taking most of the time though.  But at least it will be responsive so i can check it on my phone if i decide to open ports on my router.  PM me if you wanna compare notes.

[tosku]

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

I'm actually doing the same right now.  How far along are you with it?  I'm stripping it down to use openbox wm and using 12.10 w/ 3.8.2 kernel.  Having it set up to load into ram so that I can pull the stick and boot another machine.  Also apache and psql with a web interface so you can log in over LAN and check status.  The web interface is whats taking most of the time though.  But at least it will be responsive so i can check it on my phone if i decide to open ports on my router.  PM me if you wanna compare notes.

Are you guys familiar with BAMT?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65915.0

The website is dead, but the download mirrors are still working.

[minedeep]

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

I'm actually doing the same right now.  How far along are you with it?  I'm stripping it down to use openbox wm and using 12.10 w/ 3.8.2 kernel.  Having it set up to load into ram so that I can pull the stick and boot another machine.  Also apache and psql with a web interface so you can log in over LAN and check status.  The web interface is whats taking most of the time though.  But at least it will be responsive so i can check it on my phone if i decide to open ports on my router.  PM me if you wanna compare notes.

Are you guys familiar with BAMT?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65915.0

The website is dead, but the download mirrors are still working.

Yep, I'm familiar with BAMT.  I believe BAMT 0.5 was released Feb '12 so I assumed development had halted.  Sounded a little dated for my taste.  I tend to roll my own distros when the task at hand can benefit from it.  I'll release it to the forums after it's been battle tested.  Also need to throw together a site and set up some mirrors before I put it out there, but thats the easy part.

[crazyates]

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

I'm actually doing the same right now.  How far along are you with it?  I'm stripping it down to use openbox wm and using 12.10 w/ 3.8.2 kernel.  Having it set up to load into ram so that I can pull the stick and boot another machine.  Also apache and psql with a web interface so you can log in over LAN and check status.  The web interface is whats taking most of the time though.  But at least it will be responsive so i can check it on my phone if i decide to open ports on my router.  PM me if you wanna compare notes.

You realize that post was almost 2  years ago? May '11? You might want to look for something a little more current, as a LOT has changed since then.

[minedeep]

I am working on building a good Ubuntu Live ATI ISO file today in an attempt to eliminate all of the hard drives by using USB thumb drives, that'll save on electricity as well as hardware costs going forward.

I'm actually doing the same right now.  How far along are you with it?  I'm stripping it down to use openbox wm and using 12.10 w/ 3.8.2 kernel.  Having it set up to load into ram so that I can pull the stick and boot another machine.  Also apache and psql with a web interface so you can log in over LAN and check status.  The web interface is whats taking most of the time though.  But at least it will be responsive so i can check it on my phone if i decide to open ports on my router.  PM me if you wanna compare notes.

You realize that post was almost 2  years ago? May '11? You might want to look for something a little more current, as a LOT has changed since then.

Ah, my bad.  Just used to people updating their original post when maintaining a project.  I'll check it out.  Too far along on my own project to abandon it.  Wouldn't hurt to have a BAMT alternative regardless.

[Gator-hex]

Wouldn't hurt to have a BAMT alternative regardless.

Old too, but there is an alternative, I've always used LinuxCoin  
https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=7374.0

Here you go.
http://www.aerocool.com.tw/strike-x/chassis/218.html

I'm using the Strike-X Advance, on it's side like a desktop, lets the heat out but keeps the EM radiation in.
http://www.aerocool.com.tw/strike-x/chassis/230.html

[opentoe]

Why does everyone want to use Linux with their mining gear? These days a Windows 7 machine can run just as efficient and stable as any Linux distro out there and you have all you need. What's the reason for using Linux at all besides being old school and really just liking Linux?

[crazyates]

Why does everyone want to use Linux with their mining gear? These days a Windows 7 machine can run just as efficient and stable as any Linux distro out there and you have all you need. What's the reason for using Linux at all besides being old school and really just liking Linux?

Linux is free? You can buy a bunch of motherboards on Newegg, and not have to buy a $150 license for a legal OS?

[philips]

BAMT and LinuxCoin did also had certain advantages, they were provided with everything you need to just start mining (especially BAMT came with farm management software) while they could be installed on a simple USB stick.
Probably many miners were also Linux geeks to begin with
Also, you don't have to be old school to use Linux.

BAMT still works perfectly BTW, only cgminer needs to be updated.