Hi Guys, Been a while since I have posted for a number of reasons but I am happy to say I am back and in need of some advice! A friend of mine is looking to build a mining rig, neither of us know two much about it and so I am looking for some advice on the requirements etc? What hardware is needed? Software? Basic requirements etc. I dont have much involvement in this area so as much info as possible would be great! Thanks Matt
Pretty much everything asides from bitcoin, which is pretty much wholly unlikely to be in any way profitable these days, is AMD GPU dependent. Get as many R9 2X0/79X0/69X0/59X0 as you can afford, a motherboard with enough PCI-E slots as you need, and then get a low end cpu like a Celeron as cpu doesn't really matter. You don't need too much ram either 4GB is likely fine. Then you will want a good quality high efficiency PSU of the appropriate wattage based on how many GPU you are going for. You will also need a hard drive of some sort, something like a cheap 250GB-500GB drive, or whatever is a good price really. A case that is either open, like a test bench... or something that is highly ventilated would be best... or if you have somewhere to put it where you won't have to hear it a more basic case like a source210 with some high cfm panaflos would be fine probably. Try to buy as much lower power use components as possible to offset electric cost. I would probably try to source as much as possible from used market so it doesn't take so long to pay for it back with mining 'profits'. I am not mining yet, but I have been looking into it a lot. Right now I am just keeping an eye out for a reasonable price used GPU that will be suitable and I will use an old Atom 330 motherboard, 430w PSU and 1TB hdd I have laying about.
Buy a power meter and Do your research!! Alt coins cash value is basically tied to Bit coin value, and bit coin has tanked in the past couple of weeks going from around £500 per coin to under £200. I'm currently mining on an R270X on a rig pulling less than 250w and not even covering the electric costs.
FYI: We recently tested a TUF Sabertooth Z87 to run 65-74C average, peaking at 94C with four 290X DirectCU II GPUs (didn't have enough 1x extenders for more) for 6 days straight.
I've been mining on a R9 290 for the past 2 weeks and mine in a pool, they have a great setup tutorial for setting up the software. Worth to check it out. http://www.wemineltc.com As for hardware, it all depends how big you want to go, any power efficient CPU will be enough, mining uses 0% cpu so its only needed for the OS. For a GPU you can check this list for the hash rate and power draw (power isn't accurate though). https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison 7970 are the most power efficient miner, I'm using a R9 290 because my miner is also my main rig I use for gaming and work. As previously said mesure your powerdraw when you mine and calculate the cost. You can use a watt meter or anything else. My rig is fully water cooled and uses 500W max.
I though its all in the the application specific hardware now and normal PCs can not compete or is that just bit coins?
ASIC`s are for bitcoins currently - although some very expensive scrypt asic`s are surfacing. since you can buy a usb powered asic for £50 and hashes at 1.6GH/s - gpu mining is dead for bit coins.
I'd be telling him not to do it. Electric costs alone unless you live in America mean you will bearly break even. With bitcoin prices continuing to tank from its high of $1100 to its current price of sub $600 last I checked. Means all alt coins are devalued as well. Light coin has not been above $20 since November for example.
Even without counting the electricity costs, a USB asic will take about a year to pay for itself. Any kind of mining is really speculating about the future value of cyrpto currency.
What ever you get look at underclocking/ under volting for efficiency, if I run my system at stock settings I pull about 1150w, with some clock and voltage tweaking my 290s aren’t actually far off my 7950 rigs at sub 700w, sure it drops from 2.6 to 2.3 Mhash but still handy. You more than break even on leccy even with prices where they are now but it takes time, so as said above its all about whether you think it has legs in the future, myself I have a haul of coins and it was an interesting experiement but I'm done, I've been off loading my gear on Ebay etc, the silly prices the cards are going far is more tempting to me to fund further toys.
depends on which 1 - block erupters are at 330mh/s , antminers at 1.6<2.2 GH/s (can be overclocked ) , and bitfury start at 2.2GH/s up to 2.6 GH/s
using http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ calculator and the current value of bit coin the ant miner takes close to 2 years to pay for itself (if you have free electric), and the bit fury does 33% more bit coins per day but also costs about 33% more so the break even on that has to be about the same.
Thanks for all the advice guys! I knew I could count on you all! I have advised him that it may not be a great idea and to let me know if he wants to go anything further with it!
Depends on your energy prices and how your tariff is set up. I pay one day rate from 6AM until 10PM, which is very, very expensive. There's a different one for night time. If I leave the PC on for the night, it makes a bit of extra cash. I'm not sure this would have been viable if I expected an actual return on the parts. The only reason why it is even feasible for me is because I would have bought and used the parts anyway, so really purchase price for me is 0 from a mining perspective. TLDR If you have the gear, might as well dabble for a bit. Buying gear exclusively for mining, probably not advised to a noob.
