Topic: Advice for a start for a Mining Farm - page 2. (Read 3168 times)

Maybe in theory but as practical reality you aren't going to get 90 MB/s+ usable throughput unless it is RAM to RAM.  Still lets say it is 90MB vs 20MB in a day my rig might have about 100MB of disk activity.  So it saves 1-2 seconds per day?     Lots of good reasons to use netboot but "slow" USB speeds is hardly one of them.   The distros are very small and boot times are very fast.

Read times for USB flash drives are typically 10-30Mbyte/second.  Mostly secondary to higher protocol overhead.

With giga-ethernet you can get 90-110Mb/sec.  Under similar conditions.

Doesn't account for USB 3.0 though, haven't used it personally.

Wait huh?  iso over network is faster than USB drive read time?

I would save some money on the psu and get an Antec TPQ-1200 ... the OC edition has even more power connectors for video cards ...

Either way ... the TPQ-1200 has served me well and they run about $220 ... sometimes you can get them for $150-$180 used.

You can also save yourself some money getting 16x->16x extenders from 9mart.com. You will need 16x->16x unless you want to diddle with the pci-e lane detect pins. The 16x->16x just works, of course if you want to use the 1x slot, then you need a 1x->16x as well.

No need for powered extenders a the GD70 has successfully run 3 6990's without them, stable for almost a year now. The machine uses 1170 watts at the wall to do 2520 mhash/sec. Remember the 1200 watt rating is on the DC side, not the AC side at the wall. So my PSU is actually at about 1000-1050 watts load.

Also on the memory, on my machines with 4 video cards the resident running memory requirement is just over 1 gb ... so .. 2 gb would be fine. I actually have 4 gb in each machine which is handy if you want to netboot as 1 gb will get eaten up holding the iso image. Netboot is highly recommended because the USB is so slow and also ... extra cost you don't need to spend.

Is the barn made out of VPN lumber with ntpd windows shut tight? 

On Newegg you sometimes come across an open box of the board saving you a little more.
I'm partial to the GA-990fxa-UD3 or UD5 myself. I read on BCT someone having difficulty running more than 4 cards on MSI. DeathandTaxes probably made posts in that thread.

I'm replying on phone so parden grammer and typos.

I have a unique situation, that I don't pay for power.  I do own my own place, but without getting into details I have no power cost. 

I love the concept of fpga, one computer, space and power and heat savings.  Sadly, at this stage, its more bang for buck with video cards, but I want to go fpga in the future.  I dreamed up mounting 10 fpgas to acrylic and submerge them into oil, but that is an upgrade step after ROI.  I would like the rigs to pay for their own upgrades down the road.

So far thanks for tips.  I have a huge step to learn lynix enough to run bitcoin on them and get them wireless (due to power restrictions placement).  But at least i know I'm heading in the right direction and won't waste money on poor setups with all of everyones help.

Thanks again, if u got more advice, keep it comming.

-elrodvoss

A kilowatt meter to measure your draw at the wall.
Design your system around 6 cards working and the PSU at 70% load.
A Dr. Power II is good to keep around to measure the PSU's fitness when hardware issues creep in. It'll help to isolate motherboard issues from PSU issues.

have a look at FPGAs, cablesaurus selling them. Are you okay (with that rig you spec'd) with getting half as many BTC before end of year?
There's some speculation that it may happen this year and then mining becomes less worthwhile unless you can get power costs way down.

Well you get a momma GPU and a poppa GPU.  Leave them in the barn and give them plenty of privacy ...

Oh you want serious answers?
MB:  The 890FXA-GD70 is a monster.  I own 7.  Very solid.  A quick heads up BAMT won't boot unless you have latest bios flash and whatever the setting "protection bios upgrade" when I accidentally enabled it caused a freeze before it even finished posting.

RAM: 2GB is more than enough.  1GB works fine.  Save a couple bucks.  One rig doesn't matter but if you ever end up with 2, 3, 4 it starts adding up

Drive: I would go w/ 4GB.  Some MB/BIOS have difficulty booting USB sticks >4GB.  For dedicated rigs you don't need more than 4GB.  Hell you really don't need more than 2GB but lets splurge a little.

PSU:  That PSU is a nice one but it is a rebrand of Seasonic 1250W 80Plus-Gold.  Just get the real thing.  Seasonic customer support and service is better anyways.  The Seasonic is same price, has 5 yr warranty and a better fan.

Evening everyone,

I wanted to get some input on the first of a mining farm and see if there is any suggestions that you all could give me.  I have dug through and tried to find the best hardware for my money limitations.

Case:  $50  (custom frame case from forum posting)
Motherboard:  $167 (MSI 890FXA-GD70 AM3+)
CPU:  $40 (AMD Sempron 145 Sargas 2.8GHz Socket AM3)
Ram:  $24 (Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Dual Channel Kit)
Drive:  $15 (Verbatim 8GB STORE N GO FLASH DRIVE USB 2.0 NANO)
PSU:  $270 (XFX ProSeries P1-1250-BEFX 1250W ATX12V V2.2 & ESP12V V2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular)

Extras:  $12 x 4 (PCIe x16 Extender Cable)
            $20 (Box Fan)

Total base cost: $634 (prices pulled from newegg, cablesaurus, and walmart as of this posting)

I think that is about everything.  Of course the only thing missing is what video card I can use.

Well so far, I have been using 2 x 5850s in my current setup.  Im getting 350 each and on ebay they are selling around $150 each.
So with 4 video cards, it would cost me $1234 and give me about 1.4Ghash/s

So of my reasons behind my choice in hardware is:

Motherboard cause it supports 5 PCI-e slots, CPU and Ram is the cheapest I can find, Drive I plan on using Unix so 8 GB USB drive should be plenty.  The PSU has 8 6+2 pins and 1250W, so should have enough overhead to support 4 cards and computer for 24/7 mining.  Also I am trying to keep the power under 1400 for each system since I don't have the proper setup to have multiple rigs in the same room.

So you have any suggestions for tweaking this setup?  Thanks in advance.

-elrodvoss