Topic: building a machine - page 2. (Read 2341 times)

first of all i just have to say thank you all for the suggestions and advice mostly erpbridge

he is amazing and a great help to this project , and yea i will be treating this like my hobby i wont be expecting to make alot of money out of it or become rich by doing this , i just find it interesting and i want to get involved into it.

so that being said i went and did more research and came up and out with this

so i changed my whole system type or what i will be getting and please correct me if im wrong or if i need to change anything please that would be appreciated , i will first just give you a brief of what i will be getting then i will go more in detail in what the system or the components are that im going to be purchasing

-motherboard is a MSI 3 slot for the GPUS

-the GPUs is 3 asus 7950s

-ram is 4gs

-harddrive is 500gs

-cpu is intel dual 3.4 gh processor

-and the power supply is a 850w power supply

and i will be putting all the systems in a ventilated cooled room about down to 5degree C
but the other thing i dont understand or im confused is that how would i point each card to be running or mining differently ?? or what i mean is if (GPU 1 ) is going to be mining like in the picture GPU 0 = blah blah

how do i get the Cgminer to recognize that and or appoint each card to that specific mine !?!
excatly what @ronaldinho_07 put up in the picture something like that !?!? how would i be able to do that ??

thanks and i will be reading more into the guide that you provided me to look into

My personal favorite is running twin gigabyte GV-R797OC-3gd's on a cheap Asus F1A55-M LX + board..
cheap APU, cheap ram, very expensive Thermaltake "toughpower" 1500w power supply.. 1.4 MH stock..

Anybody who tells you to get a cheap power supply, or one that will be barely adequate for the job, hasn't mined for long..

I do have a rig with a  MSI 890FXA-GD70 mobo, with 5 pci-e slots.. I'd prefer another 2 slot asus board any day of the week..

Hope I posted this in time for it to be of some help...

The ship for big ROI's have sailed a long time ago.

It'll take about 15 months for me to get a positive ROI on my 2000Mh/s ($1,200) rig mining LTC (including electricity costs).

Luckily I started early April but yea, don't expect to get rich.

I'm sorry, I'm laughing at the power supply, partly out of personal experience. Back in early July, I ran the numbers, figured my spare 550w PSU would be enough to run a 7950 plus the rest of the system components. I ended up "releasing the magic smoke" from the PSU. Toast.

I think you REALLY need to go look at Bitcoin Hardware comparison and Litecoin Hardware comparison, and run your own numbers. In general, I wouldn't even blindly suggest someone start mining unless they had a 650w minimum PSU... and at that, only one card on that weak of a PSU.  Just blindly guessing for 7750s, I'm going to blind guess they need 200w each... then you also figure the core components of the system take 100-115, and you always want an additional 10-20 pct of your power supply's power to be spare, just in case something pulls a ton of extra power.

Your RAM is EXTREMELY low for ANY purpose. Sure, its moderately adequate for a desktop computer that will run office applications and browse websites. Whoever is selling that to you is selling you the bare minimum for running Windows... I can't fault them, because you probably didn't tell them your needs. You are essentially doing high-end intensity gaming, or high end video editing and 3D rendering. THAT is what they should be developing the system around, RAM wise. 8GB RAM. Someone told me have as much RAM on your motherboard as your cards have... others tell me 8GB is enough.

You need a current gen or gen-1 processor. You DO NOT need a top end processor, mining is not as processor intensive as you might think... unless you're mining scrypt-jane CPU-only coins. I don't know AMD, but I'll tell you the equivalent from the Intel side. The newest generation that came out in July is Haswell (Core i5 and Core i7 4xxx numbers. People were mining before July. You don't need Haswell. Before July, processors existed in the following order, from weakest to strongest: Celeron, i3, i5, i7. You don't need an i7 to mine, its overkill... I use my i7 for server farm stuff and teaching myself vmWare ESX virtualization, and running about 10 virtual servers... like I said, overkill. You can mine on the weakest of that generation, a Celeron, which is what the Tacotime crate build said that I recommended you to go look at.

Again, I think you REALLY need to go look the Tacotime crate build at https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/litecoin-build-for-noobs-3x-7950s-18-mhs-in-a-10-crate-case-163306 for suggestions on hardware. I don't think you did.

Cgminer, to your question, runs however many cards you let it. Don't crossfire them. If you leave defaults, it picks up all the cards. If you provide specific arguments, it runs specific cards. If you tell it to run one card in desktop mode at a low load and the other card at a high load, it'll do that. You CAN tell it to mine on card 2 while you run Skyrim on card 1... but you'll notice both will take a hit in total performance.

As to what coin to mine: Again, I suggest you go look at coinchoose ... and look at it a few different times during the day, over a few days. There are times certain coins are higher than others, and then there are times a coin will surge to the top, then after a little while drop way down to the bottom. I can't tell you a certain coin to mine... neither can many others. Those who DO tell you a coin, are either A) Shilling that specific coin; B) repeating what someone else told them; or C) giving you advice that is only good for a couple weeks.

This hobby (and that's how you should treat it, as a hobby) changes WAY too fast to give you advice on any one coin. I think with some of these questions you are asking, maybe you should just use the card you have in the computer in front of you, download CGminer and cgwatcher, point at a pool like multipool.us, and browse the posts on the first couple pages of each section of this forum and the forums on litecoin org.

DO NOT expect to get a 100 percent ROI in your first 90 days. That's one of the bigger fallacies out there, especially for a newbie who farms at anything less than fully optimized and tested settings, 24/7. That fallacy also doesn't take into account your support hardware, it assumes you already have a motherboard/ram/cpu/hdd. Treat this as a hobby, that whatever money you put in, you probably won't get out... and just be happy when you get that extra little gift back.

And again, go look at the tacotime crate build for hardware suggestions. He's one of the higher-tier people on the hardware side of the forum.

Asrock H61 Pro + Celeron G1610 + 4GB DDR3 + 40GB HDD
6 HD7970s (or maybe 4x 7990s)
2 1000W psu (1200w will be better)

My rig,ver2



ver1,lol

thats amazing thank you for all the information truly !!

now i have been on the phone trying to order the parts for the computer and so far its looking good im going to try the new cards 7750s and see how it works or where i can max it out at and then go from there

but the other thing is does the CPU need to be good or i can do a dual core 3.2 processor AMD ??

and the power supply ofc is about 550w and ram is 2gs and harddrive is about 500gs motherboard is gonna cost me around 70 -  80 $$ its a gigabyte 1155 chipset

but the most important part is the GPUs , the other thing i dont understand is how would i be able to run 2 different applications (CGminer) on 2 different cards or it doesnt work ? like this is the part that im confused !???!

and what do you suggestion i start mining LTC OR FTC ??

I'm running a machine with 3 GPUs on the motherboard, in a milk-crate, with 16x-16x cables to raise them up and let the air flow through. Its more dependent on how much power supply you have, how well you can control your airflow.

I have another case where the motherboard is older, and has two PCIe 1x, and one PCIe16x... and I have 3 cards running off that. So, taking that example, and translating it to the other one I just described... it has three 1x and three 16x ports on it, and two PCI ports on it. If I REALLY wanted to, and REALLY had enough of a power supply, I could run a card off each of the PCIe ports with respective risers... and could also maybe pull out my Startech PCI-PCIe 1x card and do that as well (not reccomended.) From these same forum boards, there are some issues that arise with drivers, and once thats resolved, with Windows itself, when you get above a certain number of cards.

But yes, plenty of people safely run 3-4 cards off a single motherboard. You're going to run the difference of choice... do you want to have multiple systems with one card each off different outlets (and different circuits) around the house, so you don't pop the breaker accidentally and down all your miners? This also spreads out the heat, too... so that each card is not directly influenced by the heat of the card next to it. (With proper airflow ventilation and room ventilation, that last point is kinda canceled out.) My next miner, I'm probably going to put across the basement... partially because that's where another circuit is and I'm afraid I'll max my 15A breaker soon with stuff already on it (a 3x6970 miner on a first gen quad core, an ESX server, a Drobo, my Internet equipment), and partially because I have a heat buildup already and putting this other miner over there will spread the heat in a general area.

Or do you want to put 3 cards in, so you can lower the average overhead per card? A motherboard runs about 110w, unless you're CPU mining a coin like a Scrypt-Jane coin. That's the overhead. Say your GPU pulls 250W. You could either run 3 GPUs on 3 systems (3x250 + 3x110)... or 3 GPUs on one system (3x250 + 1x110). Simple math tells you that the latter is a better choice.... and when you figure in cost to operate impacting your overhead, it comes in real easy to figure out.

I also suggest you not get yourself stuck in the mindset of mining any one particular coin. You can, its your perogative... but I'm just suggesting you look at coinchoose.com or Dustcoin and see the proof there. Also, suggest you look into CGWatcher, expecially its scheduling feature and profitability tie ins to coinchoose.

thank you so much for the detailed answer and all the suggestions and advice i really appreciate it

but the thing i dont understand is that , if i want to get 4 GPUs do i need to get 4 motherboards ?? and the rest pretty much comes easy and clear to me

or hopefully it will go as planned. most likely i will start buying all the parts by monday and i should have it all setup by next friday so i will put up pictures of the rig

Pi's are really only good for mining if the device actually doing the mining is connected in over USB. I know I've seen setups of BFL Jalapenos and a Pi. I don't know if an FPGA can be hosted on a PI, but if a Jalapeno could be, shouldn't be any reason why an FPGA would have issues.

But the above, those are for SHA256 coins. Add in also USB Block Eruptors to that mix.

As to Scrypt coins (such as LTC and the many others that are looked upon with scorn by many on this board outside "Alternative Cryptocurrency"), you need to mine those with either a CPU or GPU. A Pi's CPU is VERY minimal, to the point that its probably not worthwhile. A Pi can't support the large amounts of RAM that a Scrypt system needs (4GB+, 8GB for anything really worthwhile), and does not have the PCIe bus or ports to host a PCIe GPU.

As to Scrypt-Jane style coins, the ones engineered to only be solved by CPU and not GPU... Pi can't do these either.

As was said above me, there are sites that say parts. I suggest you maybe look here on this site at TacoTime's crate build for a suggestion. As to video cards, do research in this forum you posted in, and also at the Litecoin Mining Hardware Comparison. Most of the time, the answer of which video card will be very similar regardless of SHA256 or Scrypt.

To answer your question as to if you need parts (without suggesting to you exact parts)... you DO need the following parts, and you need them for EACH rig. They're a full computer:

-Something to hold all your components, but which still provides an adequate air supply to the base of the cards (unless you are using a liquid cooling system). A typical computer case would seem the logical answer... but its often NOT the best answer in this particular case. Again, look at the crate build.

Core components:
-Motherboard
-CPU (and its cooler that usually comes with it)
-RAM
-Power Supply (adequately sized to your needs... don't skimp!)
-Storage (Some people say hard drive... some say USB drive. I personally do hard drives because they are also usable in other situations after I finish mining (Drobo, for instance), and to me a USB drive will take a little longer to boot from. Don't try to leap ahead by getting an SSD... that's a little overkill in this scenario.) PS: I've heard Linux mining systems won't run from USB... doesn't make sense to me, but thats what a few on the forum have said.

Hashing Power/accessories
-GPU - You have LOTS of choices... and the biggest hint is choose AMD, not Nvidia. Do your research very well before choosing. Keep in mind some cards have voltage locks on them, and may not be able to be as easily adjusted as others.
-Accessories - If at all possible, you want to try NOT to jam the cards up next to each other, so not plugging direct into the ports available on the motherboard. If you choose an alternative case like a milk/storage crate, you probably need to get riser cables (1-16, or 16-16)... and you probably also need to get something to attach the card to the crate (screws) and something to support the end of the card that's hovering in the middle of the case (I use a wooden paint stirrer stick.)

-Cooling System: Unless you're using a liquid cooling system to transfer the heat outside the box then dissipate a distance away (which is also a bit overkill), you'll be wanting fans. Not just fans to blow over your rigs to provide fresh air to the bottom of the cards and move hot air away from the top of the cards... but also something to ventilate the heat out of the top of the room to a location the heat is NOT... the rest of the house, a window, etc. Your room has a given amount of heat it can hold... if you don't move the heat out and let new air come in, the room will become warm, the cards will not be able to get rid of excess heat, and will cut off until the heat has dropped below a set level.

-You don't need an optical media drive. If you do, you really only need it for the initial setup. If you have your Windows install as an ISO, you can use Rufus and put it on an 8GB USB easy.
-If you're going for the crate setup... get zipties to hold things in place. You MIGHT also consider buying a momentary power switch, or you can set your computer to "On Power loss, restore power to ON."
-You're probably going to need a network switch, and network cables. (If you know how to make your own network cables, and have access to tools or are willing to put down money for tools... much better.)

For your whole setup, you'll probably want a single setup of monitor, keyboard, mouse too. You'll probably only use it now and then, but its useful to have it rather than moving your personal desktop one around.

In my case... for the fan nearest the computers, I didn't go super powerful... just enough to get a steady air supply moving. I'm mining in my unfinished fieldstone basement which also has a dehumidifier contributing to the heat, and needed to force the hot air upstairs to exhaust outdoors... so I got a powerful Vornado fan that can push a distance, for my exhaust fan. In the winter, though... I'll be sucking in enough cold air from the fieldstone walls that I probably won't need the exhaust fan, and if I do... its extra heat for the rest of my house.

No, you cannot GPU mine LTC on a rPi. There are plenty of hardware guides and GPU comparison sheets/websites to find what hardware you will need.

Hello guys,

i require some professional advice or need help on this part

i am trying to mine LTC and i want to setup about 3 - 4 computers !! would i be able to do this with the raspberry pi ?? or

do i have to buy a GPU , motherboard and all those computer parts ?

and if i am buying the computer parts what parts do i need ??!?

do i need the :

GPU
cpu
motherboard
ram
power supply
harddrive
cooling system

do i have to get all those parts to run 3 or 4 different rigs ??

thank you
regards