Topic: Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret" (Read 60195 times)

Hopefully no one here is mining in Texas on a non-fixed electric contract.

With the freeze and blackouts hopefully no one is on Griddy or any other variable rate electric plan.

Griddy customers face $5,000 electric bills for 5 freezing days in Texas
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/2021/02/20/griddy-customers-face-5000-bills-for-5-freezing-days-in-texas


Some Texas Residents See Electric Charges Jump as Much as $14K After Winter Storm
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/some-texas-residents-see-electric-charges-jump-as-much-as-dollar14k-after-winter-storm/ar-BB1dRmGD

I am on New Power's 36 month fixed price plan at a total rate (all costs) of 9c per KWh. I also have my bill charged to a USbank Visa card that gives me back 5%. I pay the card in full so no interest or fees are ever paid. So that 9c turns into 8.55c per KWh.

To save money for miners, we can buy used computer components or recycle the used or bad computer components. There are many such online sellers such as eBay, BuySellRam.com, to whom you can sell graphics card, sell cpu, sell memory, sell ssd.....
even more, sell network equipment, sell test equipment...

Have been down for about 9-months since I moved warehouses. Kind of a bummer! Hoping to get at least partially running again for winter to heat up the new warehouse a bit, haha!

Decided to sell my Dell R815s if anyone is interested:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5278003

GTX 1060 is pretty good in performance and price. But the problem with 3GB cards is they don't work on many algorithms. I want to which coins are you mining with 1060?

That is not closely related to the topic?

There are at least two options.

1. open a hole on the opposite side of the room and cover it with a grill or something and put an axial fan on the window that blows the warm air OUT.
2. divide the room in the middle in a U shape so you can use the window for both intake and outtake. This also works well, I tried this.

http://www.kepfeltoltes.eu/view.php?filename=295U_shape.jpg

Ok, looking for the best ways to get heat out of my mining room...

8 x 10 room with 9ft ceilings, single window, single inside door. Generating a lot of heat.

I don't know anything about thermal stuff. Would it be best to:

1. Use a vent hood like apparatus with fan to get heat into the attic?

2. Use an attic fan for the same affect?

3. Put a fan or air conditioner in window for fresh/cool air?

I am going to assume that these are the original Westmere Microarchitecture from 2011 as you didn't state V2, V3 or V4.

Intel Xeon E7-4830 specifications
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon%20E7-4830%20AT80615007089AA%20(BX80615E74830).html

Also assuming that you are looking to mine RandomX (and variants).

The L2 cache on the Xeon E7-4830 limits it to the maximum of 8 threads.

RandomX needs 256kb of L2 cache and 2mb L3 cache per mining thread.

Xeon E7-4830 has:
Level 2 cache size: 8 x 256 KB <-- this limits the Xeon E7-4830 to only 8 threads
Level 3 cache size: 24 MB

You might want to look at upgrading to better (more cores) or faster ones for more performance.

The best way to judge performance differences between processors is to note the Maximum turbo frequency while using all the cores:

So using the Xeon E7-4830 is: 8 (cores) times 2.267 GHz equals 18.136 which will be the BASE for reference

now comparing  to:

Xeon E7-4850: 10 (cores) times 2.133 GHz equals 21.33 or 17.6% faster
Xeon E7-4860: 10 (cores) times 2.400 GHz equals 24 or 32.3% faster
Xeon E7-4870: 10 (cores) times 2.533 GHz equals 25.33 or 39.7% faster

Intel Xeon E7-4800 microprocessor family
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/TYPE-Xeon%20E7-4800.html

You may also want to consider the E7-8800 series as they are plug compatible with the E7-4800 series, The HP DL580 servers can use the 8800 processors. Be sure to check if your system can use the 8800 processors.

Intel Xeon E7-8800 microprocessor family
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/TYPE-Xeon%20E7-8800.html

Xeon E7-8837: 8 (cores) times 2.800 GHz equals 22.4 or 23.5% faster
Xeon E7-8867L: 10 (cores) times 2.267 GHz equals 22.67 or 25% faster
Xeon E7-8870: 10 (cores) times 2.533 GHz equals 25.33 or 39.7% faster

Hello, been following this thread for a while now. Could not find an answer to this if someone could clue me in:

do the Xeon E7-4830s not perform like they should for hashrates? It has enough L3 cache.

Sundownz how is the farm going?  Are your R815's powered off like mine?

I'm mostly running FPGAs now but still have a few GPUs going.

running 4 x 16c opterons, ES chips... with hugepages 9600 and ps max 1  ( max 2.2 )  i was getting 10000 h/s. after i installed turion power control i simply typed this into the terminal and am upto 12200 h/s


sudo tpc -psmax 6
sleep 1
sudo tpc -fo 1
sudo tpc -set ps 1 freq 3000 vcore 1.1850
sudo tpc -set ps 0 freq 3000 vcore 1.1850
sleep 1
sudo tpc -fo 0
sleep 1
sudo tpc -psmax 1

* ABOUT        XMRig/5.1.0 gcc/5.4.0
 * LIBS         libuv/1.8.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2g hwloc/1.11.2
 * CPU          AMD Eng Sample, ZS222445TGG44_32/22/2_2/16 (4) x64 AES
                L2:64.0 MB L3:48.0 MB 64C/64T NUMA:8
 * MEMORY       20.7/31.4 GB (66%)
 * DONATE       1%
 * ASSEMBLY     auto:bulldozer
 * POOL #1      randomxmonero.eu.nicehash.com:3380 algo rx/0


does anybody think i can manage more than 3000 from these cpus ? given im already up from 2.2 to 3 i consider this a good overclock but i see people doing 3.4 / 3.6 at VCore:1.3125 . cooling isn't an issue, its fully water cooled and here in the UK in my shed its cold.  but will my 1000w cooler master pro   keep up!

https://ibb.co/Y2BZ253

Yes. Very disappointing. My power cost is $0.062.   My Dell R815 generates 9.8 KS with XMRIG 5.01 for about 720 Watts of power. Four Opteron 6236 per machine. I plan to sell these servers.  At my power cost the servers are at breakeven but I expect it will get worse and there is no point running them.

Mine seem to be using a bit less power than yours. Not sure why. May be due to lower CPU clock speed.

New Numbers using XMRig 5.1.0:


This is what I have measured for four Dell R815 Servers on one PDU.Two with quad 6348 and two with quad 6378 Opterons.

    47318 H/s for RandomX

    3483 watts (14.1 Amps * 247 VAC) avg of 871 watts per server measured at the panel.9.0c per KWH

30000 * 47318 * 2.1 * 53.39 / (3483  * 0.090) = 507.7 MH/s


So with the current Monero World Hash Rate at 790 MH/s these servers are unprofitable.

https://2miners.com/xmr-network-hashrate


I will be mining on them for about 12 more hours because I need 17% more to get one more coin.

Then they will be powered off until Monero price recovers for them to become profitable. If that doesn't happen I will sell them off.

Opteron Miners be sure to update to XMRig 5.1.0 from 5.0.1.

It has improved my hash rates by:


Gain of 7.4% for a Dell R815 Server with 4x Opteron 6378's. Hash Rate goes from 11270 H/s (5.0.1) to 12104 (5.1.0)


Gain of 8.0% for a Dell R815 Server with 4x Opteron 6348's. Hash Rate goes from 10696 H/s (5.0.1) to 11555 (5.1.0)


Gain of 9.7% for a Supermicro Server with 2x Opteron 6376's (OCed +15%). Hash Rate goes from 6056 H/s (5.0.1) to 6643 (5.1.0)

Agreed, ive built a few Ryzen rigs to hopefully capitalize on this algo change but the recent price drop ive seen is worrying.

The real problem is the shi**y price of Monero itself.

If the fork doesn't get the price going back up even those systems you mentioned will only be making pennies per day.

Those servers are very inefficient it seems. But you would expect that given how old they are.

You are at 15.2 hashs per watt which is pretty bad for any CPU you'd want to mine with. Seems to me, you would want the highest Hashs per watt for longevity of mining. Efficiency is king here.

15.2 is very poor considering even Intel CPU's will be much better off. i5-8400 would be around 28-30 hashes per watt.

This guy on Reddit managed 56 Hashes per watt with a Ryzen 3900x pulling 253 watts from the wall.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/dynz46/getting_14200hs_on_ryzen_3900x_miningp0rn/

Another guy managed 8245 H/s with Ryzen 3700x pulling 155 watts from the wall. Thats 53 hashes per watt.

Ryzen 3600 is good for 60 hashes per watt! CPU cost less than $200 and a cheap board is $50. Just need $50 of good RAM and literally any PSU.

I think if a person wanted to make a mining farm today, it would need to be Ryzen 3600 (or 3600X), Ryzen 3700X or 3900X. Resale will be very good with these CPU's so you can mine until its not profitable and then resell for most of your money back or build into rigs to resell at a small profit.

I am having serious doubts that the Dell R815's will be profitable in the long term.

u/tevador put together "The profitability of RandomX" calculations for RandomX Hash Rate for profitability of a given rig:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/dxp2h9/the_profitability_of_randomx


-------------------------------------------------------

Using today's price of $51.92 XMR
https://bitinfocharts.com/monero

    This is what I have measured for four Dell R815 Servers on one PDU.Two with quad 6348 and two with quad 6378 Opterons.

    43890 H/s for RandomX

    2880 watts (12 Amps * 240 VAC) avg of 720 watts per server measured at the panel.9.0c per KWH


30000 * 43890 * 2.1 * 51.92 / (2880 * 0.090) = 553.8 MH/s

So if the hash rate for RandomX goes to the 1.3 GH/s that is estimated when it settles after the fork these Dell R815's will again be turned off.

I would then only be mining on my various Dell T5600/T7600 Workstations.

I would also look into an electric plan where electricity is free for nights or weekends to mine on the Dell R815's.

Or I would just resell the Dell R815's for a slight profit as most of them only cost me around $250 each.

*** Notice *** Opteron users be sure to use TurionPowerControl for maximum Hash Rates

Instructions for installing, Configuring and running TurionPowerControl

See my post # 984
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52644475

If you do not have TurionPowerControl and configured with the "-psmax 1" command your hash rate will be lowered by about 14% from what it would be.

Probably No.

That CN/R 6866.8 hash rate is for four Dell R815 Servers. Two with quad 6348 and two with quad 6378 Opterons.

I am using the latest XMRig v5.0.1 software found here:
https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases/tag/v5.0.1

On the two Dell r815 Servers with the quad 6348 Opterons I let XMRig do the thread configuration which uses all 12 cores in each Opteron or 48 threads total per server.

On the two Dell r815 Servers with the quad 6378 Opterons I initially let XMRig do the thread configuration (64 threads). Then after exiting XMRig I edit the config.json file to use 14 cores in each Opteron or 56 threads total per server.

As I stated earlier on the Dell R815 Server with the quad 6378 Opteron's it is best to disable one core per NUMA node to gain an additional 1% in hash rate while very slightly lowering power consumption and processor heat. This is done by first running XMRig to that it fills in the CPU core options in the config.json file. Then exiting XMRig and editing the (CN and RX) sections to remove one core from each of the eight NUMA nodes.

I reformat the very long CN and RX CPU sections [0, 1, 2, ... 61, 62, 63] to this:

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,

...

48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55,
56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63]

that way I can easily see each NUMA node of 8 cores. I then delete the last entry on each line. Be sure to leave the trailing comma in the first seven lines and on the last line remove the ", 63" but leave the "]" bracket.

Now when you run XMRig it will use 56 cores when mining.



No the Dell R815 Servers cannot be overclocked.




More than likely you need to first upgrade the BIOS in the HP DL385 G7 so that it can recognize the 6300 series Opterons.

After searching I have found these links to BIOS upgrades:

HPE DL385 G7 Opteron 6300 compatibility
https://community.hpe.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/HPE-DL385-G7-Opteron-6300-compatibility/td-p/7068866#.XdgYb2fDvxQ


HPE ProLiant DL385 G7 Server
Drivers and Software
Bios

** CRITICAL ** System ROMPaq Firmware Upgrade for HP ProLiant DL385 G7 (A18) Servers (For USB Key-Media)

Here is the direct link:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_8ca080bdbac14279b2461810ee

Bios Version is : 2018.03.14(A)(24 Apr 2018)

Click the download button to download the SP99289.exe (3.0 MB) file

Installation Instructions:

Installation:

1. Obtain a formatted USB Key media.

2. Download the SoftPaq to a directory on a system running Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and change to that directory.

3. From that drive and directory, execute the downloaded SoftPaq file: Simply double click on the SPxxxxx.exe file and follow the installation wizard to complete the SoftPaq installation process. At the end of a successful installation of the SoftPaq a web page will automatically appear to provide you with the different methods for restoring and/or upgrading the firmware on the system.

4. After the USB Key is created, you may delete the downloaded file if you wish.

5. Insert this USB Key into the USB Key port of the system to be updated and power the system on to boot to the USB Key.