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Topic: Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret" - page 30. (Read 60219 times)

hero member
Activity: 1151
Merit: 528
January 25, 2018, 05:39:50 PM
Just finished reading this whole thread. Man what a ride. Thanks for all the great stuff here guys.
jr. member
Activity: 53
Merit: 1
January 25, 2018, 10:32:05 AM
I'm going to jump in here and ask for a little assistance configuring my CPU in XMR.  I'm including screen shots of my config and my results. I've played around with it a bit.  The speeds seen here are a bit on the low side.  My mining box serves dual duty as my work computer at home.  When my PC is idle, I get a good stable 390 hashes.  Even pretty heavy use with several programs open including 20 or 30 browser tabs, photoshop and other work related programs drop my cpu hashes to around what is seen here 340-350.

My system is as follows
intel 6800K overclocked @ 4ghz (is this helping?  I'm water cooled and temps are abt 32c even mining 24/7 I could probably go higher but I understand this chip gets power hungry fast. This O/C was just a quick bios 'insta o/c' setting)
msi x99-aII motherboard
32g of ram not overclocked (should I?)
currently 3 gpu, each affined to odd number cores.





sorry for the links, but as I understand it images will not show in my posts until I earn the jr member rank.

I believe some of you have much more experience with cpu tweaking than do I, any recommendations are appreciated.

member
Activity: 242
Merit: 11
January 24, 2018, 05:25:20 PM
I suppose its my turn to contribute something.  If you are into Cryptonight mining, which it sounds like a few of you are, check out this Gigabyte mini-pc for $250:  https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164036

You won't be adding any graphics cards (unless you are using eGPUS) but this thing will hash at 614 H/S.  You might be wondering how its possible to get that kind of performance out of a cpu with a 6 mb l3 cache.  The game changer is that this processor has an embedded Iris Pro GPU with a 128 MB L4 cache.  XMR-Stak recently included an optimization to take advantage of this cache space.  It should ROI itself in 2.5 months.  You have to provide your own ram and HD, but it does come with a wifi card so you could put this thing anywhere.


Ok, I picked up and set up one of the 5575rs (identical to the 5775, just i5 instead of i7). Out of the box and just using xmr-stak with the energy saver off, I'm getting around 200-202 h/s, which is not great but not bad. I haven't figured out how to enable support for the Iris Pro yet, still working on that, but I'm feeling pretty confident I can get it up significantly...

EDIT: ok, not exactly identical, it's 2.8-3.3ghz and 4mb l3 instead of 3.3-3.8 and 6mb l3, but I still think I can get it up much higher than 200h/s

If it has an Iris pro then the L3 size is irrelevent.  The issue you will run into though is that the I5 only have 4 cores and no hyperthreading.  To take full advantage you need 8 threads.  Make sure for the low power setting you are putting in 5.  you should probably be in the 300s


So you're pulling 600 h/s on your i7? What needs to be changed in the config or CPU file . . . I'm only pulling in 250, I didn't mess around with any of the low power settings, it's still on the stock "false" -

Correct.  When I ran it with the default settings out of the box I think I got around 250 also.   Here is my cpu.txt:


"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

],

In most situations you wouldn't mine using the hyperthreads let alone affine to them, but I think this low power mode must be less cpu intensive at the cost of more memory.

In /etc/security/limits.conf  I also added the following 2 lines:
* soft memlock 262144
* hard memlock 262144

and in /etc/sysctl.conf added:
vm.nr_hugepages=128


Proof:



Many thanks!

I picked up a Brix unit with the 4770R chip for a steal and stock it wasn't doing so great.

Used your settings and put Virtual memory in windows 10 to 16GB (I have 8GB ram) and bam, 574 H/s.

About what you would expect for a Haswell i7 given that your Broadwell chip is 5-10% more powerful given an equal clockspeed.

Although it must be throttling as its dropped to ~540 h/s. These Brix units are terrible with heat/cooling. Should be fine to stick it in the shed outside where it gets much cooler.


Not sure what's up with mines then. I have 4 of them on win10 and 1 on linux mint all have 1 8gb stick in them VM is set to 32gb And I only get the initial boost to 574 within 10 minutes I'm down to 250-275 Mh/s.

I'll play with them for another 2 weeks, once I hit day 29 I'll be returning all of them.


I found that running it without a display connected would cause it to run at like 340 H/s. Mine also will literally hit Tjunction max and throttle two of the cores. Never had a computer that literally maxed out temp wise (99C)

These Brix units are about as poor a miner money could buy, even a laptop might be better at dissipating heat. Good numbers but very unstable and a headache in general.

That said, if the CPU were on a typical motherboard I doubt there would be any issues, at least heat wise.

Ultimately my plan was to aquire these CPU's : https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Intel-E3-1265L-V4-QHF4-QHF6_60666712127.html

I bought one to test with, knowing it would hash lower due to the lower GHz but still be viable since it has the 128mb L4 cache. But the Chinese ended up screwing me claiming they were "out of stock" AFTER my initial and shipping payment has cleared...... Like you fuck you if you sell shit you dont have, at least be fucking up front about it! and the listing is still up!

I inquired about these for $50 each, but they randomly quoted me $293. https://szbrilliant.en.alibaba.com/product/60665524980-804912762/Intel_Core_i7_5775C_Processor_6M_Cache_up_to_3_70_GHz_LGA1150.html?spm=a2700.icbuShop.prewdfa4cf.8.32efd7dd1sqMNO

Not sure what the deal is with these people but its fucking irritating and I hate it.

Never again with Alibaba or any of that Chinese shit. My first and only dealing with them.
full member
Activity: 139
Merit: 100
January 24, 2018, 05:19:41 PM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662


What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1


Thanks a lot for this clarification. I tried booting up with SMOS with 2 cards mounted directly on the motherboard, but SMOS would only detect 1. What OS would you runt with 12 AMD RX cards in my G7?

Are they RX vegas or 5xx 4xx? If latter, just use linux, if former, uh, you might as well save yourself the trouble and commit yourself to an asylum now. I don't think vegas would work in this thing? I didn't check what PCI-E rev it has, but I can't imagine it's more than 2.1.

Make sure your bios is updated to latest. Play with the port configuration. Different pci-e lanes should be attached to different cpus, and I don't know what that configuration looks like. I would just run everything on risers.

I normally run centos, just because that's what I use all day on prod servers at work. debian, ubuntu, centos, etc, any of them should work fine. You'll need to check on driver availability as they only usually support a couple distros. I remember having to reinstall to ubuntu from debian or vice versa because amd only had drivers for one and not the other.

More recently I've been looking into engineering samples on ebay. Intel ES abound, but AMD ES is limited. I've gone through profitability calculations on all these chips and most of the ES are sitting at like 5-6 months on cryptonight. I think someone has already been picking up these ES chips to mine on them.

Other than that, with scalable coming out, I would be looking for cheaper v2s and v3s to start hitting ebay and refurb dealers. I've seen a couple instances of v2 and v3 on ebay where power usage is 1.2-1.3x, hashrate 0.9-1.1x and cost around 0.5x (at current prices) of vegas. Most of these units have some number of pci-e slots on them (usually only a couple). But it would allow you to stick a couple gpus on each unit.


They are all RX570, im going to try with HiveOS now as i didn't have success with SMOS and its seems to be a lot of hassle to get both drivers and multiple cards to work properly on Windows. I have risers for all cards, as i can use built in graphics for monitoring. Sound like a good idea, one i get my G7 going smooth i will look for another project!

full member
Activity: 1179
Merit: 131
January 24, 2018, 05:02:01 PM
So are all of you with these Brix units experiencing some type of throttling? I am considering getting one, but will pass on it if they are not stable at 600h or so...

Mine is, but I don't think its throttling.  I am trying to figure out the root cause.  Mine will go hours at 600+ H/S, sometimes 12-24 hours, then it will start dropping to around 250.  Heat is always the first suspect, but it i stop and restart the miner it shoots back up to 600+ again and stays there.  If it were thermal related I think it would still be low when starting the miner back up (im talking about stop/starting the software, not the whole computer).  I just leave my ssh console open all of the time and occasionally glance at it.  Running it Sudo seems to help

My environment is a little different than other posters though.  I modified some settings in the BIOS and I am also running on ubuntu 17.10 without x windows so there is no GUI or other running processes that can drag down the CPU.  When I get home tonight I'll take a few pics of my bios settings.

I think using this with Windows may be part of the problem.  Windows will use the GPU which will start digging into the L4 cache.  Not to mention there are a million different windows processors that will drag it down.  I have Windows 10 on my main mining rig (which I use for personal use also) with an I7-7500k and just browsing a website in Chrome will cut my cryptonight hashrate in half.

If you are using Windows it might be good to follow this advice:  http://1stminingrig.com/best-windows-setup-configuration-tweaks-for-mining/  Generally I think this advice is kind of garbage but in this scenario I think it would help.  Which also reminds me, if you are running windows be sure you check your power settings.  There is a good chance Windows might treat the Brix like a laptop and downshift the CPU.
newbie
Activity: 29
Merit: 1
January 24, 2018, 04:03:12 PM
So are all of you with these Brix units experiencing some type of throttling? I am considering getting one, but will pass on it if they are not stable at 600h or so...
full member
Activity: 350
Merit: 100
January 24, 2018, 03:37:21 PM
I suppose its my turn to contribute something.  If you are into Cryptonight mining, which it sounds like a few of you are, check out this Gigabyte mini-pc for $250:  https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164036

You won't be adding any graphics cards (unless you are using eGPUS) but this thing will hash at 614 H/S.  You might be wondering how its possible to get that kind of performance out of a cpu with a 6 mb l3 cache.  The game changer is that this processor has an embedded Iris Pro GPU with a 128 MB L4 cache.  XMR-Stak recently included an optimization to take advantage of this cache space.  It should ROI itself in 2.5 months.  You have to provide your own ram and HD, but it does come with a wifi card so you could put this thing anywhere.


Ok, I picked up and set up one of the 5575rs (identical to the 5775, just i5 instead of i7). Out of the box and just using xmr-stak with the energy saver off, I'm getting around 200-202 h/s, which is not great but not bad. I haven't figured out how to enable support for the Iris Pro yet, still working on that, but I'm feeling pretty confident I can get it up significantly...

EDIT: ok, not exactly identical, it's 2.8-3.3ghz and 4mb l3 instead of 3.3-3.8 and 6mb l3, but I still think I can get it up much higher than 200h/s

If it has an Iris pro then the L3 size is irrelevent.  The issue you will run into though is that the I5 only have 4 cores and no hyperthreading.  To take full advantage you need 8 threads.  Make sure for the low power setting you are putting in 5.  you should probably be in the 300s


So you're pulling 600 h/s on your i7? What needs to be changed in the config or CPU file . . . I'm only pulling in 250, I didn't mess around with any of the low power settings, it's still on the stock "false" -

Correct.  When I ran it with the default settings out of the box I think I got around 250 also.   Here is my cpu.txt:


"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

],

In most situations you wouldn't mine using the hyperthreads let alone affine to them, but I think this low power mode must be less cpu intensive at the cost of more memory.

In /etc/security/limits.conf  I also added the following 2 lines:
* soft memlock 262144
* hard memlock 262144

and in /etc/sysctl.conf added:
vm.nr_hugepages=128


Proof:



Many thanks!

I picked up a Brix unit with the 4770R chip for a steal and stock it wasn't doing so great.

Used your settings and put Virtual memory in windows 10 to 16GB (I have 8GB ram) and bam, 574 H/s.

About what you would expect for a Haswell i7 given that your Broadwell chip is 5-10% more powerful given an equal clockspeed.

Although it must be throttling as its dropped to ~540 h/s. These Brix units are terrible with heat/cooling. Should be fine to stick it in the shed outside where it gets much cooler.


Not sure what's up with mines then. I have 4 of them on win10 and 1 on linux mint all have 1 8gb stick in them VM is set to 32gb And I only get the initial boost to 574 within 10 minutes I'm down to 250-275 Mh/s.

I'll play with them for another 2 weeks, once I hit day 29 I'll be returning all of them.
newbie
Activity: 29
Merit: 1
January 24, 2018, 03:03:05 PM
OK, so about these Brix units with Iris GPUs: Are the hashrates you guys are posting including the use of the Iris GPU? I don't know anything about these little units, but you can mine on both the CPU and the GPU, right?

Edit: nm, I found the answer back on page 17. Thanks anyway.
member
Activity: 242
Merit: 11
January 24, 2018, 02:00:24 AM
I suppose its my turn to contribute something.  If you are into Cryptonight mining, which it sounds like a few of you are, check out this Gigabyte mini-pc for $250:  https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164036

You won't be adding any graphics cards (unless you are using eGPUS) but this thing will hash at 614 H/S.  You might be wondering how its possible to get that kind of performance out of a cpu with a 6 mb l3 cache.  The game changer is that this processor has an embedded Iris Pro GPU with a 128 MB L4 cache.  XMR-Stak recently included an optimization to take advantage of this cache space.  It should ROI itself in 2.5 months.  You have to provide your own ram and HD, but it does come with a wifi card so you could put this thing anywhere.


Ok, I picked up and set up one of the 5575rs (identical to the 5775, just i5 instead of i7). Out of the box and just using xmr-stak with the energy saver off, I'm getting around 200-202 h/s, which is not great but not bad. I haven't figured out how to enable support for the Iris Pro yet, still working on that, but I'm feeling pretty confident I can get it up significantly...

EDIT: ok, not exactly identical, it's 2.8-3.3ghz and 4mb l3 instead of 3.3-3.8 and 6mb l3, but I still think I can get it up much higher than 200h/s

If it has an Iris pro then the L3 size is irrelevent.  The issue you will run into though is that the I5 only have 4 cores and no hyperthreading.  To take full advantage you need 8 threads.  Make sure for the low power setting you are putting in 5.  you should probably be in the 300s


So you're pulling 600 h/s on your i7? What needs to be changed in the config or CPU file . . . I'm only pulling in 250, I didn't mess around with any of the low power settings, it's still on the stock "false" -

Correct.  When I ran it with the default settings out of the box I think I got around 250 also.   Here is my cpu.txt:


"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

],

In most situations you wouldn't mine using the hyperthreads let alone affine to them, but I think this low power mode must be less cpu intensive at the cost of more memory.

In /etc/security/limits.conf  I also added the following 2 lines:
* soft memlock 262144
* hard memlock 262144

and in /etc/sysctl.conf added:
vm.nr_hugepages=128


Proof:



Many thanks!

I picked up a Brix unit with the 4770R chip for a steal and stock it wasn't doing so great.

Used your settings and put Virtual memory in windows 10 to 16GB (I have 8GB ram) and bam, 574 H/s.

About what you would expect for a Haswell i7 given that your Broadwell chip is 5-10% more powerful given an equal clockspeed.

Although it must be throttling as its dropped to ~540 h/s. These Brix units are terrible with heat/cooling. Should be fine to stick it in the shed outside where it gets much cooler.
hero member
Activity: 1118
Merit: 541
January 22, 2018, 12:17:32 PM
Senseless, if you were going through ES samples, were you the guy bidding against me on some CPUs last night on Ebay?  Didn't win a single lot...  Cheesy

Nope, I don't mine on that stuff any more. I just look more out of curiosity for what the market looks like. When I launch my pool server, I'd like to have an area with some tutorials for things like this. I'd also like to source components and make (aff) links available to them. Maybe help people find stuff where they didn't know to look for it and teach them how to mine. Make a little money in the process with aff and hope they mine with me Smiley

If you need GPUs, you can get teslas on ebay.

I also found this today..

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-614169-003-S6500-4U-Chassis-629236-B21/142657305136?hash=item213709ba30:g:N3cAAOSwVLVZeLWf
and
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProLiant-SL230s-Gen8-1U-2x-10-CORE-E5-2660V2-2-2GHz-16GB-RAM-NO-HDD/132274605291?hash=item1ecc2e4ceb:g:fWsAAOSwmkpZeRMe

About $3500 for 9.6Kh/s around 1520W CPU TDP. Each node has 1x PCI-E x16 3.0 slot (would work with vegas). It also has this 'flexiblelom' slot which is a second x16 slot but in a special (custom??) formfactor. 1 GPU per node would be perfect for vegas. They'd all actually function correctly.

Around 5months to get your money back at current rates and 0.07ish power only cpu mining. Doesn't come with extra PSUs though. You'll need all the PSUs in it for powering the machines.

jr. member
Activity: 176
Merit: 1
January 22, 2018, 11:33:59 AM
Senseless, if you were going through ES samples, were you the guy bidding against me on some CPUs last night on Ebay?  Didn't win a single lot...  Cheesy

Spinx, thanks!  I'm now hashing at 1650H/s on the G7's CPUs and it's got 4 1060s in it doing almost another 1200H/s.  I can't add anymore GPUs to it because my breakout boards haven't come so I can use the extra 1200w supplies to power cards, AND I don't have anymore cards to install into it!  Sad  I will however be moving things around to eliminate systems as I can.  I was using the standalone xmrig for CPU only and I was never able to get the thread attribute to configure correctly.  I moved to the integrated stak and ran it with --noNVIDIA to keep my GPUs on zcash and all is well.  Interesting to note, xmr-stak AUTO did the config for me and I didn't have to manually input the one you posted!

Tomorrow I'm picking up a lot of various mostly G7 and a couple G8 servers.  Going to be busy times ahead and I'm going to need GPUs!

My next thought is how can I optimize even more.  My current G7 has 64GB of RAM in it but it's only using 5GB of it with everything running full tilt.  I have all 8 cassettes installed with 2 DIMMs per cassette.  Since none of this work is RAM intensive, I'm thinking of pulling out 4 cassettes and 1 DIMM from the remaining cassettes to see what it does to power consumption.  This would effectively put me at 4GB per CPU, would improve airflow through the case and hopefully drop off 25-50w of power pull.

hero member
Activity: 1118
Merit: 541
January 22, 2018, 08:42:07 AM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662


What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1


Thanks a lot for this clarification. I tried booting up with SMOS with 2 cards mounted directly on the motherboard, but SMOS would only detect 1. What OS would you runt with 12 AMD RX cards in my G7?

Are they RX vegas or 5xx 4xx? If latter, just use linux, if former, uh, you might as well save yourself the trouble and commit yourself to an asylum now. I don't think vegas would work in this thing? I didn't check what PCI-E rev it has, but I can't imagine it's more than 2.1.

Make sure your bios is updated to latest. Play with the port configuration. Different pci-e lanes should be attached to different cpus, and I don't know what that configuration looks like. I would just run everything on risers.

I normally run centos, just because that's what I use all day on prod servers at work. debian, ubuntu, centos, etc, any of them should work fine. You'll need to check on driver availability as they only usually support a couple distros. I remember having to reinstall to ubuntu from debian or vice versa because amd only had drivers for one and not the other.


..



More recently I've been looking into engineering samples on ebay. Intel ES abound, but AMD ES is limited. I've gone through profitability calculations on all these chips and most of the ES are sitting at like 5-6 months on cryptonight. I think someone has already been picking up these ES chips to mine on them.

Other than that, with scalable coming out, I would be looking for cheaper v2s and v3s to start hitting ebay and refurb dealers. I've seen a couple instances of v2 and v3 on ebay where power usage is 1.2-1.3x, hashrate 0.9-1.1x and cost around 0.5x (at current prices) of vegas. Most of these units have some number of pci-e slots on them (usually only a couple). But it would allow you to stick a couple gpus on each unit.

full member
Activity: 139
Merit: 100
January 22, 2018, 08:35:57 AM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662


What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1


Thanks a lot for this clarification. I tried booting up with SMOS with 2 cards mounted directly on the motherboard, but SMOS would only detect 1. What OS would you runt with 12 AMD RX cards in my G7?
hero member
Activity: 1118
Merit: 541
January 22, 2018, 08:29:51 AM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662


What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?

Put the GPUs on pci-e expansion boards. Power the expansion boards from the 2x psus you leave attached to the G7. Take other 2 PSUs, put breakout boards on them and run it to the GPU cards 6/8pin port. CPU Mining will kill 1kW (depending on cpus) from the 2x PSUs you leave in the unit. You should still be able to optionally stick a couple cards in the system itself. I think you should also be able to power the riser from the external PSU -- I've never done that before though.

I don't know about windows, I'd never run windows for any miner.

I'm not sure what you mean by a common ground. I'd just plug all the PSUs into the same PDU. Here's my PDU:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013HY9E2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ASF0S1GFIHF5V&psc=1

Also, I'm pretty sure that the expansion boards don't use any 5V. I know I've stuck a 6 pin PCI-E molex from a PSU directly into an expansion board and it worked fine. Maybe it's just the expansion boards you got?
full member
Activity: 139
Merit: 100
January 22, 2018, 08:08:58 AM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662


What i have not solved yet is running 12 gpus in my G7. Im fairly sure how to solve the electricity, except how i solve common ground the best way, since i need to take 1-2 psu's and mount them externally to be able to fit the pci-e breakout boards. With normal ATX-psu's i have add2psu-adapters solving this, but now im not really confident in whats the best solution is?

And also, does Windows Server support 12 gpu's?
newbie
Activity: 63
Merit: 0
January 22, 2018, 06:21:19 AM
This is one good idea! Thanks for the tip!
hero member
Activity: 1118
Merit: 541
January 22, 2018, 06:16:44 AM
Glad to see you guys got the G7s up and running. I've been scouring ebay trying to find a better deal than those G7s for mining and haven't been able to find anything.

I posted a little guide / blurb for how to run a 240V 30A outlet for residences in the USA.. If anyone needs more power...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28578662
newbie
Activity: 182
Merit: 0
January 22, 2018, 06:03:56 AM
"On my rig, I have 4x E7-8837 cpu's, which are 8 cores each, no hypherthreading, so 32 physical cores total.
Each cpu has 24Mb cache, so 24Mb/2Mb=12 threads for mining on each cpu.
To get 12 total threads running on the 8 cores, I run two threads on 4 of the cores, and one thread each on the other 4 cores = 8 total cores of the cpu..
I didn't know you could run 12 threads on an 8 core without hyperthreading. That's brilliant!
newbie
Activity: 65
Merit: 0
January 22, 2018, 05:12:11 AM
So, the conclusion of all the benchmarks I've read is: find an architecture that uses an AMD CPU Cheesy

Yes and no.  If you are talking about modern desktop processors, Ryzen wins out, the main reason being because it includes the SHA instruction set.  Probably the Epycs on the server side too, but they have barely released those to the market.  If you are interested in making a run at mining cryptonight the best bet is to find an old server on ebay with multiple xeon chips in it (The HP DL580 G7 was mentioned earlier in the thread).   The rub with the Ryzen chips are that the motherboards are expensive.

My HP DL580 G7 with 4 x E7-8837 does about 1600H/s on cryptonight.

how much power from the wall? thx Wink

I can measure this tomorrow, i guess around 800W, not sure tho.

800 w without any GPU?
full member
Activity: 139
Merit: 100
January 21, 2018, 08:15:29 PM
After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, what should have been a painless procedure that has swallowed the better part of a day to figure out is finally complete.  The DL580 G7 is rocking the E7 8837's.  All in all, it required what should have been easy.  A BIOS update.  Thanks HP.  

Spinx, what settings are you using for the miner?  I'm currently seeing about 1K/s w/ the default config from launching it and letting it figure itself out.

"On my rig, I have 4x E7-8837 cpu's, which are 8 cores each, no hypherthreading, so 32 physical cores total.
Each cpu has 24Mb cache, so 24Mb/2Mb=12 threads for mining on each cpu.
To get 12 total threads running on the 8 cores, I run two threads on 4 of the cores, and one thread each on the other 4 cores = 8 total cores of the cpu..
To run two threads I set 'low_power_mode=true', and to run one thread I set 'low_power_mode=false'.
So for each cpu, this is what I do on my E7-8837:

Code:
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

Then I duplicate that configuration four times for the other 3 cores.
This is also the suggested configuration from xmr-stak-cpu.
My experience is that a core running a single thread will hash 30/s to 40/s, and a core running two threads will be 60/s to 70/s.
If the hash rate drops to 20/s, it is because too many threads are running and the cpu cache is being swapped out when the threads run. That means it is inefficient and the total hash rate is lower.
I attached a picture showing all 32 cores running, and 48 threads running, hashing about 1650/s. My xmr-stak-cpu version 2 cpu.txt configuration file looks like this."

Code:
"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 8 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 9 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 11 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 12 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 13 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 14 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 15 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 16 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 17 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 18 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 19 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 20 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 21 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 22 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 23 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 24 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 25 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 26 },
{ "low_power_mode" : true, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 27 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 28 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 29 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 30 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 31 },

],

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