Topic: Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret" - page 9. (Read 60234 times)

My four R815 have been powered off for almost a month now because they are unprofitable. Even if the temps drop to 79 degrees (like they did earlier this month when the rain came) they would still be unprofitable.

This mining profitability chart is for the 4x R815's mining Monero at 79 degrees:

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingPower=7465&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=2784&CostPerkWh=0.071&MiningPoolFee=0.3

Power usage per month of $142.32 and a loss of $14.19 on top of that.

I am only running 5x Vega 56's at the moment and they are profitable (180% profit of power usage) even at this $90 Monero price.

If come winter the Monero price isn't at or above $120 I probably will keep the R815's powered down. And if by next June the crypto prices are still at these distressed levels I will sell the R815's.

My R815's are on LTHN and will remain so except for specific speculative chances.  I've got enough XTL horded away if that ever pops so I'm not too keen on mining that ATM.

I can't wait for the temps to drop.  Shutting down most days for 4 hours due to electrical cost spikes sucks.  Come on end of September! 

Profit is quite bad now on the R815s -- I'm looking at 10 cents a day as of now on XMR, haha. I had a pretty darn good run with them initially... I mined 67 coins of XMR since 4 months ago... sold them along the way.

I will keep them on as long as it's above zero... and perhaps even a bit below zero on speculative coins... I already converted 11 of my R815s and all my AMD cards to XTL (Stellite) as a bit of a speculative gamble. May put the rest of my R815s back onto ITNS coin which is my other speculative coin.

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But I am still very pleased with my HP Z400s -- they've been handling the summer heat well.

I put about half of my machines on Lyra2z exclusively to save power / heat until the end of August.

With the price of Monero XMR falling below $100 (currently at $95) I have shut down all my HP DL580 and Dell R815 Servers. They are no longer profitable at that price. Also it doesn't help that the temperatures are now above 100 degrees again here in Texas as that causes all the server fans to run at 100%.

I will keep my four Vega 56's mining but that is all I will be running until the price rises above $120 or Fall/Winter comes.

anyone figure out undervolting?  is it worth it?  I found the following commands:

shows various power states, core voltage:  


and then this let's us set max states and a specific state:


And then this to see what the current pstate and temperature is:


But if you just do "TurionPowerControl -psmax 1 -set core all pstate 2"  and then do -CM it just leaves the pstate at 1.  You can do "TurionPowerControl -psmax 2 -set core all pstate 2" and then the -CM will show the pstate bouncing between 2 and 1 (visible on TurionPowerControl -CM and also visible in CPU-Z) but then the hashrate goes way down.  

So is there some way to save some power usage by undervolting?  Is this "TurionPowerControl -psmax 1 -set core all pstate 2" the wrong way to go about that?

It is exactly what you state.

Is this the "TurionPowerControl -psmax 1" tweak or something else?

I have a R815 w/4x 6234 Opteron's. Before the tweak I was getting 1565 H/s on all four processors mining CryptoNight V7 (Monero). After tweak I am now getting 1625 H/s or a gain of 60 H/s per R815. This is a 3.8% gain.

Installation instructions for TurionPowerControl:
https://hardforum.com/threads/multiple-processor-g34-checklist.1669698

Improve Opteron 6200's performance (and PPD) by using TurionPowerControl
https://hardforum.com/threads/improve-opteron-6200s-performance-and-ppd-by-using-turionpowercontrol.1708870

Trying to tune 16 core 62xx ES
https://hardforum.com/threads/trying-to-tune-16-core-62xx-es.1715566

I have three R815's each with 4x ES (Engineering Samples) 6238's. I plan to do further tweaks on them using TurionPowerControl and will post results.

I learned something on Discord today I'd thought I'd share.

I was able to get another 200+ H/s for an additional 8w by changing the p state of the CPU's on the r815's.  

https://code.google.com/archive/p/turionpowercontrol/downloads

I am now doing 6400H/s on the 6380s on CNv7 Lite on the machines w/ 1GB UDIMMS and 6550H/s on the machines w/ 4GB Registered memory sticks.

I'm lucky in that I picked up a 24 month plan in June 2017 that has me paying 7.1c/KWh. That price includes all fees and taxes. My last bill was $842.96 for 11,914 KWh's. The bill is for everything as in mining, AC for the home and all other home electrical usage.

I know that next summer I will be paying much more. I only do fixed rate plans and the best that I can find today (without gimmicks) is OURENERGY 24 month plan that charges 8.47c per KWh for usage even if it is over 2000 KWh's. A lot of plans game the system to appear that they have the lowest price at 2000 KWh but jump the rate to 20c/KWh for usage over 2000 KWh's.

Their site is here: https://ourenergyllc.com
and the Fact Sheet is here: https://ourenergyllc.com/prodox/EFLS/june18/june18ext/ONC24FIX-06222018-1.pdf

Using my current bill's numbers I would be paying $1019.98 which is an increase of $177.02 or 21%.

I found out about a USbank Visa card that offers a 5% rebate for electric utilities that can be applied to the bill as a credit. I signed up for it and enabled the 5% for electric utilities for the July-September quarter. My previous bill was $720 so I got a $150 signup bonus (for spending $500) and $36 for the 5% on the $720 which reduced that bill to $534. My current bill of $842.96 will be reduced by $42.15 bringing it to $800.81. It will be interesting if USbank offers the electric utility rebate for the next quarter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/8rowwr/for_all_the_us_miners_out_here

It’s amazing what people will do these days.  Saw a post on Discord last week where somebody was selling Hero and Legendary accounts for BCT.  WTF...

Well that is fun... my "sundownz" account was compromised and I had to lock it down.

Hope I can get it back 

Awesome info. Thank you very much.
Looks like you're using the 1 > 4 extenders and you make it stable. Because i will plan use that splitter too.
Thanks again for your sharing info.

Since this thread is what got me started scaling up I'd figure I'd update as well.  I'm also in TX near Dallas and the heat has been atrocious.  I also suffer from another problem.  I had a fixed rate of 7.9c/kw which I could live with.  My energy provider abruptly exited the market 2 months ago leaving me hanging and with providers of last resort.  After much scrambling I ended up signing up with GoGriddy.  They charge you a $10 monthly fee, direct pass through transmission charges and wholesale electricity cost updated every 5 minutes.  I'm actually saving money... Well I was until this last heat wave hit.  I went from $25/day in juice to $60, consuming about 400kw per day.  I've seen spot rates as high as $3/kw at 4PM when it's 109F out.  So because of this I power down at 1PM and power back up after 6pm.  It's the only choice I have or I'm way upside down on the electricity cost.  The bonus is that outside of these crazy hours, I'm actually paying LESS for electricity than I was because night time hours are under 2c/kw and I pull the same amount of juice at lowest demand as I do at peak.

I've picked up some of the FPGA hardware and am sending it to Mineority for hosting with them.  Their fee is reasonable when you factor in all the additional expenses, not to mention effort, for running rigs.  With a point and click interface I don't know what I'm going to do with myself.  Oh yeah, maybe do something other than constantly babysit machines. 

I've also got some Acorns on the way to test with.  I'm seriously looking forward to cooler weather.  Ambient temp forced cooling sucks when it's hot.  (It's actually nice right now at 86F and a nice breeze inside the cointainer lol)  I will continue to mine and at some point probably expand my farm.  I will not expand until I've built and tested an immersion setup.  If I am to host at my current location going forward, I have to implement that as a method to eliminate a host of issues I have faced by converting a shipping container in TX into a location to house electronics running full tilt.

If I were you (in texas) I'd set them to all turn down to 50% usage for the 8 peak heat hours, or 0% for the peak 4 hours. Electronics do not want to run that hot. Cap life is inverse to operating temp. Silicon transistor MMTF is log inverse to operating temp

So. My PNY 1080s ran out of warranty last month -- and I had two die on me in the heat.

To my surprise I discovered broken GPUs have some fairly decent value on E-Bay.

I paid $499 each in June 2017 for the cards... sold for $200 each on E-Bay as broken / for parts.

I am garage mining and have the garage door 4" opened at the bottom. My miners are on a workbench at the back of the garage and I have  a fan to push the air from above the miners to a ceiling "whole house" fan that pushes the heat into the attic where it exists from the roof ridge vents.

Here in the Dallas area we are having a heat wave where the temperatures are getting to 111 degrees around 5 PM.

I have four HP DL580 G7's all running on 240V AC. These four DL580 also have 23 GTX 750's running on top or in them.

These four systems produce 11,692 H/s mining Monero.

The DL580 will shutdown at 107 degrees.

One thing I noticed is that with the heat comes higher energy usage. At the 106 degrees the four processor fans in each of the DL580's are running at 100% and they take quite a bit of power to do that as seen by these total system numbers:


106 degrees: 16.7 Amps, 4008 watts

96 degrees: 15.1 Amps, 3624 watts

86 degrees: 14.4 Amps, 3456 watts


The increase in power is mostly from the DL580 fans with some coming from the GTX 750's.

I am only somewhat profitable at 106 degrees:

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingPower=11692&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=4008&CostPerkWh=0.071&MiningPoolFee=1.0

Only $88 in profit while using $205 in electricity isn't much so at this time I have stopped mining in the garage until this heat wave breaks which is forecast around July 24th.

My "whole house" fan has also just decided to stop working and only hum when powering on so I will take this time off and see if it has a bad run capacitor as it is 15 years old. I will also be cleaning all the systems of dust.

Thanx for the heads-up!!!

I just picked up an ASUS Prime Z270 AR mobo for under $100. PC and eBay Bucks saved me >$27. Add a couple of Acorns and some gpus (or FPGAs) and it's time to Mine on!

Just a heads up: Ebay has a 10% off coupon good only for today.


https://pages.ebay.com/promo/2018/0710/67034.html?_trkparms=%26clkid%3D5206987769407708000

I just picked up a Vega 56 using it and saved $43 off the original $430 price.

For anyone interested in my server-mining virgin perspective... I finally have experience.  I didn't end up using ansible... at all.  Maybe I'm missing out but what I'm doing seems to have worked just fine.  It's easier than I expected.

So my experience went like this:

1. ordered the server (4-node, 128 core Opteron 6376) and set it up on a test bench (my bedroom/office/computer desk table extension).  

2.  From there I installed Win 10 Pro followed by Linux for a dual boot configuration.  I can easily remote into linux and send commands to all four nodes using Xshell.  For windows, any remote access is fine... teamviewer, google remote desktop, Microsoft RDP, etc...  Dual boot configuration is also very easy.  Default bootup goes to the Linux boot grub.  From Linux I can tell it to boot to Windows.  When I reboot out of windows it just goes back to Linux.  All so easy.

3. Tested various algo mining to see power consumption.  Maxed it out and was just over 1300 watts.  For my current infrastructure... this is about as much as I can handle unless I upgrade power.  I didn't get to measure algorithms that used around 50% of CPU resources but I estimate consumption would be around 900 watts for that.  I'm not really happy about the extra power but I am glad to have the extra CPU power as well as learn more about servers.

4. ordered a TP-link 8-port managed switch and power-line Ethernet adapters.  Tested these on various circuits and they all worked.  Home was built in 2004 so fairly new-ish construction/wiring which I've heard helps.  I've also heard folks having problems on linking across circuits but I didn't have this problem.

5.  From there I just moved everything into my mining cave which is now nice and warm.  Really looking forward to the winter!  lol..  Oh and the server CPUs stay nice and cool (as far as my limited experience tells me)   That is, CPU temps around 52C ... But boy does it blow out some heat!  it's right under where my dog sleeps so I bet my dog is enjoying it at night hehe

So yeah, got me some first hand experience and greatly enhanced my CPU-only algo flexibility which was my main goal in all this.

Thank you for this thread.  This thread was the genesis of motivation to arrive at this implementation.  

Having old iDRAC firmware does cause me some issues which was why the update was tried.

Dell released a system wide update that fixes the iDRAC but also does the 3.4.1 BIOS update. That BIOS update is what bricked the system with the ES Opterons.