Topic: Happy New Years! Seventh alt coin thread! - page 41. (Read 34194 times)

car generators/alternators  will go up to 16 volts if you are gunning  the engine.

I have  a link  for a dc to dc    somewhere someplace let me look for it.


 this is too much $$
and limits to 150 watts

https://www.trcelectronics.com/View/TRACO-Power/TEP%20150-2412WI.shtml


but  you need something like this 

id kinda worry about the voltage regulators on the card. the more voltage they have to drop the more power is wasted as heat and the hotter they will become. at least if irc, might be wrong on that. i would monitor the vreg temp in gpuz (enable logging) or something if the card supports it.

That is some great advice, to be completely honest with you, we didnt even think about the voltage being that high when we ran it off the diesel engine. The GPU seemed to not have any issues with it, atleast the one we are testing it out on. Im shocked we didn't damage the GPU trying to run it this way, because the alternator ramped up to 14.7v under load of mining....

In regards to hooking up the GPU, the gpu is plugged directly into the mobo of the test pc currently... no riser at all being used for this setup. The GPU itself is getting its 12v and grnd from outside of the atx psu.

Im pretty sure the solar controller is capable of adjusting the max voltage down closer to 12v, just need to look further into it. Neither of us are experts on this solar controller. Its an outback flexmax unit that he upgraded to because it is capable of charging lithium cells vs his older controller he had previously. He replaced the onboard battery bank when it failed with an diy 18650 setup. He built it out of these really cool kit connectos he bought from china a while back.. they work amazingly well. I built both of my 30ah packs for my electric bicycle out of them and those diy packs have over 2 years of riding on them...

The one thing I would worry about is that solar and car alternator systems are NOT in fact +12VDC, but 13.6 "nominal" and commonly up to 15 VDC when charging.

If you're just feeding the risers and the GPU with that, it PROBABLY won't be an issue as they use on-board power conversion circuitry to regulate it down to the voltages they actually use, and their caps are probably rated for 16 VDC - marginal but as long as you don't get voltage spikes probably OK.
I'd be inclined to put a pair of 15 amp silicon diodes in series on each riser feed, and the same on each +12VDC line to a PCI-E power connector, to drop the voltage a bit just to be sure you don't overvolt the GPUs and risers.
Might be able to get away with 10 amp diodes instead, if you leave the diodes out in the air enough for them to get decent cooling.

Just finished up initial work on a project.
Been wanting to move my Polaris cards over to LINUX but the high power consumption was a drawback - so I did some digging and found that AMD DOES in fact allow for undervolting and underclocking on them under LINUX with a bit of work.
Apparently one of their employees has written a "ROCm-smi" utility (also called ROC-smi in some places) that is similar in concept to the long-running Nvidia utility - but it's still pretty basic and limited from what I've seen of it, and I have not tried it out yet.

Instead, I went the route pioneered by Phoronix in their https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/amd-linux/918649-underclocking-undervolting-the-rx-470-with-amdgpu-pro-success article, with some additional input from https://github.com/ktsol/dwarfing/blob/master/amdgpu-mod.sh, and did a bit of patching work on the applicable AMDGPU module that is in charge of voltage and clock control.

Just getting the drivers installed and working was a bit of a nightmare, but the key there proved to be https://math.dartmouth.edu/~sarunas/amdgpu.html - which I THINK also offers the option to make NVidia and AMD COEXIST ON LINUX for the first time in a few years (but this time around the Nvidia card has to be the "primary" display-running card)

Test system was one of my FM2 motherboards with A10-7860K APU (never did figure out how to get X working on the iGPU - yet - but haven't tried VERY hard yet), using my pair of Sapphire RX 470 reference cards, a Gigabyte 480 4GB I just got on a "refurb" sale, and a MSI 480 8GB that was also on sale recently.

Cards are STOCK at this point - I plan to BIOS mod them eventually for memory straps - so the hashrates aren't impressive.

Before I did my patching to the kernel module, the system was pulling about 770 watts (the iGPU DOES work on this setup, but can't do ETH on it so it's doing D.Net RC5-72 work - which adds about 30 watts to that total).

After kernel mods (I went with 830 mv instead of the Phoronix 818 just to be conservative, and a "fixed" 20% underclock at this point instead of the dwarfing "configurable" option or the Phoronix 13%), I ended up with the SAME hashrate at about 540 watts.

At this point, I can easily add a 5'th card and STILL come in under my 700 watt "standard rig" target (motherboard only has 5 slots anyway).
A low wattage motherboard/CPU setup would probably be able to run 6 cards on a 700ish watt rig, though I might have to do a bit more "fine tuning" to get it to that point.

I'm not sure how far this could be pushed, might play with it some more over the rest of the week to find out - and DEFINITELY will be adding a 5'th RX card before I call it "done".
I'm also thinking about cleaning up the setup, setting it up with "generic" admin/password type access, and pushing it out as a "basic" mining OS for contributions, as AMD-capable mining OSs at this point are either kinda limited (rxOC) or CHARGE way too bloody much (EthOS, the MONTHLY charge for SimpleMining, don't get me started on PIMP).
One thing I DO want to figure out is how to get X to run the display on the iGPU instead of the first discrete GPU - I THINK I know how to do it, and I THINK it will work without causing stuff like fan/clocks control to stop working (like FGLRX had major issues with).

I did specifically size it to fit on a 16GB USB drive, as those are pretty much the "entry level" any more, but I am sure I could get it down to 8 without a lot of work - there's stuff from the standard XUbuntu installation that is NOT needed that I've not uninstalled yet.

(edit) 5'th card up and running, now for more fine tuning like strap mods.

Phillipma,

Some info that may interest you, my friend has solar on his RV and he wants to get into crypto mining to maybe earn a few coins while he travels the country, i told him it is a little late right now but he insist on it. He travels the country as a travel nurse and he thought of the idea of building a small rig to run in the generator spot on his RV, currently its missing the generator, but its big enough for like a 4-5 card rig and has good ventilation if setup correctly, so i talked him into trying the idea out on his personal PC he currently own in his home, which has an GTX 960ti.

Test 1:

since true sinewave inverters are so expensive and the PCIE connections are just +12dc and GND, we ran power cables directly from the post his solar controller is wired into and i soldered them to a PCIE pigtail and plugged it into the GPU in a DC to DC configuration, ran the PC off normal 120v, but the GPU would be powered by the solar controller/battery circuit. PC booted up fine and it mined without a single hiccup the 20ish minutes we ran it for, no issues at all, just the solar controller adjusted to the load.

Test 2:

Since running this PC wouldn't be viable off the batteries, we decided to try running it off the alternator off the diesel engine in the RV, he claims it has like a 160amp alternator... fired the engine up and the computer was able to mine just perfectly off the voltage coming from the car alternator. We decided to run this setup through an old audio capacitor i had laying around, but it worked and i couldn't see a reason it couldn't mine this way while he driving, since the alternator would place very minimal load on the diesel engine, probably not even change the mpg....

Test 3:

Since running this PC wouldn't be viable off the batteries while not driving, we decided to try running it off solar alone, cut the switch to the battery bank and started mining, the rig would mine perfectly tell a cloud caused voltage to drop to low and computer would grey out the GPU tell we rebooted the PC, which it came back and worked as normal again.

Test 4:

We tried Test 3 again, but we added a server PCU and soldered the +12v and GND from the server PSU to the +12v and GND wires on the makeshift PCI cables we hacked together. We booted the PC up and started mining while watching the load on the server PSU, what we did was we went into the controller and setup a custom battery charging config, setup the charge to a max of 14.7v. The server PSU would see literally less than 2watts of use while it would mine in this configuration, as soon a cloud would drop the voltage on the solar controller output, the load would shift to the server PSU flawless, no hiccups and it did this numerous times over and over without stopping the mining action...

Currently we have it running this way on a test, we let it mine solely off solar the rest of the afternoon tell the voltage levels dropped the load over to the server psu and its been mining all night off the server psu. We are going to run it all day tomorrow to see if we experience any issues with this setup. I thought it was something you would be interested in since your trying to do something with solar and mining DC to DC may be a cheaper alternative for you in the future on some rigs.

The plan going forward is to setup multiple circuits on his current PC. We are going to setup a circuit for when he is driving, allowing him to supply solar+alternator voltage, then we are going to setup a circuit for server psu+solar for when he staying at a campground or rv lot with power.

The idea is to allow it mine off grid/driving during periods of no solar, then use as much solar as it can to mine with during the day with the seamless transition.

I had so many psu's  in my house and at the solar array I lost track.

I now buy corsair for atx   basically they sell replacement cables   at the best price.

I got them almost free after rebate like 5-10 years ago. was actually the first psu's i ever bought.

Best site to check for psu reviews is https://www.techspot.com/products/power-supplies/
You have multiple reviews for the same psu and everybody should check it out before spending money on some shit psu.

I've never owned a CM series and don't plan to ever do so.
I DID get a couple of the "refurb" AX 860 that Newegg had on sale last week though - first "Corsair" power supplies I've owned in decades - but only because they've been widely reported to be Seasonic KM3 under the hood like the SS-860 or X-850 supplies I own (but different pinout on at least some of the modular cables for some weird unknowable outside of Corsair reason).

hahaha yes have 1 of those and 1 in 450w lol

Id like to try one of those cases, what is the link to order from pls

I bet you most
Of us had these at some point.

Still puts out after 5 years

for those of you still chasing XMR profits, I just swapped from claymore to xmr-stak-win64 and am seeing better results; more consistent poolside hashrate reports, etc....

Last night was a long night in downloading a bunch of miner apps and starting to go through them one at a time.  Now that I have a baseline process, this should go pretty quick for me.


Those are some killer PSU deals phil... sadly, i'm saving all my pennies for the new gen hardware release... =)

That's a nice sale on some quality products from Corsair. I'm pretty fond of their products over the past decade or so.

ThermalTake on the other hand... I used to be a fan of their products, but my enthusiasm has been waning in recent years. Below is a picture of a ThermalTake 1200 watt Gold PSU that had a SATA cable connector melt in the PSU. It had 2 SATA devices connected, so there's no way it should have ever drawn that much power. :p Checking reviews on Newegg it seems that a number of people have had the same exact issue in the past 6 months.

Good sale for 1500 watt corsair psu  code is SPRING2018

use the caps

a factory new is 450
a refurb is 350
coupon brings it to 280

I got 2
I also purchased a 1000 watt rm1000s

new it is 199
refurb it is 140
coupon it is 112

so my order would have been 1360  it was 870

Ebay has a solid coupon


PSPRINGTIME  15% OFF

MOST EVERYTHING 50 MAX

ie a 340 usd item gets a 50 dollar discount

as does any higher priced item.


I grabbed this ssd


https://www.ebay.com/itm/Micron-1100-2TB-SSD-SATA-6Gb-s-2-5-Solid-State-Drive-MTFDDAK2T0TBN-1AR1ZABYY/401506777930?

good ssd for only 299 usd after coupon


a pair of these below
https://www.ebay.com/itm/CORSAIR-RMx-Series-RM1000X-1000W-80-PLUS-GOLD-Haswell-Ready-Full-Modular-ATX12V/301744475341?

180 + 180 = 360 - 50 = 310 net for 2000 watts of power

Seems ASIC quality plays a big role.

On one I got it stable around 0.985V while the lower ASIC quality crashed at that voltage and had to be bumped up to 1.03V. With WattTool couldn't pick a voltage in the middle. Had to jump from 985V to 1030V.

Mine aren't undervolted very far - 2'nd or 3'd step down from stock on TheStilt BIOS list, whatever that ended up at.

In reality there is plenty of available power, we are in a surplus situation.  Hydro-Quebec has given a big "fuck you" to bitmain and others - mining farms are leeches, lets be honest - they bring nothing to society.  No jobs.  No expertise, nothing.  Income is shady and moved around the world, so no real net benefit for Quebec if we subsidize their electricity costs.  Which is why we have huge aluminum production facilities - but these make a whole region the size of an European country live - and live well.  So they get 1cent power.  not miners.

Long story short, if you want to mine in Quebec there is plenty of power and opportunity to do so.  you'll pay shy of 10cents all included cad with taxes overall for a business.  In my home its around 7cents all included CAD, service fees, taxes and all.  I have a company here but dont do hosting.  I dont really like the business model of hosting miners, and im really allergic to anything that has "cloud" in proximity to the word "mining".  Im doing nothing after winter ends here til autumn due to career changes but off the top of my head if you have 150k+ worth of miners then it makes sense to rent a place with existing power near Montreal calculating all costs.  below that and fixed costs eat too much.  I could provide half that from stock.  If you are interested im personally thinking about expanding if gpu prices crash down to msrp and lower and will need a new place.  I dont want to sell hosting though I do not have enough capital to finance everything and i really dont feel like mortgaging my house for this lol.  

One of the bigger players here is financed by israel interests and most likely chinese capital.  http://montrealgazette.com/business/crypto-miner-bitfarms-to-invest-250-million-in-sherbrooke-facility
Most projects are exclusively S9 farms.  Dont ask me why though, makes no sense to me.