Topic: I made a giant, overpriced mining rig - page 5. (Read 7818 times)

Just to clarify I have 12 GPU cards.    I do things for failover and redundancy because that is how I set up everything that handles potential income.  It might be excessive but it is just a habit.

As far as ASIC goes,  How many people do you know personally with ASIC rigs? 

As far as my huge amount of memory, I will need that to run numerous instances.  One thing I am just checking out is the possibility of adding nodes even if I could virtualize an ASIC chip.  They have such low power useage and would take up low CPU and perhaps GPU cycles that if I can virtualize and ASIC instance , then maybe this rig would not be a waste of money.

My one test was a dismal failure at about 26600 Mh but I was testing on cracking phpBB3 hashes when I got that speed, so I will see for sure in a day or two.

Most likely this will be a bad investment though.  I can face that but I am going to look for ways to "hedge" a potential loss.

No pictures yet.  On the off chance this does work, I really don't want copycats with my rig chugging away at what could be my bitcoins.  If it works I might be open to "leasing" as part of my hedge plan.  Being that if it works, I lease instances as a hedge against BTC for dollars.

First: Ouch!

Second: I suggest you compare mining litecoins when the btc difficulty starts to skyrocket soon.

Very bad timing on the purchase but best of luck..hopefully you can at least break even on it

I feel really bad for you right now. I would have invested those 60K directly in btc.
GPU mining at this point is a waste of money unless you already have the equipment and you're currently mining with it knowing that you already broke even with the equipment.
Buying all that hardware just doesn't make sense at this time.
ASIC drove the difficulty to over 6m and it'll hit 7m in 10 days. your ROI is at least 2 years if lucky and the price of BTC helps you.
on the other hand, 60K invested in BTC might give you returns of more than 100% in the next two years.
I do hope you achieve success, but I'm nto entirely sure about this being a good investment.
Best of luck though.

This is a gigantic waste of money. An Avalon mining rig would use less power and cost 10% of your rig, for the same amount of hashpower. Your setup is depreciating so fast it is more efficient to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and sell the entire thing now. All it will accomplish if it runs is contributing to global warming.

If you can post some pictures..those are some big money machines.

You know that all the new bitcoind roads are designed for the atomic powered flying sports car and that your $100k v-8 sports car will have to remain parked in your garage?


Why a cluster? Mining bitcoins is a parallel task: you don't need any failover or load balancing tech.


High-end CPUs and lots of RAM? For mining? Seriously if you want to throw money away you might as well give it to me: I could invest it in hardware that would produce some income and not generate electric bills like there's no tomorrow...


I use USB keys for each of my "nodes". On some of the first USB keys filesystems were remounted read-only on medium errors: the mining process was undisturbed...


You think so? You have a grand total of 12*4*2 = 96 GPU. If these are 7970 you may have a total of 96 * 700MH/s (overclocked) = 67.2GH/s for $60k.

The fact that you have 12 GPUs/node will certainly be a problem (there's a limitation of 8 GPUs/server in the AMD drivers).

So you will probably be restricted to 64 GPUs -> 44.8GH/s (still for $60k). Being in a datacenter, power won't come cheap: even if you manage to put these 44.8GH/s online you may not even make a dime mining Bitcoins (and unless the BTC price rise to absurd levels you certainly will begin to lose money in one or two month).

For a point of reference I spent ~$7k for 12GH/s one year ago: your hardware is 3x less dollar efficient than mine one year later. Mining is about optimizing the cost of hardware and the power usage, your setup is simply over-engineered.

For the first commenter:  I'll let you know tomorrow.

For Ionux.  Maybe we should see how I do first before you start getting information from me.  I might suck

But seriously, Go with ATI / Radeon.  Its gotta be as open as possible.   What I am doing now is this:

Trying to tweak my system on a theoretical computing level.  That is why I have the BSD licensed controller, so I can protect my work.  The USA is lawsuit happy and if this works like I want it to work I want to make sure that someone does not file a suit for violating the GPL or something.

Before GPU mining I would advise you make a cluster.  If you can find some old VIA mini ITX boards you can have a low power 3 node cluster than can fit in an old case.  Those boards usually have one PCI slot to experiment with an old GPU.  You wont get a mining rig that will give you plenty o' bitcoin but you will learn how to make a cluster, learn Linux and learn how to tweak a GPU.  By doing this you will learn something that could even become a profession just in case the whole bitcoin thing turns out to be a fraud someday.

What I have to do with my clusters now is see if I can arrange for cluster leasing or something in case the whole bitcoin thing is nonsense and I end up getting stuck with $60k worth of future landfill.

Hey man, that is an amazing setup.  I'm trying to get into mining myself but don't have the funds at the scale you do!  Can we talk offline, perhaps?  I'd love to pick your brain about GPU mining setups!

hi
how much hashing speed it s having?

and to top it off I made two of them.

I decided to go with GPU rather than with the non existent ASIC.  I see it as deciding to buy a v-8 sports car for $100k rather than wait for the $1k atomic powered flying sports car to be finished (like with BFL).

I work with both clusters and co-location, so I got a good deal on a massive amount of hardware and I got a good deal on coloco (air kept at 66F all day plus a staff).

My rigs are a cluster of 4 nodes each and one embedded *BSD licensed controller of my own design.  Each one has 8 8 core cpus, 512GB of RAM and 12 GPU cards with logging and storage done in an encrypted VIA Mini ITX controlling a storage array (so an error won't crash the system by filling up system disks).  The other rig is exactly the same, located in a different location with the same colo company and has hot failover capability with the other machine using something Linux HA heartbeat.  So if one rig fails it takes over the tasks of the other rig as its virtual instances switch tasks (why I needed so much RAM).

I really think I spent too much for this ($60k for both.  if I had not got the deal I did I would have paid about $90k) and tonight or tomorrow I should be able to start mining once it is set up at my colo.

The amount I spent is making me have doubts about bitcoin to be honest but I am here and I am obviously jumping all in.  So I figured I would introduce myself.

Hi!