Topic: Is water cooler required in mining? (Read 406 times)

Watercooling is not only completely unnecessary for mining, it also requires extra maintenance in addition to the costs and is dangerous.
A leak could potentially kill your entire rig.
Air coolers are fine, just make sure you're purchasing a GPU with a good air cooler.

Naaaah... Make an unusual rig with enough space and air flow between your cards and you are safe. (don't look at pictures on internet for rigs where most of the cards are 2cm near each other). You have a guarantee, right?
Most of the water cooling GPUs are made for 5+ years. You need only 2.5 or 3? It will last with proper air cooling.

Air cooling is enough, just have proper ventilation; one intake and one exhaust. As long as the hot air doesn't get stuck anywhere, you're pretty much set.

Due to the additional cost of water cooling, the use of water-cooled cards in cryptocoin mining is RARE.

When I started mining I bought a few reference design R9 290s. They had blower style coolers and were very loud and ran very hot. I watercooled 3 of them. it was expensive but they have never run above 65 degrees even in hot Australian summers and they have usually been core overclocked from around 950 to 1100, which for eth mining means an increase from 26/27mh/s to 31mh/s.
I have other aircooled 290s and 390s and since I have been mining for more than a year, most of the aircooled ones have had fans fail and in summer some have to be underclocked to get them running below 85-90 degrees.
I believe the watercooled cards have been much more stable and are likely to live longer, but now that Nvidia cards like the 1070 provide similar hash rates but consume half as much power I am gradually retiring the AMD R9 cards and buying Nvidia cards.
Lately though, with GPU mining profits just getting worse and worse I have stopped buying new cards. I bought a couple of Baikal ASIC miners and I am considering selling off a lot of GPUs and going for a big ASIC, because unless altcoin prices really improve or some new inovative GPU mineable coin comes along it just barely seems worth it anymore.
I have randomly mined a few coins just in the hope that if I hold them they might have potential - like verge, zoin, nexus... but also I keep mining eth even at a very low profit because I think it has great future potential, but I'm really digressing.

Back to your question - it isn't necessary to watercool and it is expensive but it can have some benefits in the long term.

It's not required but it helps for cards over 200w. Amd 290/390/295x2/Duo/Vega, nvidia 980ti/ 1080ti.

Liquid cooling is a nice luxury, but for many users, it adds an unreasonably large amount to the initial investment. (Plus, for a big farm, manually installing the blocks on each card would take a lot of work, although I suppose some find that sort of thing enjoyable.)

There are a number of cards that come with closed water-cooling loops out of the box, and sometimes those can be had for similar prices as air-cooled versions (assuming those models were even produced).


For users with many small cards, especially, water cooling usually requires too large of an investment. For example, for my 3GB 1060s, I wouldn't be surprised if water blocks costed half as much as my cards. Some 1080ti users may tell a different story, though I'd imagine most users still stick with air cooling.

I'm in the Midwest USA, currently my electricity use for mining is $280/mo.   But Oct 1st we get winter rates, so it will be $170/mo and that lasts until June next year.  

750MH/s @ 3400 watts.(including fans and stuff)     Doubt I add any more cards any time soon.   And at least I won't need to turn my heat on this winter.  

Wow, amazing. 
do you have a problem with the utility bill?
how much money do you spend each month?
Where do you live?

6x RX480s
7x RX460s
22x 1060s


 

OK
Thanks for the information.
If I may know, what Graphics Card are you using?

No.

I run 35 GPU with open air frames, exhaust out the window.   All cards stay under 75C.

No need for water cooling.   

I am a beginner in mining using RIG. I want to ask if water cooler should be used to cool Graphics Card and Processor? Because I see mining relying heavily on GPU speeds so people are overclocking and automatically increasing the temperature of the GPU.
Thanks