Topic: mining rig docs (Read 1750 times)

Unless you have really cheap electricity (probably around $0.10/kwh or less), you'll most likely be losing money mining with GPUs.  Even if you are able to break even or make a profit by mining, you'll probably never break even in terms of the hardware cost of buying decent mining GPUs.  

Of course it's different if you have special circumstances that include free electricity and/or free/cheap GPUs, or have other requirements that can be met by building a GPU rig such as heating your home or using the rig for other projects.

The best way to get started with mining right now is to buy an FPGA-based mining unit that's eligible for trade-in credit for an ASIC miner whenever the ASICs are finally released.  The most popular is the Butterfly Labs (BFL) Single, which can mine at ~832 Mhash/sec and can be purchased used for anywhere around $400-700.  I think there are other FPGA miners that can be traded in for other companies' ASICs but I don't know anything about them.

FPGA units are also really easy to set up since for the most part, you just plug them in and start your mining software.  cgminer/bfgminer should automatically detect the most popular FPGAs and only require you to put in your pool server data to get started.

You should check out this page if you haven't already: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
It's a list of the most popular (and some not-as-popular) mining devices including their price and performance/power consumption metrics.

In terms of building a GPU rig, you'll first want to find a guide on building a regular desktop PC.  There are plenty of tutorials available; just use Google and I'm sure you'll find a decent one.  Building a mining rig is just like building a normal computer except instead of putting in one or two graphics cards, you'll usually want to fit in as many as possible.  Some motherboards have 4 PCI-E x16 slots with double spacing which allow you to comfortable fit in 4 graphics cards, but most people use PCI-E extended cables to fit as many graphics cards as possible into dedicated mining machines.  This requires a bit of work as you're trying to fit more graphics cards into a case that wasn't designed for it.  Or you could opt to forgo the case all together and just put the components on a shelf or something.  A google search for "bitcoin mining rig" (or a search on the forums... there's a mining rig pictures thread somewhere) should turn up some interesting pictures of GPU rigs/farms.

50btc.com (the most popular mining pool) has a PPS calculator that lets you get an estimated daily payout for a given hashrate.  Currently their estimate is 0.14 btc/day per 1000 Mhash.

Either way, bitcoin mining is marginally profitable at best.  It can be a fun project, but definitely not a "get rich quick" scheme.  

Good luck!

Thanks.  This should be enough to set me on my way.  For the record, I'd be satisfied with the ability to mine coins for a cost that is less than purchasing them.  To me, the beauty of bitcoin is not so much in the prospect of making a profit, but in the decentralized aspect.  From my experience, the true value of a currency is not in it's exchange rate, but in the character of the people who own it.  With centralized currencies, the true owners are the cult leaders who runs the institutions of banking.

While that's true, he did say:


The highlighted parts are what I based the rest of his post on, which makes me think of GPUs, considering you don't build FPGAs/ASICs into a desktop. Also, you don't need software to integrate the FPGA/ASIC units into the OS like you do on GPUs. That was just my assumption though.


Either way, much of this information is just scattered in lots of posts everywhere. Just googling your immediate question should be enough to get you through step by step:

1) "Best video card/FPGA/ASIC for bitcoin"
2) Buy said items
3) "How to mine on a ______"
4) in reading info on this, you'll see pooled vs solo mining mentioned
5) "bitcoin pool mining vs solo mining"
6) Make decision
7) "How to setup _____ type mining"
"Bitcoin _____ unit mining software"
9) Download the software of your choice and configure with everything learned above
10)
11) profit... Or not, depending on the difficulty in the coming months

He never specifically mentioned GPUs. I'm setting up a remote rig for FPGA/ASICs, and there's still a lot that goes into them. Setting up your network, compiling CGMiner, auto starting CGMiner on startup, restarting on crash, etc. I'm still not quite familiar with setting up watchdogs, but that's next on my list.

At this point in time, building a GPU mining rig is pointless, which is good and bad. It's good because it means all you need is an FPGA/ASIC, and run some simple software on a host computer. The more units you plug in, the faster you mine. It's really simple to operate. By comparison, a GPU rig is significantly more difficult to build, upgrade and maintain. With GPUs, you got to worry about power distribution, OS setup, GPU software setup, mining software setup, etc.

The downside is that very casual miners (bored gamers) aren't going to be able to do any profitable mining. I started as pretty casual, mining on my gaming downtime, then ended up building dedicated mining rigs. However, that was a year ago. With ASIC coming pretty soon, you should consider a preorder or picking up a FPGA unit from someone. With either of those units, you should be able to run any of the popular miners (browse the mining software portion of these forums for more info).

Can anyone recommend a source of instruction on how to build a mining rig?  I have some knowledge on the components that are required, but have never actually built my own computer before.  I would particularly need to know the process of installing the necessary software to integrate the components with the operating system, along with whatever mining software may be needed.