Topic: My journey to a 2-story man mining house...a work in progress! - page 2. (Read 1870 times)

The first batch of parts  


I had my last final for the spring semester, so it was time to build. PC4 is mining with one card. In the next couple days, I'll upgrade the power supply and add 2 more GPUs.


This is my gaming PC. But, in reality it has just become my Plex Media Server with 11tb Raid 5 array. Until 2 days ago, it had a GTX 980ti in there. As you guys know, it is terrible for mining. Now, two cards are hashing away!


My old man has this brand new 5 year old Dell T3500 computer that was going to be thrown away. He saved it about 2 years ago, and today we have given it a new purpose in life. PS upgraded and 1 card installed.


Day one is complete, i was lucky enough to be able to work at home today due to a early morning tech support call! A blessing in disguise actually. Allowed me to dedicate a lot of time to testing, tuning, learning. I should mention how mad the wife was when she couldn't watch her shows because the Plex media server kept crashing (bad tunes). Here are the results:





Here is the link to the imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/hjiQi I am a newb here, so embedded pics are disabled

I originally posted this in Yun9999's thread, but i dont want to hijack his thread with my stuff.

 After some research, I have officially dived in!   The parts were ordered today! 9 cards and 2 Power Supplies. I split the cost 50/50 with the old man who lives in my spare bedroom.

After much planning last weekend, I decided to use my main daily driver, my dad's daily driver, and 2 spare PCs that we have and are not currently being used. So, after doing a lot of power calculations and planning. We have a planned phased approach.

Phase 1 - install graphics cards in existing PCs without any need for risers,  
My daily driver (PC 1) - install 2 MSI Armor OC RX 480s
My dad's daily driver (PC 2) - install 2 MSI Armor OC RX 480s
Spare Dell T3500 (PC 3) - install a higher wattage PS and install 2 MSI Armor OC RX 580s
Spare Custom PC (PC 4) - install a higher wattage PS and install 3 MSI Armor OC RX 580s

Phase 2 - convert Spare PCs to risers (9 risers, and 4 more cards), build wooden riser cases
Spare Dell T3500 (PC 3) - install 4 risers and add 2 more cards
Spare Custom PC (PC 4) - install 5 risers and add 2 more cards

Phase 3 - install additional cards and risers to max out the remaining daily driver PCs (10 risers, 6 more cards and 1 more PS)
My daily driver (PC 1) - install 5 risers and add 3 more cards
My dad's daily driver (PC 2) - install a higher wattage PS, install 5 risers, and add 3 more cards

So, by utilizing as much existing hardware, I should be able to get 9 cards up and running quickly while lowering our initial cost and risk! In a couple months, we will be doubling our hashing power with only a minimal incremental investments at each phase. Conservatively, 19 cards should net about 500 MH/s.

Also, the thought is to learn a bit on the way. Each phase has goals to meet. Not only to begin hashing, but to also test. Test capabilities of the 480s/580s, tweak and tune the cards, ROMs, etc. And then, learn the tricks of the riser setup. After that, we should be good to build a some more dedicated riser rigs from ground up.

Please, if you have some thoughts, or advice, I would love to hear from you. Most importantly, what do your wives think?