Part II - [GUIDE - Personal Experience] How to get started with Mining
Okay guys lets get started with this one.
In the Part- I I have covered basic set up for any mining rig which will help you achieve your altcoin mining dream.
As of now, I have set up two mining rigs all by own. That was the motivation for me to create the Part-I thread.
To motivate everyone, I am sharing my mining rig set up in small room. Note that I have not made the room too fancy, it is still under development and lot of work needs to be done.
However, mining rigs are already up and running which will help me cover ROI and expenses.
✓ This guide might help you with the electrical connections, cooling set up, positioning your rigs etc.
✓ If not, it will at least send you some inspirations to make your own.
1. Why electricity is important & what are the cautions?Mining operations is nothing but all about how you use your electricity. Because you are converting electrical energy into your profits! It might sound lame at first but yes, your rigs are hungry for this energy, they use this to power up the GPU's and perform the computational tasks.
Following table shows you different GPU's and power consumptions by them. Later is the description regarding "How much electricity does your Rig will use in total".
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| | Model | | | Power | | | Efficiency | |
| | NVIDIA RTX 3090 | | | 290W | | | 0.42 Mh/w | |
| | NVIDIA RTX 3080 | | | 230W | | | 0.43 Mh/w | |
| | AMD RX 6800 XT | | | 104W | | | 0.61 Mh/w | |
| | NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti | | | 160W | | | 0.36 Mh/w | |
| | NVIDIA GTX 1060 | | | 85W | | | 0.26 Mh/w | |
* Table like this can be created using this tutorial:
Tutorial - How to create Table in the BitcoinTalk ForumFrom the table above you can easily see what power is required by your GPU, how efficient it is and correlation between the power and efficiency itself.
For example,
NVIDIA RTX 3090 has efficiency of 0.42 Mh/w, and considering it's maximum voltage input of 290 Watt you will get 0.42 x 290 = 121 MH/s of Hashrate.
Your electricity will play important role here because that's what decides how efficiently your card will work.
I mean if your input is less than 290 W then it won't hash that efficiently and you won't get 121 MH/s rate.
If your electricity is unstable then you will get results like the following one:
Image 1: Represents 7 days of Graph for my miner with Sapphire Cards.
Image 2: Represents 2 Hrs of Graph for my miner with Sapphire Cards. ---> Watt Graph (Yellow Dotted Line)
_____ ---> Hash Rate (Purple Line)
_____ ---> Temperature (Red Line)
_____ ---> Fan Speed (Blue Line)
So if you look closely the Image 1 and 2 above then you can study the patterns of watts and hash rates moving parallel to each other. The image 1 which is 7 days graph also shows sudden drop instances in hash and watt that one is electricity shut down and rebooting of the rig.
In rest of the graph you will see noisy line all over. This can be seen in detail with the Image 2. This happens due to Unstable Electrical connections. This data is taken from my own rig and the grid here is not that perfect.
However, this is way stable than what I had before setting up the extra Fuse and breakers, PSU apart from the actual electrical line.
GPU will suck electricity based on:
✓ Hashrate at which it is working. This may or may not drop. In my case, the 6 x sapphire card goes from 63 MH/s to 79 MH/s based on which electricity is fluctuated.
✓ Fan Speed: People forget that their fan are also working to cool down the GPU. If your fan is working below 30% speed then your cards won't require much energy. If fan is working at 100% capacity then it will suck more energy.
✓ Fan Speed can be controlled by using your OS's dashboard or BIOS settings. Or now a days it can be easily controlled with overclock settings from the OS dashboard.
✓ The only way to calm your fans is by lowering the temp of rig as whole by means of Air Conditioner or Blowers.
**Image 1 displays the Fan correlation with speed %, degrees, and watt.
2. The CautionHere comes the image of my farm.
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| Image 3 | Image 4 | Image 5 |
Image 3: Represents the split connects and main line coming directly from the area grid. In here we have main grid, sub-grids and metered grid for separate connections. Since my connection will use power more than 2-4 kw at any given time (including all the devices in room) it was better to acquire separate connection rather than running it on the normal area line.
So the wire thats coming to the Breaker is from metered line which also acts as main breaker. The one shown in the image is extra one for the safety.
Image 4: With my past experience, in which I have burned down the switch boards due to insufficient output and lower rating of the switch boards. So this time I have upgraded to the higher rating electrical board. As seen clearly in the photograph, I am using 16A output switches for the rig connection while the normal one's for monitor and wifi router.
Image 5: It just represents the complete set up of the farm and how I have arranged the rigs, air conditioner and electrical wires have been kept as sticky as to the surfaces so that it won't tangle you in and confuse later. Believe it happens when you are new and just started with the set up.
3. The Rig Settings (For proper cooling): - The small details, big Help!| __________________________________ | __________________________________ | __________________________________ |
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| Image 6 | Image 7 | Image 8 |
Image 6: This was very first set up of my rig. I kept both the rigs facing the same side that is just plugged in the whole set up in sequence but never thought it will disturb the cooling patterns of both rigs. The air flow of first rig used to divert all the hot air to next rig and thus it added more degree's in the second one and it used to be hot all the time even when the air conditioner was facing it. So the next task was to divert the hot air to opposite direction away from both rigs.
Image 7: For this, checkout this image 7. You can observe that both are facing outwards and little tilted to above side. This help the cool air to struck on the GPU's and throw the air in outward direction. The change was clearly observed on the panel and both of them have almost same temperature around 30-60 celsius.
Image 8: The air conditioner needs to be positioned in single mode only. If you turn on the swing and try to cool the whole room then it won't work. Since the rig keep generating heat all the time, the conditioning is not that perfect.
So it's always better to stop the swing and keep the blower pointed on rigs. At least this helps cool it down.
In the night time, the temperature is way lower since complete atmospheric temp is also low. So the rigs are very efficient in the night time.
4. Auto Reboots in case of Electrical faults, High Temps:I am using the auto features from my OS (that is SMOS). The set up is such that on the electrical failure or high voltages, mining rig completely stops the operation and go into sleep mode or pause mode. This cut off the the electrical supply from PSU until the power voltage turns on to the normal stage.
Similarly, if any of the GPU's go beyond the set temperature in my case it's 80-85 degree celsius, then the Rig will put itself into pause mode. This helps the rig to achieve lower temp, and after certain range it resumes the operations.
These safety precautions are amazing and it also reduces your physical presence near the rig. You can operate this remotely.
For this the following Watchdog scripts are used:
Watchdog options:
--no_gpu_monitor Disables the ADL (Windows) or sysfs (Linux) GPU monitor for temperature and
fan speed.
--temp_limit=TEMP Sets the temperature at which the miner will stop GPUs that are too hot.
Default is 85C.
--temp_resume=TEMP Sets the temperature below which the miner will resume GPUs that were previously
stopped due to temperature exceeding limit. Default is 60C.
--watchdog_script(=X) Configures the gpu watchdog to shut down the miner and run the specified platform
and exits immediately. The default script is watchdog.bat/watchdog.sh in the
current directory, but a different script can be provided as an optional argument,
potentially with a absolute or relative path as well.
--watchdog_test Tests the configured watchdog script by triggering the same action as a dead gpu
after ~20 secs of mining.
--watchdog_disabled Forces the watchdog to not execute. Can be used to disable the watchdog in mining os
that always run with the watchdog enabled.
More on the coding part in next tutorial.
- I hope you find this tutorial or article very interesting.
- I am not Expert, my tute may not be perfect but you should educate yourself by reading other sources, tutorials etc.
-I am just sharing what I am doing in the hope that all the young people and new comers will get motivated with this and DIY.
-This is out of love of Crypto Space we are in!.
- To the moon. 
