I've got some 1080's coming, and I'll put a couple in my main PC and 2 in another PC I have here. This other PC only has a 430 watt PSU in it, so maybe not enough to run a couple 1080s on. I was going to build a whole new pc just for mining, but I'll try it like this first and see what I get.
I have some HP 1200 watt server PSUs from ASIC miners, which still make 900 watts on 120 volts. That is adequate.
I'd like to run the pc off of only one HP server PSU, I have breakout boards with on/off switches on them, so that part is ok.
Only part I'm not sure about is powering the motherboard from the PSU. I've seen this adapter here:
https://www.parallelminer.com/product/180watt-max-24pin-atx-power-module-included-sata-molex-cpu-power-connectors-ditch-your-atx-power-supply-entirely/and it is claimed to work, but I am not sure it will. For one thing, it only has a 4 pin EPS power plug and my motherboard (an Asus P8Q67-M DO/TPM) has an 8 pin EPS plug. It's running an i3-2120 and 10 GB of ram, so plenty powerful enough for mining work with 2 GPUs in it.
And another thing, I was planning to run Windows 7 64 bit, but I could also run 8 64 bit. I have 10 64 bit OS disks, but haven't been able to get one to load up properly. I'm certainly not going to pay for a copy of 10, that is nonsense! But I read at Nicehash that they suggest using 10. Is 7 or 8 good enough or do I really need a copy of 10?
depends on how many of those gpus you have coming on 900w figure 150w for the mobo,cpu and ssd which will leave about 750w so maybe 2 to 3 of those 1080ti's, server psu's youll get better efficiency on 220v and youll get the full power of what that psu can do so you can run more gpus per rig. btw the small psu for the motherboard is called a pico psu. its quite popular method, I too am using this on all my rigs, works great, looks much cleaner using less cables, but I also custom make my own cables for rigs of this nature. id advise building a rig with a motherboard ment for mining and a dual core Pentium cpu, nice hash is nice but if you are using 1080ti's don't use nicehash youll make more by not using it and pool mining instead, i3 cpu is rather overkill and tad wasteful for a mining rig build, windows 10 pro is OS to use, either that HIVE OS, which is Linux or maybe NVoC which is another Linux mining os