Topic: What do you guys think of this rig? (Read 4852 times)

You might as well maximize what hardware you already have and use these vs buying a new board for every 2 or 3 new cards....poclbm doesnt use much cpu resources so a amd 4000+ should have no problem even if you only have pci slots....those can be adapted for hashing and as its been discussed the bandwidth reduction doesn't mean much mayb 10 mhash which is alot cheaper than buying a new board, new psu, etc etc

Hi d3c0n808, thanks for point me in the right direction. I'll see if my local store has got these. It'll drive down the cost of my build by a huge margin.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6128.0

Hey how do I use the PCIe x1 slots for the GPU? Is there some kind of adapter? Or is it simply not possible?

only if you are that genius and keep it to yourself, otherwise the whole community will double or triple, making the increase meaningless at the next difficulty update

My solution is to stick a HD5830 or similar card in an old pc (3-4 years old) with no harddrive, maybe 1gb ram (whatever it has), upgrade the power supply, and run the system off linux on a USB stick....about as cheap as it can get for me....
...until the bitcoin return and heat become unbearable....

You never know, some genius might be able to double or triple the throughput on these GPU's....then it's game on again...

check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5f_e4P6gMA


he says hes getting around 32Ghash

The current expected difficulty increase is ~67%. I expect that to go up a little more, but it shouldn't come anywhere close to 100%.

Perhaps you bought your equipment already but I thought I would throw my .02 in here as well.  Everyone has given you great advice.
I have an asrock 890gx extreme 4 board and a sempron 145 with stock cooler.  There is really no need for a 890fx or a high end board.  The asrock has onboard gpu which is nice because your not stealing resources from your mining cards to run the GUI.  So running f0 flag on poclbm is no problem.  The board i think can be had for 140 bucks and has 3 pcie 2.0 slots. and 1 pciex1 slot so theoretically you can stick 4 cards in there with the help of a pcie to pciex16 converter.  The single core sempron can be unlocked depending on the cpu so its a 50/50 that you can get dual core but as it is with 3 cards running poclbm the cpu isn't even taxed.  You can get away with 1gb for linux i prefered 2 an at 30 bucks for 2gb thats no biggie.  a 1000 watt psu can be had for less than 100 bucks now a days depending on how many cards you intend to run.  Make sure if your running 4 cards in one case that you have GOOD fans, unless your going water cooling.  I have 2 delta 250cfm fans for my cards as they run pretty hot overclocked, and at 500cfm they both run at about 68C.  If your going to running windows make sure you have a dummy card for each gpu otherwise windows will not recognize the cards(this is not a problem in linux) Also there are some excellent tutorials on how to mine with linux.  Windows tends to be less stable and a little slower at least in my experience the linux machines hash much more consistently where as my windows machines has a lot of fluctuation. I'm sure some people will disagree.   When I say excellent I mean its just a matter of copy and paste commands into a terminal and I'm sure there are a lot of people that would be more than willing to help you setup any scripting. 

Looking like next difficulty jump may be closer to 100% than 50%...
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9723.0

Things are changing so fast people cannot comprehend them, what will your rig generate in 22 days when the difficulty is 1.2-1.5 million?  Will it even be profitable on an energy basis (assuming current value of $7)?  What will the value of bitcoin need to be to be profitable?

Difficulty is not only increasing logarithmically, it is accelerating even on a a logarithmic scale!

You should instead figure if its worth investing more time / money in more equipment RIGHT NOW

Short-term profitability is not going to make up for lack of long-term profitability.

i figured the difficulty would increase, just not that much that much

to me the only thing right now is to get 3 rigs going asap

then i guess just wait it out, no matter what difficulty, or whatever, till they pay themselves off atleast

ill be watching the difficulty in the coming weeks, and trying to figure if its worth investing more time / money in more equipment

No. It won't.

The difficulty is currently estimated to go up by ~70% in less than 2 days. And then it will probably go up another 30-60% 1.5 weeks after that. And so on and so on.

Your income is asymptotic, not linear.

If you were to get 2 day shipping, and started mining right after the difficulty rise in less than 2 days, then you could make (with 1GHash/sec) ~2.47BTC/day or $17.43/day before you take out the cost of electricity. Cost of electricity for that rig will probably be (assuming you are going to use Air Conditioning during the summer) ~$3/day, so your incremental daily profit for just this coming difficulty round would only be ~$14.50.

This next difficulty round will probably only last 10 (or fewer days).

~$14.50/day x 10days = ~$145

And after that 10 days, the difficulty is likely to go up, let's say, 40% (even though 50% is just as likely). At which point, your daily profit would only be ~$9.45/day.

~$9.45/day x 10days = ~$94.50 + ~$145 = ~$239.50 (total profit from rig not including cost of rig)

And after that 10 days, the difficulty is likely to go up, let's say, 40% (even though 50% is just as likely). At which point, your daily profit would only be ~$5.90/day.

~$5.90/day x 10days = ~$59 + ~$239.50 = ~$298.50 (total profit from rig not including cost of rig)

So, after 1 full month, you have only paid off less than $300 of the total cost of your mining rig. That is less than 25% of the cost of your mining rig, not almost completely paid off like you estimated.

But let's keep going.

~$298.50 + ~$33.50 + ~$15.40 + ~$2.40 = ~$349.80

After 2 full months, you might have paid off less than $350 of the total cost of your mining rig.

So lets lay this out.  Difficultly is going to increase very soon (5-9 days) and is expected to be close to 400k.  50-60% increases are expected every 2 weeks after that

With a 1Gh/s machine
For first week (244k difficulty) - ฿30.04
2nd & 3rd week (~400k difficulty) - ฿18.34 x2
4th & 5th week (~600k difficulty) - ฿12.22 x2
6th & 7th week (~900k difficulty) - ฿8.15 x 2
8th week (~1.35M difficulty) - ฿5.43

This is the point that you think you'll have it paid off, and it's only generated ฿112.89 = ~$790 ($7/BTC), not accounting for electricity costs and your time to build it and keep it running.  Your income will continue to decrease to the point that it's not even break even with electricity, let alone the cost of your rig.
*EDIT* and this is assuming you got the rig up and running TODAY, not next week when difficulty has already jumped


I know it sucks to have missed the boat (I found BTC in February and decided against building mining rigs ) but it's just not profitable like it used to be.  

If you believe BTC will continue to increase in value relative to other currencies then you should BUY BTC at this point instead of mining them

244139.481583

Hash Rate (mega-hashes / second)   1000  if i can get all 3 video cards to hit 340+ and stay that way

per Day   ฿4.12

per Week    ฿30.04

per Month   ฿125.24

a coins what 6 to 7 dollars , the computer would pay for itself in 1 month plus 1 to 2 weeks

what i am thinking of is buying a motherboard that will fit 3 cards at the moment, i dont know if i can clock these cards and get 275 to 350

lets say i buy 2 cards at first, then in a couple of weeks buy the third card, ill have those working for 1 to 3 months, then maybe sell like 50 or 100 bitcoins to help pay for second rig,

im just gonna have to figure stuff like this as i go

like how much do these companys buy bitcoins in bulk, what type of ram, or power supply i need?

stuff like that

pretty much the immediate goal is to break 1.5 to  2 gigs of hash's and be in a mining pool

At least 20 benjamins ( $2000 ) !

im doing guesswork, trying to save space pysically at the house

ohh the calculator sites up http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

Go find FOUR HD radeon 5850's maybe Gigabyte or Sapphire

and a MOTHERBOARD that will FIT THEM ALL - Dual Card Slot types

and find a COMPUTER CASE that has 9 to 10 expansion slots to fit said video cards

comeback and tell me the cost........

I am going off http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm

http://pastebin.com/AvymGnMJ

and a couple of posts in this forum

and a bit coin calculator on the net, that seems to be down right now i wont link it

i think the standard for bitcoin mining is having a decent job and maybe a partner or brother who has a part time job and can keep the machines running all the time

right now i am thinking of that 600 to 700 dollar computer /without the video cards

even if things dont work out i have a bad ass motherboard and 2 graphics card for a computer and 2 spares, or i can give the other 2 cards to my brother or build a decent, cheap, 2 card mining machine

Every day I see these threads...
People with no clue want to build a rig...
Wasting huge amount of money...
Not realizing the game has changed...

The game is now cheapest rig will win...
Used to be just get it up and running...
Profit margins were so big...
Those times are gone forever...

If you invest $1000 in your rig...
In a year you might make $200 profit...
Cut your costs with $100...
Profit will be up by 50%...

These threads only proves one thing...
People are totally blinded...
By the tempting thought of printing money...
Because of this, in a couple weeks or so...
Difficulty will be a milli++...

for $50 you can get 1Tb hdd nowdays
2Tb for $70-$80 -)

sata HDD 80 gigs is $40.99 , so no biggie

so, safer to pay more, if unsure, yes.
its also [unreasonable, alittle, meaning everyday hardware flow] investment -)
nothing to beat hard-drives on storage market this time. and you can't rely on SSD on all aspects, except of read time[some time :], so tinies possible hdd could be simplest solution[to deploy/maintain/use]/storage pick.

i didn't even include some things

i can buy a 50 dollar HDrive....... or you going to freak out at me cuz its not cost effective? lol

anyway

im down to $359.88 bux without the video cards

right now im tryin ti figure out a 3 video card rig

i am still going to try to figure out how to stick 4 ati radeon 5850's in 1 rig

1 stupid case that will hold it, and has 9 expansion slots, only need 8 for 4 video, but you have that extra in and of a half + motherboard that extends past the 8th exp slot

i dont know how to use linux or ubunto or any of that crap, i got a sp3 version of windows

and i dont want my power supply to melt, catch my room and house on fire

so ?
i knew guy, running PC by LiveCD offfice-card-DVD Linux distro for months. for "general purpose" usage.
thats strongly depend meaning of "general" for each of us and VERY different, IMO.

He was thinking about not even putting a hard drive in it, so that means that this rig isn't intended to be a general purpose machine.

if he had extra-cash and prefer to invest it into better appearance/reliability/ease of use &etc instead of horsepower - is okay, IMO
but if his goal maximize RoI dynamic, you may be right.

so then http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157207

is just overkill again?

All you need are PCI Express x1 slots of any PCI Express revision. (may need to do some extenders and/or modding of the connectors) Mining does not require that the video cards be in x16 slots.

ok i found ASROCK motherboard, dont know if there worth a dam, can hold 3 cards is 142 $

and there all pci express 2

umm should i be looking for pci express 2.0 slots or not?

maybe thats where im screwin up

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Processor SDX140HBGQBOX
 is like $37.99

the memory i still can buy, i can save 1 stick for another computer, or put it in mine, and have 6 gigs

ill go down from 200 computer case to 69 so 280 saved already

and i need what a 700 watt Power Supply? thats like 70 bux compared to the 150 dollar 850 w

Right now, the only way that buying hardware for mining beats the $0.75:1MHash/s mark is by only purchasing video cards and putting them into existing "overhead hardware" that you don't have to buy.

@w128  @xenon481  im just doing guess work right now

@xenon481  so going all out to save space at the house wont work maybe ill just have to deal with having twice the computer rigs maybe just stick to 3 pci slot motherboards hell maybe 2

The $0.75 per MHash/s number makes some assumptions about increases in difficulty and increases in exchange rate, but if you expect either of those assumptions are wrong, then that means that you believe that it is currently more profitable to buy the BTC.

I fooled around on Newegg for a bit trying to put together a build that hits the $0.75:1 Mhash standard set forth above. Currently, it just isn't feasible. With a few excellent combos it would be possible but, they are few and far between for mining-appropriate hardware. The best I could come up with, without delving into bottom-of-the-barrel, no-name, potential fire hazard hardware territory was about $0.85/0.90:1 Mhash.

Here's a thought, if you're going to insist on using all that fancy hardware, upgrade the CPU and call it a 50% gaming machine.

Historically, buying bitcoins directly has been more profitable than mining.

Again, you are wasting a TON of money for absolutely zero reason.

- Do not use that Motherboard
- Do not use that Processor
- Do not use that Memory

You can cut at least $250 just by cutting out that unnecessary stuff.

And a $200 case is overkill waste of money as well.

Even if you can cut half of your "overhead hardware" cost out (~$350), you are still looking at ~$1100-$1200 for a rig. That is nearly $1.00 per MHash/s....... That is 33% over the expected break even hardware outlay.

im looking at Cases right now with atleast 8 slots, i found one thats 59 bux, but im only seeing 7 back slots

so a 9 slot right now is look about the 200 price range

well im trying to make the computer around or LESS THAN this guys......

http://www.bitcoinrigs.com/products/Enthusiast-Rig-2000.html


$1,399.00

    * Athlon II X2 250
    * 2 GB DDR3-1333 RAM
    * 500 GB Hard Drive
    * 700 watt power supply
    * Ubuntu 10.10
    * 2x ATI 6970 video cards
    * Mining output with 2x cards = 680 MH/s

i dont know wtf ubuntu is, i know what a free version of windows xp sp3 is....


so lets see what i can get for around 1400

------------------------------------

      

COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case  $199.99
 
MSI 890FXA-GD70 AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard     $194.99

   CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX850 V2 850W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply    $159.99    

   AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor ADX640WFGMBOX   $99.99    

   G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL   $49.99         

   Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound    $11.98    

   XIGMATEK Apache EP-CD903 92mm Sleeve CPU Cooler supports AM2 AM3 939 754 and LGA 1156    $19.99
-------------
Shipping and Handling $711.92 not including shipping and handling
---------------
then 4  5850 video cards at 200 a piece 800 $+

i am still missing a hard drive, not sure if i need one if i usb sticks, dont really need a dvd rom

haha, dont even know what im doing really, just guessing all this out

finding a case that this motherboard will fit in is a B

Retail CPUs ship with a heatsink and fan that will be plenty for a mining machine. You really only need to look at aftermarket HSF if you intend to overclock, minimize noise or you're buying an OEM CPU.

Paying anything over $0.75 per MHash/s is a losing proposition and anything just under that isn't worth the risk.

For 1,200 MHash/s, you would need to try to spend less than $800 (preferably less than $750 to reduce risk).

Unfortunately, 4x 5850 alone costs over $700.

And as far as CPU goes, a Sempron is overkill.

i made it public, but for some reason i cant see it either



im going to do a testrig 2 wishlist, ill post info in a minute

so what should i go with just a athlon II x4? quad core and a 15 to 30 dollar cpu/fan?

Mining is new to me but, I'm pretty well-versed in hardware.

• You don't need decent CPU, much less an aftermarket heatsink.
• You don't need a high-end gaming motherboard.
• You don't need gigs of RAM.
• You would need a large case and a ton of airflow if you intend to cram 4x 5850 inside.
  

If you're going to build a mining machine at this (against most current advice) you'd likely be better served by building 2 machines, one for each pair of cards.

You are wasting far far too much money.

And that is a private link to the wishlist that other people can't see.

ok, pretty much, here is the "Wishlist" list from Newegg

what do you think? would it work?

https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.aspx?ID=17615766

the current rig i want to make/buy is a

motherboard MSI 890FXA-GD70

with amd athlon II x4 deneb 125w 3.0       i could drop it to the ones that are 90 W

a 60 $ heatsink/fan for CPU

and 4 Video cards ati radeon 5850's

2 sticks ram

i dont know how big of a Computer Case i need

also

how do you go about telling how Big of a Power Supply you need, im guessing of getting a 800 or a 950 W from corsair

since the 4 video cards will be pulling 155 to 165 W