Seeking advice on mining rig hardware

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MrCaffeineX

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A friend of mine has asked me to build him a mining rig. At this time it looks like it will be either for Litecoin or Feathercoin, as it appears that the bubble has burst on Bitcoin. I informed him that the whole idea still sounds absurd to me, but he has money to burn and taking a chance on mining might actually be a safer bet than pissing his money away on lottery tickets...

I have been doing a bit of research into the Altcoins, of which there are many, and was figuring on steering him in that direction. AMD GPUs still seem to be in high demand for these types of projects, so I'm assuming these Altcoins can still be mined using traditional GPU-based mining rigs, correct? Knowing how hot/loud the current AMD cards can get, would something like the 7870 GHz Editions or 7950s be a better bet?

The other questions I have before speccing this thing out for him are what is the CPU performance necessary to feed the GPUs enough to keep them mining and is RAM/HDD space a consideration for mining?
 
many answers here
gpu for mining alt-coins especially Radeons, Nvidia gpu simply do not compare.
There is not much need for a very high end cpu for doing this, none at all, so a Pentium or i3 something that still has a bit of speed when he needs it for something else, but overall will run cool and sip power
no overall need for uber amounts of ram 8gb 1866/1600 is perfectly fine, hard drive space wise, you could get away with a 250gb hard drive as it is not much storage nor net bandwidth intensive.

7970/280x or 290/290x would be the best best, if he really does have cash to burn, then it might be the best bet to go custom cooled cards by himself or by factory, and if he goes 290/290x swap the stock cooler for an aftermarket one, or even go so far as liquid cool them.

Depending on how many cards he plans running, a milk crate style build might be beneficial, as in the motherboard more or less sits on a flat board, the gpu hang on a rack to give them ample airflow and connect to the pci-e via riser cables.

to give an idea, litecoin(alt-coin) you are doing via Scrypt, a 7870 gets ~400KH/s if you set it up right, 7950 ~600, 7970 ~750, 280x ~800, 290/290x ~850-975

Top Nvidia card under 400(780Ti, Titan, Quadro)

So $/performance generally seems to be 7950/7970 that are custom cooled. a rise of 100KH/s does not seem like much but it can make a significant difference.

Also if he is that keen to do this, then maybe he should look into maybe buying the coins directly and "playing" with them as an investment so he can make his $.
 
The newest AMD GPUs are better, but how much depends on the type of coin as well.
Get a quality PSU rated a fair bit higher than the maximum needed as the PC is going to be left alone for long periods of time running with high power use.
Get a good case/fans and make sure the room/area where the PC is wont heat up too much.
You dont want a fire or components smoking.
 
dragonstongue said:
to give an idea, litecoin(alt-coin) you are doing via Scrypt, a 7870 gets ~400KH/s if you set it up right, 7950 ~600, 7970 ~750, 280x ~800, 290/290x ~850-975
Click to expand...

never pay attention to things like this, you will find most 7870's will stay under 400k and many 7970/280xs won't do 700 no matter what you do. I have some 280x's though that go right to 750 without touching a thing and some are quite a bit of work to get over 600

Always budget for the low side and not these very optimistic numbers.

If you aren't into mining don't do it, these rigs are WORK and unless you get very lucky there is quite a bit of troubleshooting time involved in every rig
 
MrCaffeineX said:
At this time it looks like it will be either for Litecoin or Feathercoin, as it appears that the bubble has burst on Bitcoin.
Click to expand...

Bubble bursting? At $860 per BTC (and oftentimes reaching close or back beyond $1000), I don't think so.

It has, however, become very unprofitable to mine without the use of a decent Bitcoin ASIC.

I will have to disagree just slightly with mkrohn though. I have 3 7970's (non-GHz Editions) and 2 of them can do 730KH/s with no effort. The third was flawed out of the box even when I first used it for Folding@Home, however I have it underclocked and it's still doing 650. At stock clocks it would do only 570... underclocking it made it increase in performance... weird.

7950's are still the best when it comes to power consumed per KH though the R9 290's (the non-X ones) come close. All of my 7950's do 630 or above. One runs at 670 using the same settings as the others. However, in the absence of 7950's, you pretty much have to take your pick of what's available.

Which brings me to another point. Be aware, you will also get different performance between cards of the same model as well. This is due to the difference in silicon batches. Like I said, I have 9 of the same model of Sapphire 7950, most from different batches. Most will do 630 or above, but then I have an odd duck that now does 670. I have 2 others from that batch that I hope will do 670 (haven't installed them yet). So, just be wary that you may not get X hashes on Y card just like that guy said on those forums over there... Your mileage may vary. Like mkrohn said, there's a lot of troubleshooting involved and sometimes it will take weeks of playing with settings just to find ones that are 100% stable. It's definitely NOT "plug it in and forget it".

I do very much agree with Nenu's assertion about the PSU. PSU's have the greatest efficiency at around 40 to 70% load. It's best not to design a system around 1500W of power draw and then only get a 1500W PSU. If you're going that big, go for dual PSUs. Two 850's or something at least.

If you have the option, run without cases. I had my rigs in cases up until about a month ago. I will try to avoid cases from now on. I have mine in Spotswood tech trays and they work absolutely awesome! When inside cases, no matter how well designed, there was always something blocking air movement. That caused the top card to always run 10C or more higher than the other ones even if there was 2 slots of space in between. I was always having to reboot cards because their VRMs would overheat and cause the card to crash while mining. In tech trays, there is no real limitation to how far apart I place the GPUs now similar to milk crate setups and whatnot.

Like dragonstongue said though, mining isn't really where the money is made. It's more "free" that way, but crypo coin trading is where the big bucks are really made.
 
mkrohn said:
If you aren't into mining don't do it, these rigs are WORK and unless you get very lucky there is quite a bit of troubleshooting time involved in every rig
Click to expand...

I'm going to disagree here. My dual 7850 Windforce rig gets 700KH/s out of the box; the dual-GPU rigs are much, much easier to build and maintain than the quads (which require some from of custom cooling solution as GPUs are not rated to run packed together so closely).
 
mkrohn said:
never pay attention to things like this, you will find most 7870's will stay under 400k and many 7970/280xs won't do 700 no matter what you do. I have some 280x's though that go right to 750 without touching a thing and some are quite a bit of work to get over 600

Always budget for the low side and not these very optimistic numbers.

If you aren't into mining don't do it, these rigs are WORK and unless you get very lucky there is quite a bit of troubleshooting time involved in every rig
Click to expand...

funny, cause if you take the time a 7870 CAN do over 400, I have mine does 415 at intensity 19, with lower clocks it will do just under 400 FYI my clocks are 981 core 1535 memory at 1.115 voltage 66% fan temps 48c or below my "standard" gaming stable clocks are 981 1455 1.2 core voltage and this gets 392-398 which the vast majority of 7870 will do without much an issue.

7970 can do 700+ without much an issue if you take the time to find the settings as in proper thread concurrency, vectors etc. I myself was getting only 365 on my 7870 till I really took the time to find the sweet spot for all the settings AND running and older version of CGminer, this brought me up another ~40KH/s which may not be a huge amount but it certainly makes a difference.

Each card is different though there are static settings that work for a given card, the biggest thing is finding the right core/memory clocks, next up is vectors 2 and so forth.

It can be done, so no I do not at all agree with the never pay attention to this part, if you take the time then as stated 7870 can do 400+, 7950 640+ 7970/280x 700+ and so forth.

definitely a use older version of both Cat drivers and CGminer as this does help the KH/s.

Anyways, it is always a +/- thing was just giving an average always is in if you take the time to get the most out of it.

There is not ASIC at this point to do scrypt mining or that would be the way to go, SHA mining i.e BTC-ZET etc via gpu is not worth it and asic wise unless you have thousands of $ to throw at it for an asic farm(which is worth it if you throw enough $ at it) I wouldn't worry about it.

Scrypt is where its at, 7950 seems to get the best performance per $ spent as well as performance per watt for scrypt at this point, a custom cooled 290 would edge it out as performance per watt, but will not performance per $ spent.
 
Thank you for the suggestions!

It took a little while to coordinate everything and to find a deal we considered acceptable on the hardware (plus an always-fun trip to MicroCenter) so here is what we ended up with:

Intel Core i5-4570S
MSI Z87-G41
2 x XFX 7970 GHz Edition 3GB

The hardware seems to run great. The cards stayed nice and cool when I was stress testing them with FurMark and the CPU, while being overkill for this kind of mining, as I understand it, should let us double the machine as a file server for some documents while it does its thing. If it's going to be on 24/7 anyway...

We opted for GUIMiner v0.04 since neither of us wanted to be messing around in the command prompt all the time. We got an account set up with a pool, downloaded/installed the Litecoin Wallet software, and ran some quick calculations to see how much the electric bill is going to go up (not as bad as we thought really).

I followed the instructions in this guide: http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/03/12/absolute-beginners-guide-to-litecoin-mining/ and the software doesn't seem to do anything. I get a nebulous message that it is "Starting" in the lower-right corner of the GUIMiner window and if I hover over the icon it says "Connecting..." The CPU is at idle and neither GPU is being utilized. It has been sitting at this point for over an hour.

How long does connecting usually take? Should I just let it sit like this for a while longer or is it never going to connect successfully? On a semi-related note, is there much of a difference between mining pools? We opted for WeMineLTC because of a recommendation from another guide, but perhaps another pool works better?
 
bwang said:
I'm going to disagree here. My dual 7850 Windforce rig gets 700KH/s out of the box; the dual-GPU rigs are much, much easier to build and maintain than the quads (which require some from of custom cooling solution as GPUs are not rated to run packed together so closely).
Click to expand...

I have to disagree with this. my 6 gpu setup was plug and play. My quads were actually more of a pita, but didn't need that much attention.
 
by my estimates -- sounds like you spent around 1100-1300 dollars. At current difficulty and prices you are looking at a 2 to 3 month window to recoup that cost, not factoring in electricity.

Another way to look at it -- as you progress to the "break even" status, you get closer to a "free" top of the line gaming setup (7970's in crossfire are still potent to run just about anything)

I have some of my 7970's that will do 770khash, and another set that's stuck at 600khash, go figure (this is after bios tweaking and everything)

Depending on your finances you have two good options: mine the most profitable "big" coin, I would suggest DOGE, and sell every 24 to 48 hours if you are looking for immediate return on your hardware expenses. You could just hold whatever you mine - but that's a factor of how much you want to gamble and the time value of money :)
 
MrCaffeineX said:
Thank you for the suggestions!

It took a little while to coordinate everything and to find a deal we considered acceptable on the hardware (plus an always-fun trip to MicroCenter) so here is what we ended up with:

Intel Core i5-4570S
MSI Z87-G41
2 x XFX 7970 GHz Edition 3GB

The hardware seems to run great. The cards stayed nice and cool when I was stress testing them with FurMark and the CPU, while being overkill for this kind of mining, as I understand it, should let us double the machine as a file server for some documents while it does its thing. If it's going to be on 24/7 anyway...

We opted for GUIMiner v0.04 since neither of us wanted to be messing around in the command prompt all the time. We got an account set up with a pool, downloaded/installed the Litecoin Wallet software, and ran some quick calculations to see how much the electric bill is going to go up (not as bad as we thought really).

I followed the instructions in this guide: http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/03/12/absolute-beginners-guide-to-litecoin-mining/ and the software doesn't seem to do anything. I get a nebulous message that it is "Starting" in the lower-right corner of the GUIMiner window and if I hover over the icon it says "Connecting..." The CPU is at idle and neither GPU is being utilized. It has been sitting at this point for over an hour.

How long does connecting usually take? Should I just let it sit like this for a while longer or is it never going to connect successfully? On a semi-related note, is there much of a difference between mining pools? We opted for WeMineLTC because of a recommendation from another guide, but perhaps another pool works better?
Click to expand...

That rigs crap for mining. If you planned on doing only 2 GPU's. I've bought some motherboard/CPU/RAM combos for $50 or less that were pulling over 700K each on my pair of 280x's. You spent a retarded amount of money and parts that are overkill. If you were building a desktop you did it right but for mining you could have easily had an extra GPU with the same budget.

Do yourself a favor and just ditch guiminer and create a .bat file for you miner.
 
That rigs crap for mining.
Click to expand...

The way I figured it, if the mining never pans out, at least this is a nice gaming desktop. Yes, I could have gotten a cheaper CPU (I recycled the RAM from a dead box, so no real investment there and the motherboard was $40 after the Microcenter discounts/MIR), but if I'm going to have it running 24/7, I theoretically should be able to do more than just mining since the CPU will spend most of its time idle anyway.

The bigger problem is actually getting the mining going now. It doesn't have to be with GUIMiner, but it would be nice to have it actually working instead of sitting disconnected from the pool.
 
Its very easy to create .bat files for CGMiner and you can use the -failover tag so if your primary pool goes dead, it automatically picks up a second pool. I have several rigs that haven't stopped mining for weeks at a time. The only time I reboot them is if there is an update or a problem with a card/config.
 
cgwatcher is damn amazing -- CGremote is the software I've been looking for -- but I really don't feel like donating 15 dollars for beta software when all I have to monitor is 3 machines on my home network. especially considering I already have a good remote control link with VNC.
 
collegeboy69us said:
cgwatcher is damn amazing -- CGremote is the software I've been looking for -- but I really don't feel like donating 15 dollars for beta software when all I have to monitor is 3 machines on my home network. especially considering I already have a good remote control link with VNC.
Click to expand...

I have cgremote but I'm also at 9 rigs though. You can enable the API and have a basic status monitor really easily: http://thomassileo.com/blog/2013/09/17/playing-with-python-and-cgminer-rpc-api/

I plan on building a C# and GUI based display for basic stats but I just haven't had a chance to yet. It's going to be my choice for end of semester coding project. I'm going C# and maybe eventually have it as a snap tool. Mainly it'll be something I find useful instead of some boring, used up trash project
 
I had trouble getting CGMiner to work, but then I thought of just using the CGMiner that was in the GUIMiner directory, and it works!

Now I have to figure out how to optimize the settings for these particular cards.
 
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