My Crypto Mining Rig

Oh man…I remember it like it was yesterday…back in 2014, I read up on Bitcoins. I didn’t think too much of it at the time but remember thinking of buying or mining a few with my gaming PC.

IF ONLY I DID 😦

So, last year my Dad and I started chatting about it when things started to really heat up in the Crypto world. Ethereum were going for around $200 at the time…We started making plans and worked out finances, as the graphics cards to mine these ain’t cheap. Together we managed around R30K…I took to the interwebs to try and find some cheapish cards but proved to be useless.  Everyone sold out, back orders everywhere…even my suppliers from work (Pinnacle Africa and few others) couldn’t help.

Finally, I found an online supplier, Wootware and was able to secure 3 x cards.

XFX Radeon RX 580 8GB GTR-S Black Edition – whoooohooooo !!! Thx Wootware 🙂

Then came the next problem. Finding a PSU big enough to handle the load. Even these seemed to be out of stock everywhere, but luckily, again Wootware was able to help (waiting another week).

In the meantime, I started building my frame. Luckily there’s a lot of info online and was able to make one easily. I used some square aluminum tubing I had lying in the garage, along with some connector blocks.

A week later we got our parts and started building our first rig. I simply love building PC’s… Opening the boxes makes me feel like a little kid on Christmas. There’s also that smell the first time you power up a newly built PC…MMmmm

The building was easy, like putting a puzzle together. The only trick is getting all the power connectors in place and making it look neat.

I decided to go the Windows 10 route (at first) simply cause I know Windows better. The next tricky bit is to get the correct drivers installed for the AMD cards and getting all the necessary monitors and mining software to work.

Windows Installation done…time to build it into the frame…

Oh man, its beautiful !!! 🙂 🙂

Once everything was installed…I fired up Claymore Ethereum miner and was getting around 22Mhs per card…not too impressive and knew I’d be able to get much better results.

I found a site (anorak.tech) with loads of info and firmwares for the cards. After a bit of digging, I managed to flash my cards and got to 30Mhz, using even less power. I now had a total of 90 Mhs 🙂

After a few months of mining, we could afford a couple more cards and managed to score some more from Wootware. This time Powercolor RX570 4gb – They cost less, uses less electricity and with a bit of flashing I managed to get 28Mhs per card.

So, I now have my first rig with a total hash rate of  146-147 Mhs.

I ran into some issues with Windows after a while and thought I’d give Linux a try. I got EthOS and WOW !! What a difference…with Windows my rig consumed around 1100watts,  but with Linux I was able to bring that down to around 980watts. The nice thing about Linux is that it takes a lot less configuring, and works out of the box…no special drivers needed and the machine overall were just more stable.

That’s it !!! I learned a lot from this DIY…I just wished I started earlier 🙂

At the time of writing this, Ethereum is worth around $1100 and my mining profitability is sitting around $500 to $600 minus my electricity bill, but that’s a post for another time.

🙂