How To Make An Ethereum Mining Rig



Cryptocurrency has been — and continues to be — a wild ride.

I’g old enough to remember being given a couple of bitcoins when they were worth adjacent to zero. Needless to say, I don’t have them anymore. Now, with bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices skyrocketing again, there’s renewed interest in cryptomining, which is a style to accrue cryptocurrency without having to pay for information technology.

ZDNET
Recommends

Allow’s take a wait at what makes a good cryptomining rig, and what hardware information technology takes if you desire to be serious about mining.

In the most basic terms, you are using a calculator (or computers) to solve cryptographic equations and tape that data to a blockchain. Taking this a bit deeper, miners verify the hashes of unconfirmed blocks and receive a advantage for every hash that is verified. The process is computationally intensive, requiring state-of-the-art hardware if you are planning on making much headway with mining. Mining, equally it was back in the days of the gold rush, is not for the faint of heart.

And as with all loftier-end systems, information technology’southward less a example of how much do you want to spend, and more a example of how fast practice y’all want to spend. Then, what hardware do you need to mine cryptocurrency?

OK, the “rig” is essentially a customized PC. It has all the common elements of a PC: CPU, motherboard, RAM, and storage. Where things deviate from the norm is when it comes to the graphics cards. It’s the GPU that’s doing that difficult piece of work when it comes to mining cryptocurrency, and not the CPU. You’re going to need quite a powerful GPU for mining, and probable yous are going to be buying more than than one. A lot more.

In fact, y’all tin can think of a mining rig as a relatively cheap PC with one or more than high-performance GPUs attached. You need to connect multiple graphics cards to a single system, which means you lot also need a motherboard to handle that. You’ll also be looking at more than one power supply unit (PSU) if y’all’re planning to button things to the extremes.

There are also another mining-specific items you’ll need to make the mining rig ready for mining.

Mining rig considerations

Here are a few considerations to bear in mind when building a mining rig:

  • It’s not going to be cheap!
  • You lot need to factor power consumption in your mining equation because that can swallow into your earnings.
  • You’re not edifice a regular PC, and getting everything to piece of work can become a game of trial and error and a lot of fiddling with drivers. Be patient!

Why are graphics cards prices so astronomical?

Prices are beingness driven high by two factors:

  • Supply chain issues causing backlogs
  • In order to prevent loftier demand from miners causing even more issues, most cards now feature LHR (Lite Hash Rate) to limit mining speeds, making them less desirable for cryptomining. The card listed below is not express, so the cost making it perfect for mining.

OK, let’s start with the motherboard. The Asus B250 Mining Expert is a beast of a motherboard, capable of having xix graphics cards connected to information technology. That’s a lot. The board isn’t new — it was released in 2017 — and it is finicky when it comes to setting up (information technology needs a specific layout of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards),

Asus has published recommend GPU layouts for nineteen-, 13-, and 11-card for this board, and while other layouts might work, I recommend staying with what the manufacturer suggests, as veering away from this is a recipe for a serious — non to mention expensive — headaches.

Yes, prices are soaring for this motherboard, merely that’s part and packet of bitcoin mining. If you lot desire something priced a little more reasonably, then you could take a look at the Monland B250C BTC Mining Motherboard. A lot less powerful, but a fraction of the toll.

Note: Asus recommends running Windows 10 with this motherboard.

View now at Newegg


There’south no real point in overspending on a CPU for a mining rig since it’s the GPU’south that are doing the hard work. This quad-core Core i5 is perfect for this setup and works not bad with the motherboard chosen above.

View now at Walmart


Depending on how many graphics cards you have installed, yous may need multiple PSUs. It’s tempting to find the cheapest possible, but since they are going to be pushed hard, I recommend paying a trivial more.

These Segotep PSUs are middle-of-the-road skillful value, yet they offering reliable performance. The modular nature also ways that you’re not turning the mining rig into a spaghetti of wires.

View at present at Amazon

View now at Newegg


Even if you’ve built a PC in the past, I bet you lot’ve not had to fit in PCI-E risers. This is where a bitcoin mining rig differs from a regular PC in that yous tin’t have all the graphics cards directly attached to the motherboard, so these risers allow you lot to connect them indirectly.

Yous’re going to need one of these for every card you connect (other than the carte that goes into the x16 PCI-e slot). This six-pack of powered risers are great and provide stable power to your graphics cards.

I do not recommend using not-powered risers. I’ve had zip but problems with stability using them in the past in cryptomining rigs, and so don’t brand the aforementioned mistake I made!

View now at Amazon

View at present at Newegg


This is a not bad card and everything you’re looking for in a mining rig. Loads of potential for overclocking, stable, and great cooling. Another nice side benefit is that it’s quite an efficient menu, which ways lower ability consumption and reduced mining costs.

And, unlike a lot of graphics cards nowadays, this does not feature LHR (Lite Hash Rate) to limit mining speeds.

  • 24GB 384-Fleck GDDR6X
  • Boost Clock 1725 MHz
  • 1 x HDMI two.1 3 x DisplayPort ane.4a
  • 10496 CUDA Cores
  • PCI Express iv.0

View now at Newegg

View now at Walmart


20210318-adrian-beth-crypto.jpg


Editorial standards


Related

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-build-a-cryptomining-rig/

Check Also

Will Dogecoin Go Up In Value

Will Dogecoin Go Up In Value

On Dec. 6, 2013, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer decided to combine their dearest of …