for months now graphics card supply has been completely tapped out thanks to
every gamer's worst enemy miners
and no not young people who screech into the microphone but they're awful too i'm
talking about the kind of miners who are using hardware both pc components and
more specialized equipment to calculate what are called
hashes for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin
in exchange for a reward effectively
mining for money but how do you get in
on the action can you just fire up your old pc and start making
money let's investigate
mass drop is now featuring their custom configured akg k7xx audiophile
headphones check them and other drops out at the link in the video description
let's get this out of the way first uh to make a gold rush analogy the days of
walking onto a random plot of land you know sticking your pickaxe
scissors or whatever into the nearest mountainside and sailing home in a
golden ship are basically over but just because
mining the most popular cryptocurrency bitcoin is no longer practical for the
average person with uh an extra graphics card or two
that doesn't mean that you can't mine for something so as always around here
we started our adventure with some overkill hardware bringing our 10 GPU
server out of the motherballs uh from eight gamers one CPU theoretically 1080
ti's are the most profitable but we have to ignore cost to buy what do you mean
ignore costs to buy what do you think i'm like made of graphics cards can we
use these so then what we ended up with is
five gtx 1070s uh four gtx 1080s and then a single 1080
ti it's not going to be like the highest earning rig but we can use this to run
some important benchmarks and determine whether our plan will be profitable i
guess we got to take it upstairs um one trip yeah sure
i was about to say the same thing oh gosh
come on it's just like complete disregard it's fine who cares
it's like a five thousand dollar shirt oh i care it's just it's fine like we're
just not gonna drop it so it doesn't matter right you got it because you never drop anything okay here
okay technically not the way it's meant to be rolled i don't think but yolo
can you lift it any higher so i got my ankles okay thank you
oh don't shift down like that
you know i think we actually could have fit 11 in here if we use the um the katana i think it
throttles a little bit i think mining on the katana would be a terrible terrible
idea i'm just saying i think we could have while i do this Jake's gonna work
on installing the whopping two sticks of memory out of the 24 slots on our board
here um cryptocurrency mining doesn't
really benefit from a ton of RAM with that said though it may benefit from a
large virtual memory space on your storage drive and then he's also going
to throw in two of our 22 core xeon processors
wait i guess i know that's really stupid
they're just the only two cpus that we had lying around that were compatible
with this board and we actually have to populate both of the sockets for this because
otherwise we won't have enough pci express lanes for all of these freaking
gpus are you struggling yeah a little bit
i don't have enough do you have any more
did this take us less than four hours aha [ __ ] you brandon i was right well
it's because he's here not because i had no confidence in you doing this by
yourself from that time ouch
holy [ __ ] god you're going to drive up all of our
insurance premiums when he has to go to the emergency and get that burn sorted
out and there we have it we are now ready to
boot up our system so actually almost um
cooling is sort of a concern in a system like this so we're gonna go ahead and
throw our fans back in here and then Jake are
you ready with that shroud just gotta get this gaff tape unstuck wouldn't want
to be wasteful you know just are you really reusing tape yeah this tape is
still sticky how cheap do you think i am is this an evon initiative i mean this
chassis clearly isn't designed to have graphics cards um yeah i don't know how
we're gonna fit this in here i think you kind of have to just
cram the tip in between two of them
okay it's like it was made to fit yeah see look at that i like that i got
my reused tape yeah look it's still sticky i told you gaff
tape is amazing you didn't tell me that i did you've never told me that okay
well gap tape is amazing uh so now we just need some power okay
i need four right oh right yeah
dory i planned for this we could have easily done this experiment with just a normal
motherboard and 4g yeah but that would have been so lame
it's like power me please look i'm working on it okay
please give me power i'm failing
come on okay we're in we're in all good ah
yes slightly less annoying
uh where are all the 632 screws from uh right here i have a thing where do they
come from where do they go where do they come from
that was terminally unimpressive okay there we go that's where i like it
that's how you know it's working okay so while we're waiting to fire up
Windows and install the NVIDIA driver which by the way takes a long ass time
on a system with 10 gpus uh let's have a look at power consumption uh we're
looking at 400 watts right now 400 watts
had idle at idle so basically no matter what kind of
hardware you're using mining is going to add a lot to your electrical bill so
it's this real cost that's associated with it that prevents casuals from just
using old hardware to mine these days it is all about efficiency so our pascal
based cards consume a similar amount of power compared to previous generations
but they run the algorithms needed for mining much more quickly than previous
generations and the more calculations that you can perform per watt of power
consumed the more profitable you'll be
the other key is to mine smarter almost
no one is mining for bitcoin directly these days because over time the
difficulty of generating a reward by mining goes up
a lot so people are opting instead to mine for
an altcoin like litecoin ethereum zcash
or even dogecoin yes for the uninitiated
that was and is a real thing
okay without scratching the table oh my god that got a lot heavier
i'm so happy i'm not carrying that side that's fine i'll be on the bottom this
time oh wait i'm going backwards again what the hell no you go backwards
also i just locked this door wait and my elbow needs to
unlock it there we go yeah oh man this thing's heavy
wait why are we standing like this this is not a good strategy yeah um
can you slide that way and i'll slide this way yeah
i got it hey if we drop it it's not that big of a deal so hold on hold on don't push holding
now sort of counter-intuitive
uh other side is in it it is yeah
really are you serious yeah holy [ __ ] that was
painless so um now that it's installed the plan
is to use a marketplace called nicehash
that pairs buyers who want to rent
hashing power with sellers who have hashing power like us
so what's cool about that is that after you run the included benchmark which can
actually take a few hours with this much gear and had trouble with the 88 threads
worth of CPU that we're rocking in this version of the software anyway it
determines which algorithm is most profitable for
which piece of your hardware at any given moment and runs that giving you a
real-time readout of how much you're earning before electricity costs and
then paying you out daily as long as your balance is at least .001
of a bitcoin that is after taking their cut
it's booting right i think so
okay so over the weekend Jake i didn't
really help spent a bunch of time babying this thing through crashes and
blue screens and we have finally
got it mining stably tm we initially thought that the issues
might be related to thermals because let's face it uh the cards are really
close together by the way your ducting seems to be falling off if you want to
go have a look at that um get this ladder in here but with
afterburner up on screen it's actually pretty clear that our climate controlled
server room has that under control we're hitting 82 degrees top some of them are
a lot lower like 70 even that actually
that reminds me we haven't factored the cost of air conditioning into our
profitability equation but that's something that we can really look into during part two of our investigation so
getting back to this machine you might have noticed that there are
actually only eight gpus in the system now see that we pulled out the middle
too that's actually due to an NVIDIA driver limitation that specifies a
maximum of eight gpus per operating
system so shout out to gary over at ASUS for that tip so that means our final
power usage is a cool 2000 watts no
biggie then for our remember four power supplies
let's talk about the return on our investment to buy
that configuration would run you nearly 18 000 us dollars at an average of 11 a
day in profit again not accounting for air conditioning it would take around
four and a half years to recoup that and that is assuming stability in the
cryptocurrency market stability what stability in the cryptocurrency market
right what a joke so obviously this would be a really stupid
mining setup to go out and buy however if you were a little more um how you say
not a complete idiot about your part selection assuming that your power costs are
similar to ours at around 10 u.s cents per kilowatt you could actually get your
upfront investment back a lot sooner so we're going to investigate a more
optimized config in a follow-up video but this config for about five thousand
dollars that you're looking at right now is kind of what we're planning let us know if you have any suggestions in the
comments first let's get back to the original question does what we're doing
make any sense well if you have a bunch of spare
modern hardware lying around collecting dust
actually yes so we're planning to leave that
system running until phase two when we'll report on our results and then
compare it to our second system but if you have to go out and actually buy
hardware to do it your return is likely going to take so long that you'd be
better off doing what many people are doing and trying to buy and sell
cryptocurrencies more directly as they rise and fall though
there are certainly risks associated with that as well
so why did everyone run out and buy all the video cards and high wattage power
supplies driving up prices for gamers
well while the profit isn't anything earth shattering many miners actually resell
their hardware when it's no longer profitable recovering much of the
upfront cost and then keeping all the money that was made while the systems
were in service so let us know in the comments what you
guys want to see in future follow-ups here because we have hardly begun to
explore this rabbit hole we're planning a future build with 19 gpus in one
system so that's going to be a thing and we'd love to talk about asics as well
those are pretty interesting but we definitely want feedback from you guys
and we want to tell you about our sponsor today crunchyroll
is the site created by anime fans for anime fans offering the most current
episodes of new shows straight from japan like knights and magic and my hero
academia season 2. all the content on the site is professionally subtitled and
our link down below gives you a whole month of free anime completely ad free
coming out in october is food war season 3 and black clover then if you enjoy the
many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows
straight from japan within an hour of their premiere and being able to stream
anywhere anytime from a variety of devices like your phone tablet or game
console you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for just 6.95
a month so head over to crunchyroll.com Linus right down there and sign up today
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
and video cards sure but maybe not the server also links down there is our
merch storage has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which
you should totally join