okay based on the response to part one of this series we could have done a lot
better with our first GPU mining computer but
believe it or not we knew that theoretically 1080 tis are the most
profitable but we have to ignore cost to buy and so today is all about rectifying
our stupidity that is in part two of this series which is now
we're gonna show you guys how you can mine cryptocurrency at home
properly and we're gonna build what we call the ultimate
13 GPU price to performance mining rig
kind of started out with that unknown survey and then it went away
and we're gonna do that after we tell you about today's sponsor mack weldon
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part selection might not be thrilling but it's the single most crucial part of
building a mining rig now we touched on this a little bit in our last video but
one of the key factors in a well-designed miner is what's called the
roi time that is how long it will take the hardware to pay for itself and start
generating a profit now our first machine would have taken uh
what five years five five years but a well-designed miner should take
closer to four to six months
now let's introduce the big star of this video the motherboard
most people will just jump on whatever is the cheapest five to seven slot board
available at the time but ASUS b250
mining expert if you can find it in stock lets us
spend a little bit more on the board and the reason that we can afford this is
that we can save on system components that don't affect mining speed like cpus
RAM and ssds because even if we don't
fill it up with the p106 or p104 mining
cards that are apparently required for it to reach its full
19 GPU potential 13 graphics cards is still about twice
as many as a normal board now for our CPU choice
this is going to be a little different from normal Linus tech tips we're
looking for cheap cheap cheap so coffee lake is out of the
question what Jake's installing here is a last gen kaby lake where we'll find
some better options like the Intel celeron g3930 which for around 35 bucks us
with the heatsink included is basically
uh steel now as for RAM
right now similar to the CPU basically we'd
recommend whatever is the cheapest compatible memory that you can find from
a reputable brand at the time of filming this ended up being some bare bones 2400
megahertz ddr4 from crucial for just under 50 bucks okay now we're getting
into the tough stuff it's no longer as simple as just
buy the cheapest one you can find picking the absolute
best GPU for mining would pretty much require a crystal ball
but that doesn't mean we can't make some educated guesses
so for users who are more limited by space making the most of every PCIe slot
by filling their rigs with 1080 tis for
maximum raw power might make sense
but based on the numbers today the roi time
for that approach compared to our choice is much longer so right now
one of the best AMD cards and reliability is a factor here too is the
rx 570 4 gig after flashing a mining friendly BIOS
and yes we know vega is insane at monero mining but it
has some other issues so the water cooled vega 64 in our mining test server
would regularly switch hbcc off for no
apparent reason cutting the hash rate of the card to about the same as a
biosplashed rx 580 so it's not worth it
to us for the extra cost and hassle at
this time even if we could find any of them in stock now on the NVIDIA side of
things gtx 1060s and 1070s yield similar
roi time to each other but most miners these days are opting
for the 1060 due to its lower upfront costs and better relative resale value
now they have their issues um NVIDIA cards
with sub-optimal RAM yes graphics cards can use memory from
different manufacturers and you cannot predict what you'll get in the box
drop a lot more performance than AMD cards with bad ramdu but one nice thing
about NVIDIA cards is that they don't need a BIOS flash in order to hash at
their peak so then we ended up with a balanced
approach here eight rx five seventies one of them is a
four set which is a total lie because actually
one of them is a 470. three of them are actually 580s check out these 580s from
that ASUS sent over these things are ridiculous uh thanks bros and then we've
got two of what are some pretty special
passively cooled p104 mining cards that
are the equivalent to a gaming gtx 1070
let's talk about mining cards basically a mining card is a less expensive
version of its gaming cousin that comes
with beefier power delivery and in some cases claims of better
efficiency which believe it or not we were able to observe with these sample
cards from manly so all of that is good stuff
the problem though is that they have much shorter warranties
and they have no display outputs which
can potentially have a negative impact on their resale value if that's part of
your model for making back your money okay so it's assembly time um
these uh these mining cards actually just go in with um
with zip ties here because they don't have pci brackets so
it's just a little you know something like that but that is far from our
biggest potential problem now actually yeah thank you you guys might have
noticed before that the b250 mining expert has pci express 1x slots all over
the place definitely way too small to fit a
full-sized graphics card so what gives then
well it's designed around the use of risers so these five to ten dollar kits
come with they come with a 16x slot on a
little pcb they come with a power adapter
and they come with a usb cable
that plugs into see that another little pcb that goes right into check this out
goes right into our 1x slot a little something like that
now there are a ton of models of these things on the market but the go to
currently is the ver 0 6 or version 6c
and this was recommended to us by longtime cryptocurrency expert marshall
long that's ogbtc on twitter
now one tip when powering these guys is to use as few adapters as possible when
plugging them in so ours are run off SATA
so we're going to be using two of these adapters per SATA harness coming out of
our power supply on the subject of power this is one of the biggest concerns for
any miner and choosing the right power supplies yes plural potentially for your
system can be tricky now for small scale miners changes in
efficiency like going from an 80 plus gold power supply to an 80 plus titanium
model probably won't significantly impact your
roi time so most folks go for a relatively inexpensive 800 to 1200 watt
unit from a trusted brand leaving some headroom for more cards if they plan on
expanding now one of the best options for a rig
like ours would actually be an adapted
server power supply that runs 200 volts
or more from a company like parallel miner
but using one of these relies on having 200
volt power which isn't common in north america and relies on finding anything
in stock which was an issue so we opted instead for three
850-ish watt units on most boards you
would actually need a jumper like this one to run multiple power supplies but
it's pretty cool ASUS actually thought of that and the b250 mining expert has
three atx connectors next order of business then is finding a place to put
all this stuff so jakku over here being the diy type he's actually whipped up a
couple of different styles of frames to show you guys and we're going to include
the dimensions in the video description if you're interested this first one was
made out of recycled two-by-fours that he found at work
and some drywall screws that he found at work
on the floor so it has the advantage of being really really cheap
but it should be noted that we do not recommend having wood
anywhere near a hot mining machine and
we think the additional cost of this metal frame made from one by one angled
aluminum from the local hardware store is worth the better space efficiency and
the lower weight though again you would want to improvise a non-wooden support
system for your graphics cards for the 13 GPU rig though
rather than building a gigantic chassis we opted to demo another popular
mounting strategy which is building your miner right into a shelving unit
now this isn't great if you have to move it
around but it is pretty darn cost effective because even if you are using
racks you're going to want shelves to put them on anyhow
okay so everything's together we've booted up Windows we've flashed a few of
our gpus with some customized BIOS's and
we have some mining software ready to go so we're currently using a management
utility called awesomeminer and without going into too much detail that's
probably a subject for another video it basically allows you to control up to
5000 machines in a single instance and
it can auto profit switch notify you if your rigs are having
issues help organize your miners into groups and a lot more so with it all set
up we're mining monero with the cast xmr miner on the AMD gpus and then z cash
with the dstn miner on the two NVIDIA cards and without much tuning the AMD
cards are running an average of 7.3 kilo hashes per second in kryptonite and the
NVIDIA cards are at around one kilo hash per second in equihash
this all equates to a current average of
about 900 us dollars per month in revenue before we pay for power so
at about 10 us cents per kilowatt hour this config
with current profitability is sitting pretty at about a five month roi time
that's about eight percent of our original rig's estimated roi time which
is pretty damn good so guys stay tuned then for part three
of mining adventure where we look at the pros and cons of asic miners because
gpus are not the only way to tackle this
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