13 GPUs in ONE PC? – Mining Adventure Part 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
2,083 words · ~10 min read
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okay based on the response to part one of this series we could have done a lot
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better with our first GPU mining computer but
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believe it or not we knew that theoretically 1080 tis are the most
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profitable but we have to ignore cost to buy and so today is all about rectifying
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our stupidity that is in part two of this series which is now
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we're gonna show you guys how you can mine cryptocurrency at home
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properly and we're gonna build what we call the ultimate
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13 GPU price to performance mining rig
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kind of started out with that unknown survey and then it went away
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at the link below
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part selection might not be thrilling but it's the single most crucial part of
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building a mining rig now we touched on this a little bit in our last video but
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one of the key factors in a well-designed miner is what's called the
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roi time that is how long it will take the hardware to pay for itself and start
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generating a profit now our first machine would have taken uh
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what five years five five years but a well-designed miner should take
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closer to four to six months
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now let's introduce the big star of this video the motherboard
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most people will just jump on whatever is the cheapest five to seven slot board
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available at the time but ASUS b250
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mining expert if you can find it in stock lets us
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spend a little bit more on the board and the reason that we can afford this is
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that we can save on system components that don't affect mining speed like cpus
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RAM and ssds because even if we don't
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fill it up with the p106 or p104 mining
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cards that are apparently required for it to reach its full
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19 GPU potential 13 graphics cards is still about twice
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as many as a normal board now for our CPU choice
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this is going to be a little different from normal Linus tech tips we're
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looking for cheap cheap cheap so coffee lake is out of the
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question what Jake's installing here is a last gen kaby lake where we'll find
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some better options like the Intel celeron g3930 which for around 35 bucks us
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with the heatsink included is basically
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uh steel now as for RAM
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right now similar to the CPU basically we'd
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recommend whatever is the cheapest compatible memory that you can find from
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a reputable brand at the time of filming this ended up being some bare bones 2400
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megahertz ddr4 from crucial for just under 50 bucks okay now we're getting
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into the tough stuff it's no longer as simple as just
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buy the cheapest one you can find picking the absolute
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best GPU for mining would pretty much require a crystal ball
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but that doesn't mean we can't make some educated guesses
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so for users who are more limited by space making the most of every PCIe slot
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by filling their rigs with 1080 tis for
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maximum raw power might make sense
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but based on the numbers today the roi time
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for that approach compared to our choice is much longer so right now
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one of the best AMD cards and reliability is a factor here too is the
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rx 570 4 gig after flashing a mining friendly BIOS
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and yes we know vega is insane at monero mining but it
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has some other issues so the water cooled vega 64 in our mining test server
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would regularly switch hbcc off for no
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apparent reason cutting the hash rate of the card to about the same as a
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biosplashed rx 580 so it's not worth it
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to us for the extra cost and hassle at
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this time even if we could find any of them in stock now on the NVIDIA side of
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things gtx 1060s and 1070s yield similar
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roi time to each other but most miners these days are opting
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for the 1060 due to its lower upfront costs and better relative resale value
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now they have their issues um NVIDIA cards
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with sub-optimal RAM yes graphics cards can use memory from
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different manufacturers and you cannot predict what you'll get in the box
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drop a lot more performance than AMD cards with bad ramdu but one nice thing
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about NVIDIA cards is that they don't need a BIOS flash in order to hash at
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their peak so then we ended up with a balanced
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approach here eight rx five seventies one of them is a
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four set which is a total lie because actually
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one of them is a 470. three of them are actually 580s check out these 580s from
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that ASUS sent over these things are ridiculous uh thanks bros and then we've
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got two of what are some pretty special
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passively cooled p104 mining cards that
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are the equivalent to a gaming gtx 1070
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let's talk about mining cards basically a mining card is a less expensive
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version of its gaming cousin that comes
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with beefier power delivery and in some cases claims of better
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efficiency which believe it or not we were able to observe with these sample
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cards from manly so all of that is good stuff
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the problem though is that they have much shorter warranties
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and they have no display outputs which
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can potentially have a negative impact on their resale value if that's part of
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your model for making back your money okay so it's assembly time um
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these uh these mining cards actually just go in with um
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with zip ties here because they don't have pci brackets so
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it's just a little you know something like that but that is far from our
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biggest potential problem now actually yeah thank you you guys might have
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noticed before that the b250 mining expert has pci express 1x slots all over
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the place definitely way too small to fit a
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full-sized graphics card so what gives then
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well it's designed around the use of risers so these five to ten dollar kits
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come with they come with a 16x slot on a
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little pcb they come with a power adapter
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and they come with a usb cable
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that plugs into see that another little pcb that goes right into check this out
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goes right into our 1x slot a little something like that
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now there are a ton of models of these things on the market but the go to
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currently is the ver 0 6 or version 6c
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and this was recommended to us by longtime cryptocurrency expert marshall
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long that's ogbtc on twitter
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now one tip when powering these guys is to use as few adapters as possible when
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plugging them in so ours are run off SATA
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so we're going to be using two of these adapters per SATA harness coming out of
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our power supply on the subject of power this is one of the biggest concerns for
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any miner and choosing the right power supplies yes plural potentially for your
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system can be tricky now for small scale miners changes in
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efficiency like going from an 80 plus gold power supply to an 80 plus titanium
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model probably won't significantly impact your
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roi time so most folks go for a relatively inexpensive 800 to 1200 watt
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unit from a trusted brand leaving some headroom for more cards if they plan on
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expanding now one of the best options for a rig
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like ours would actually be an adapted
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server power supply that runs 200 volts
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or more from a company like parallel miner
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but using one of these relies on having 200
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volt power which isn't common in north america and relies on finding anything
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in stock which was an issue so we opted instead for three
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850-ish watt units on most boards you
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would actually need a jumper like this one to run multiple power supplies but
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it's pretty cool ASUS actually thought of that and the b250 mining expert has
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three atx connectors next order of business then is finding a place to put
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all this stuff so jakku over here being the diy type he's actually whipped up a
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couple of different styles of frames to show you guys and we're going to include
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the dimensions in the video description if you're interested this first one was
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made out of recycled two-by-fours that he found at work
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and some drywall screws that he found at work
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on the floor so it has the advantage of being really really cheap
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but it should be noted that we do not recommend having wood
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anywhere near a hot mining machine and
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we think the additional cost of this metal frame made from one by one angled
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aluminum from the local hardware store is worth the better space efficiency and
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the lower weight though again you would want to improvise a non-wooden support
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system for your graphics cards for the 13 GPU rig though
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rather than building a gigantic chassis we opted to demo another popular
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mounting strategy which is building your miner right into a shelving unit
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now this isn't great if you have to move it
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around but it is pretty darn cost effective because even if you are using
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racks you're going to want shelves to put them on anyhow
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okay so everything's together we've booted up Windows we've flashed a few of
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our gpus with some customized BIOS's and
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we have some mining software ready to go so we're currently using a management
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utility called awesomeminer and without going into too much detail that's
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probably a subject for another video it basically allows you to control up to
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5000 machines in a single instance and
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it can auto profit switch notify you if your rigs are having
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issues help organize your miners into groups and a lot more so with it all set
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up we're mining monero with the cast xmr miner on the AMD gpus and then z cash
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with the dstn miner on the two NVIDIA cards and without much tuning the AMD
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cards are running an average of 7.3 kilo hashes per second in kryptonite and the
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NVIDIA cards are at around one kilo hash per second in equihash
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this all equates to a current average of
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about 900 us dollars per month in revenue before we pay for power so
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at about 10 us cents per kilowatt hour this config
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with current profitability is sitting pretty at about a five month roi time
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that's about eight percent of our original rig's estimated roi time which
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is pretty damn good so guys stay tuned then for part three
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of mining adventure where we look at the pros and cons of asic miners because
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gpus are not the only way to tackle this
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