Build Your Own Crypto Currency (i.e. LiteCoin) GPU miner computer rig: February 2014

Posted in Betting, Forex & Gambling, Computer Hardware, e-currency, Earn Money Online, Hacking, Tips & Tricks

This article caused quite the stir with other crypto currency miners. As I concluded that mining digital coins with a Computer is a “no go”. Which is correct if you’re mining Bitcoins; it’s complexity of mining is increasing. To make the investment in ASIC mining equipment pay for it self you have to get at least 50GH/s to be profitable. But … that doesn’t count towards mining other crypto currency.

Trading currency

The currency with the only ‘real world’ value is Bitcoin. However mining other new crypto currencies is where the huge profits can be made when trading them for others. Or so I heard. But how can you exchange them? Kraken.com where Forex meets crypto currency! And that’s all I needed to know for now to start building my rig.

DIY Crypto Currency GPU mining rig

Generic information to get started: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

But that’s a bunch of numbers you get get weary about fast. Let’s get specific!

Which Graphics card / GPU ?

I’m still researching this myself, but the most bang for the buck seems to be a second hand Radeon 7990 as it does ~ 1250KH/s. Like to buy new stuff? Still recommended is to buy a multiples of XFX 7950. It’s a dated card at ~ 600KH/s, but the purchase price vs. power usage can’t be beat.

Suggestions that I found to perform great:

MSI Radeon HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 (Twin Frozr) ± 650KH/s
XFX 7970 ± 700KH/s
“Sapphire R9 280x Toxics” ± 850KH/s

A few articles I recommend you to have a look at:

7950 vs. R280X (7970) vs. R290(X) @ HolyNerdVana

Quick overview of all these card at Tweakers.net Pricewatch. Also to get the cards to work (without a monitor and thus via remote access) have a look at this Dummy Plug suggestion.

Undervolting

This is a very interesting phenomenon. By decreasing the speed and increasing the GPU performance

Which PSU?

Depends how many video cards you use. As the least power per videocard seems to be a typical 300W. So anything from Enermax or Corsair with at least 750W modular seems to do the trick. Also checkout Add2Psu (turn 2 modular PSUs into 1).

Which mainboard + CPU: Gamer or Miner?

CPU is easy … as it’s not used when mining so you can settle for AMD Sempron / Athlon II X2 (both AMR3+ socket), or an Intel Pentium G3320 (maybe even the Celeron) depending on chipset manufacturer. Little stubborn? Or maybe like to use your rig for gaming as well? Then checkout this CPU comparison chart.

Mainboard depends on how many GPUs you are going to plug in. Most main board support up to 3 or 4 cards. Only few support 6 cards. An overview of most popular motherboards I could find on my research:

Asrock 890GX Extreme 4
Asrock BTC (specifically designed for mining, but hard to get)
Asus F2A55-M LE
Asus Sabertooth 990fx
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC

Case vs. crate?

That’s a case of heat production for starters, and how many cards you can fit in a case and motherboard. A typical ATX case only supports 3 double

Which HDD + RAM + OS? LINUX of course!

I’m not a huge fan of Windows for doing specialised tasks. Also because it’s memory hungry. So in case of building a mining rig on Linux? 2GB of RAM suffices. No need for more. Although you can get some more cause it’s cheap at the moment. The HDD doesn’t really matter, it’s pretty much only used for OS. It depends what else you have running. Fileserver for example? Then get a 1+ TB version. Otherwise? Boot from USB stick or get a cheap SSD.

Linux installation research: