Hey all

I am going to use this thread to document the building of my Crypto Mining Rig. Over the past couple of weeks I have done a crapload of research on where to start, what hardware is needed. What I have discovered is there is a ton of nuances to the whole mining thing. What makes it somewhat difficult is the lack of centralized documentation. Everything is scattered across multiple sites and YouTube. However, I have been able to piece together enough to get started.

Here is the motherboard, CPU and hard drive used. There is 8GB of memory. It will support 7 video cards. The goal is to work up to 4 video cards by summer time. At that point I will have to make a open air rig. I currently have another one on order which should be here by the end of March.


The video card is RTX 3060 TI. This is the latest release from Nvidia. This thing is a beast!

The operating system is HiveOS. It is a Linux based OS which is specifically made for mining. The HiveOS web and mobile interface in short is bad ass. I can control and make changes to my rig from my laptop or mobile device.

I officially got it up and running yesterday. I have been playing with the settings and figuring everything else out. So far so good!

If you have a rig yourself please post! I would love to see what everyone else is doing.

Robert

Keep us updated! As I said in a different thread I've been messing around with nicehash, comes out to a huge 4 dollars a day lol. What platform are you running to mine?

Sent using the NexusFi mobile app

Always found this subject very interesting, not something I have ever pursued though as I had been lead to believe that it all comes down to electricity price and that it was almost impossible for retail to make money at retail electricity rates. But now that Bitcoin is literally 10x the price it was a year ago, maybe that has all changed.

Good luck with it all, I've had a blast with mine. I started back last June, something I had always kicked around and finally got into it. I've got 2 rigs running now, a combination of RX480s, 580s and a few 5700xts. Was a huge pain for months, just had to babysit it, continually something would go wrong, it'd run fine for 4 days then have nothing but issues for 3 more, etc. Few months ago I switched from NiceHash to BetterHash and its ran for 3 months straight untouched, love it. It's about as close to printing money with no effort (once set up) as you can get. 2nd rig isn't complete yet, cards became super hard to come by at a decent price obviously the last few months when things took off.

Here's a picture of mine, I've added a few cards to the bottom rig since this and cleaned up the cable situation some.

Here's a link to the picture, can't quite seem to get it to work.
https://imgur.com/a/R8XE5ca

Here's @lexknight image incase link breaks.

lexknight 

It's about as close to printing money with no effort (once set up) as you can get.

I assume that means you've had some success with it? Would you mind sharing more details?

@lexknight do you include your electricity usage in your profitability? With a rough estimation of the power usage I maybe net a dollar per day while its running.

SMCJB 

I assume that means you've had some success with it? Would you mind sharing more details?

Thanks for helping on the picture.

Yeah it's worked out well. I guess people shouldn't take "printing money" to mean "getting rich". It's basically paid itself back at this point, and it's nice to just have a flow of ETH into my wallets.

I spent $3,500 CAD (roughly $2.8K USD) approx on everything, over time. I started with 1 card, then 2, 3, etc. It's been about 9 months now in total, but only 2 months running 9 cards total. Most cards I bought used from gamers off craigslist or facebook marketplace. Motherboards, CPUs and power supplies I bought new, ram and cables, risers and the frames I got used also.

For tracking my profit I use the month end price in the month the ETH was mined, and based on that it's returned approximately $3,600 CAD, so I just broke even last month on the rigs, but not bad for 9 months. The last few months have been a huge part of that though, last month was $850 in profit.

If you though just take the current prices today and how much I've accumulated, it's worth $5,600 CAD in total though, and since I've held onto it all that's a more fair price of how much value I've generated, but at the same time the price could drop and that'll fluctuate.

In terms of power, I'm not a stickler with it. Basically I'd say my power bill has gone up $50/month, but that's actually deducted already in the above $3,600 number. Power is relatively cheap here from what I gather compared to various states.

I possibly will set up a 3rd rig once #2 is complete, but depends on prices and if the payback is still reasonable. At a minimum I want to finish rig #2, that one can hold up to 8 cards and only has 3 so far.

Edit: Also I didn't mention but I did bios mod all the cards and overclock and do all of that stuff. I wouldn't say I've got them 100% optimized, but I'm happy with the results and they are stable which is worth my sanity.

SMCJB 

Always found this subject very interesting, not something I have ever pursued though as I had been lead to believe that it all comes down to electricity price and that it was almost impossible for retail to make money at retail electricity rates. But now that Bitcoin is literally 10x the price it was a year ago, maybe that has all changed.

Mining is cyclical, as in many will attempt it when the price is high, creating huge demands for equipment - only to bust at some point and you'll see people selling mining rigs fairly cheap as they can no longer generate a profit. The efficiency of mining also increases rapidly with newer tech, like the launch of the RTX 30xx series gfx cards NVidia did around half a year ago that is still in very high demand and very difficult to acquire. In comparison, one generation doubled the efficiency (new gen releasing roughly every 2-3 years) if you compare a 2080 vs a 3080 its 217% more productive generating $9,43 profit daily (rough guesstimate) while purchasing one realistically will cost you around $1000 despite the recommended retail price being $700ish.

So the required investment is fairly high and somewhat difficult, the tech is short lived, and any profits are completely at the mercy of the volatile crypto prices and electricity prices. If you scale things up, you could hedge power costs with electricity futures if you manage to access a power exchange, though that opens a new can of worms potentially adding losses from the hedging and limiting you to juggling 1Mwh chunks of power per contract (thats 1.000.000 Watts per hour, pretty huge).

From a business perspective it seems like a high risk endeavor not really worth the time and hassle, unless you just want to do it for the fun of it as a hobby or experiment.

I thought about creating a thread like "Show you rig", but you were ahead of me

I'm in the process of building a rig too. I've ordered parts which are yet to be delivered. I ordered a Gigabyte GA-H11-D3A with Intel Core i5-7400, 8gb of memory and 850W power supply. I know the power is limited but will add another one when I needed.

I already have 2 3070's, these are running currently in my trading pc and my son's gaming pc (which he likes very much, hehe). I've ordered a 3080 also, but it's not available currently.

I'm mining ETH at Ethermine with lolMiner, approx 10 dollar daily on both cards (120 mh/s).
I'm exchanging the mined ETH for Ravencoin.

I'm planning to run the rig on HiveOS, so looking forward to your experience since it's new to me.

Will post pictures once the rig is complete.

mongoose 

Keep us updated! As I said in a different thread I've been messing around with nicehash, comes out to a huge 4 dollars a day lol. What platform are you running to mine? Sent using the NexusFi mobile app

@mongoose

I am using HiveOS with the T-Rex miner. T-Rex has the best performance out of the miners I have tried.

Robert