Mining Rig Updates
This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant
In the interest of a quiet and cool environment inside the house, I ended up ditching the open frame chassis and moving to rackmount servers in the garage. The progress on those has been slow, because of parts issues and dealing with the heat in there.
I ordered a low end Tripp-Lite SR2000 rack off Ebay, it was “open box, but in perfect condition”, but arrived missing a side panel. I saved about $400 on it, so for now I’m living with out. I threw a large piece of wood over the side that faces the wall, leaving the side with the panel exposed. I also ordered a rackmount AC unit by TrippLite, but it was damaged during shipping (arrived with a loose faceplate) and isn’t cooling well (possibly my fault, as I didn’t wait long enough for the coolant to settle after it being shipped on its side, despite plenty of “This Side Up!” labels plastered on the box). It does blow cold air, but even just the back pressure of the optional exhaust vent is enough to cause it to overheat and shut the compressor off. TrippLite service is awesome, though, as they’re sending a new one immediately and it will be here next week. I found a old monitored TrippLite vertical 208/240v 30A PDU on Ebay and that completes the rack.
As for the machines, I’ve opted to do four machines, two with 4x GTX 1070 cards and two with 4x GTX 1080TI cards. The systems with the 1070s have been going strong for a few days, making about $30 a day between the two of them. The 1080TI machines should make a good bit more, and hopefully the market will improve to get the numbers where I really want them. Still, I’m looking at $60-$80 day, depending on the market, at this point with all these systems in place, and that makes for a ROI in five months or so (not including the rack), which is considerably shorter than most investments.
I’ve bought and returned several components over the past few weeks, and have finally come to a conclusion as to which parts are best for one of these rigs. If I were to do it all over again, I’d standardize on:
- Chenbro RM41300-FS81 chassis
- Corsair HX1200 power supply
- MSI Z170A XPOWER Titanium motherboard
- Celeron G3930 processor
- 2x 4GB Crucial DDR4-2133 ram
- Samsung 32GB M.2 SATA ssd
- 4x EVGA GeForce GTX 1080TI SC2 video cards
- Lots of velcro straps to keep cables out of the way
