Hey, what's up it's Jerad with State of Tech and I am starting off with a new project,
I'm going to be building a cryptocurrency mining rig.
Now, in this video I'm going to show you the assembly, basically, I'm just going to go
through it really fast with a timelapse showing you the assembly of it.
I'm going to give you a few updates along the way and to start off this video I'm going
to talk about my mindset about all of this.
Cryptocurrency has definitely gotten a lot of press lately, especially Bitcoin, with
Bitcoin rising so much in value over the last couple of months.
People are saying is there any more room for it to grow?
Is it going to crash?
You know, I've been interested in Cryptocurrency for a while, I just haven't done anything
about it.
That's been the situation with certain technologies that I haven't had the time to really look
into but I may have had interest in, I just haven't dived in.I figure now is no better
time to dive in because whether or not all of these cryptocurrencies backslide a little
bit or if they continue to grow, there's really no better to get into mining, if you're interested
in it.
Now, people are saying there's no money to be made anymore in mining, or you might as
well just take your money and invest it directly.
Now, I agree that that could be a way to go about it but the problem there is that if
you go and invest your money and then the people that are saying it's going to backslide
are correct, you're going to lose a lot of your money.
Now, I've invested in stocks, I don't have a ton of holdings, but I have invested in
stocks over the last couple of years.
Over the last few weeks, we've seen a backslide in the value of stocks, especially in the
technology sector.
I had a lot invested in technology semiconductor companies and stuff like that and we saw a
huge backslide.
Even AMD stock has had a lot of issues this year.
Nvidia stock has been a wild ride this year in 2017.
So, I'm always looking to diversify and kind of spread out where I put my efforts.
Now I had played around a little bit with just the PC that I built, I'll link to it
in the description below.
I built a Threadripper PC with a 1080 Ti in it to do my video editing and do work from.
It's been a great computer and so I just kind of played around a little bit with that to
just see what the process is like before diving in and deciding to build an actual mining
rig.
Now, some of the parts are a little inflated in price on building out a mining rig or even
building out any computer these days because the price of the GPU's are a little bit higher
because so many people are buying them for mining.
Of course, they're pretty popular for gaming as well.
Then the rest of us are buying them for video editing and there's just a lot of use cases
for GPU's these days.
I decided that I wanted to mine for a couple of reasons; rather than taking the money and
putting it into cryptocurrency, which is throwing money in at basically high rates right now,
and we don't know where they're going.
People were saying when Bitcoin got near $10,000 that there's no way it can get any higher
and this morning, as the time that I'm recording this video, it has hit $17,000 which is crazy!
It's just growing like crazy.
Sure it could backslide but could it backslide all the way back down to where it was six
months ago?
I really doubt that.
It's kind of a little risky to me to just go ahead and throw money in there because
who knows where it's going to go.
I'm not necessarily interested in Bitcoin as I am Ethereum.
I think Ethereum has some room to grow still and as Bitcoin continues to grow it's going
to help feel the value of the other Cryptocurrencies, or at least some of them because people are
going to be looking to diversify as well just because you can't put everything all in one
place.
We have these other Cryptocurrencies that are getting a lot of hype that have a lot
going behind them as well.
A lot of people mining them, a lot of value and so I think Ethereum is probably a good,
safe bet for me to jump in.
I've decided that I wanted to build a mining rig for this main reason and that's because
if I decide to do this for a month or so, and I decide it's not for me, I still have
the value of the parts that I can go and sell.
The GPU's aren't going to be losing any value if anything they may go up in value a little
bit.
Not much but a little bit.
So I'll be able to disassemble my mining rig and sell it off for parts if I decide to get
out of this.
My thoughts are if I start mining and there's a crash in the rates of Bitcoin, Ethereum,
and everything else and everything goes down and I decide it's just not worth it, then
I can sell the parts off and I still have a little bit of value that I mined for that
month in Ethereum or maybe I decide to switch Cryptocurrencies.
I'm just going to start with Ethereum.
So, that's my mindset and I think a lot of people are either in the camp of you've got
to spend a bunch of money to build a rig and then it's going to take however long to mine
the dollar amount that you could have just put in to that Cryptocurrency in the first
place if you were to just invest in it.
But, I'm just not feeling like taking a big enough risk to just go and take the money
and throw it in.
Now, maybe six months ago, or a year ago, or even five years ago I should have been
looking into this a little bit more.
I've definitely had been just interested and done a little bit of research but never pulled
the trigger.
I should have a while ago but I never did.
Alright, we're going to go ahead and build this rig, I've got some timelapse of unboxing
and timelapse of putting this thing together.
We're going to assemble it and get it all ready to go, get Windows installed on it and
start to go through the process of setting it up.
So let's get started.
Alright, so I've got the miner live and it's running and I've got it humming along pretty nice.
Now, I originally wanted to record this ending to this video immediately after I had it up
and running but I ran into a couple of little snags just trying to work on optimizing the
rig.
When I first powered it up, the process was much simpler than I thought to get everything
running.
So, let me quickly talk about that and then I'll talk about what I've done to try and
optimize it to get the most performance out of the system.
Once I got it assembled, I went and installed Windows 10 Home Edition on it.
I got Windows 10 on there and then started installing drivers and then installed, of
course, the AMD drivers for the GPU's.
Now, what I did was have all of the GPU's plugged in and tried to install the software
with all of them plugged in.
That seemed to cause some sort of an issue, I don't know if maybe the drivers have a hard
time installing for the first time noticing there are six GPU's on board.
I don't know but that just gave me some problems, so what I had to do was actually remove the
GPU drivers altogether and reinstall them.
So what I did was just plug in one GPU and run them.
Of course, there were some things that I needed to do to the BIOS of the motherboard and whatnot
during the startup.
I needed to enable some settings in there to tell the slots in the motherboard to run
in Gen 2 instead of Gen 3.
Gen 2 is a shorter PCI slot as opposed to Gen 3 which are longer slots.
On the motherboard that I used there are a few of those Gen 3 slots, there are a few
Gen 2 slots but with using that risers what we're doing is basically converting all of
those to Gen 2 slots so that we can get those six GPU's plugged in directly to the motherboard
using those risers.
I had to go into the BIOS and make some of those settings.
I forget if I mention at the beginning of this video but I will put a link in the description
below to instructions on what I did to go and set up the specific motherboard that we
used.
Following those instructions is going to save you a lot of time as well as when you go to
install Windows and of course the drivers you just use on GPU at first to get everything
up and running and then add in all of the rest of the GPU's.
What I also had to do is disable onboard video on the motherboard.
The motherboard, combined with the CPU, support onboard video and I needed to disable that.
There was something causing confusion, I couldn't get all six of my GPU's to work until I disabled
onboard video services which you can go through the BIOS.
I'll also provide instructions on how to do that below.
Once I did that I was able to get all six of the GPU's recognized and then I went and
started mining.
Now, I wanted to see where it was going to mine right from the get-go without doing any
optimizations and so I was able to get a collective hash rate out of the machine of 118 MH/s which
was a little slow, I was expecting to see things a lot faster.
I installed a utility so that I could do some overclocking of the memory and just try to
optimize the systems as best as I could with some of the research that I've been doing,
and I was able to get a little bit more performance out of my cards.
One thing that I realized is that some of my cards are Hynix ram and some of them are
Samsung ram.
So there's a little bit of a different method to optimize there and that leaves me with
a little bit more room to still play.
I need to go and make a little bit more adjusting to the BIOS of each of those cards, flashing
the BIOS to make changes.
I'll also provide a link in the description to how you do that.
There are lots of videos of people showing how to do it, I may create one of my own because
there was no perfect video on how to flash the BIOS.
Somebody would either leave out a little key detail out of their video.
In another video, I would watch somebody would leave out a key detail at another point.
There didn't seem to be any perfect video, especially if you're wanting to make sure
that you're going to make sure that you're going to be able to get your cards back, flash
the BIOS back in the future, maybe you want to sell off your equipment later on in time.
I think it's important to have everything set up perfectly because I don't know like
I said at the beginning of this video, I may decide that mining isn't for me and I may
want to sell off my stuff.
That means that I'm going to have to reflash the BIOS on those GPU's and all that stuff
and package them back up and sell them.
So we'll see how things go but I'm going to provide a link below as well just so that
you have the instructions that I went through because I want to be able to resell my stuff
down the road and not have any problems with who I resell them too.
Lastly, I think that there is some issue that I'm still having.
The system is running great, it's running smoothly.
It's not crashing, it's hashing around 120-124 MH/s, which is still pretty low.
It should be running significantly higher than that.
I think that there may be an issue with the risers that I have, that the risers may be
working ok but I'm going to try different risers because I have troubleshooted everything
that I can with the equipment that I have and have not been able to get the performance
out of my cards that most other people are getting.
So the last thing that I can think of to try is maybe some new riser GPU riser cards.
I think that maybe they're just not very good ones and from what I've read there's a lot
of no-name companies producing these and so if you get a bad batch they could perhaps
not work at all or they could underperform as well.
It's just another troubleshooting effort I'm going to try.
Because I could always return the riser cards that I have now as defective as long as I
figured this all out within the first 30 days of me having all of this equipment.
So, with that said I have a lot of stuff that I have learned along the way and I want to
share some of that stuff with you.
Now, if you are new to this like I was, and I still no professional at any of this, I've
just done a lot of research and trial and error and figured things out along the way.
If you're new to this, there are a lot of resources out there, from what I've found
a lot of people have a hard time talking about it and actually sharing it in a way that you
can follow along.
There a lot of good information out there but if you're new to this and a lot of this
terminology and all of this stuff is new, you've never built a computer before at all,
you may want to try and find something that, or somebody that can walk you through this
process a little bit better because you'd hate to buy a bunch of equipment and waste
your money.
That's very possible to do if you set everything up wrong.
If you're messing with the BIOS of these GPU's and you make a mistake you could damage one
of them.
I mean, there are lots of issues that could arise, thankfully I haven't run into any of
those.
I'm just trying to now optimize and get the best performance I can out of my rig and I'm
considering building another rig.
So if you want to follow along on the process, I'm going to be posting some update videos
here on State of Tech from time to time to make sure to click on that subscribe button.
Thanks so much for following along here.
If you liked this project give us a thumbs up.
If you have any questions about it, ask that in the comment section below.
Once again there are links in the description, including an entire parts list on my build
also including some alternative GPU's because there are a lot of GPU's backordered right
now.
Prices are really high on them and so I've been scouting for good GPU's that are reasonably
priced still.
Check out that parts list and we hope to see you back here soon on State of Tech.
Thanks a lot.