My crypto mining saga

I got into crypto a few years ago when poker sites started taking this strange stuff called bitcoin. I get sick when i think about the coins i cashed in over the years, but I still managed to hold on to a few. When the recent all time BTC high came, I decided to take some profits and put a high-end gaming computer together. Soon I realized that miners had bought all the GPUs and there was a unique opportunity to put a mining rig together. My research led me to this blog:

http://www.coinminingrigs.com/how-to-build-a-6-gpu-mining-rig/

Finding parts was obviously an issue, and quickly learned I was a little late to the game. GPUs, PCI-E risers, motherboards, and power supplies were all in short supply and prices were rising. I abandoned all hope of finding the coveted AMD RX series GPUs in stock anywhere, so I ended up pulling the trigger on six Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1070's. Everything I read about the card said it was quickly becoming the best fit for GPU mining, and the power savings should eventually offset the higher price tag. About a week later the above blog was updated with the same information and the price of the 1070's spiked as well.

Now we need everything else for the rig, starting with the frame. Already spending more than I wanted to I went with a simple PVC pipe design courtesy of this blog post:

https://wilsafris.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/pvc-litecoin-mining-open-air-case-for-6-gpu/

For mine I made one small change, adding 2 inches to the frame to accommodate the massive 1070 cards.

I sourced the rest from GPUshack.com. GPUshack sources refurbished parts for mining, and has kits for up to 8 GPUs. They also have a better warranty than anyone else I have come across. SPOILER ALERT: I'm going to need it. The kits from GPUshack contain a motherboard, CPU, RAM and a SSD or USB stick with their mining OS, linux-based ethOS. Went with the 6 GPU kit, 6 PCI-E Risers and a 1000 watt platinum power supply.

My order was supposed to ship on June 7, but after that date passed with no confirmation and trading a few emails with them I found that they were affected by a shortage of PCI-E risers. $2100 worth of GPUs were going to collect dust until June 23rd. I decided to get a few of these things running in some older PCs I had laying around and do some testing. I got 3 cards going in 2 different PCs. I was pleased with the performance of the 1070s, mining ether at 25 MH/s with default settings. The first tuning I did was lower the power to 50%. This cuts the power consumption to 90 watts per card and had no affect on hashrate. I have yet to get to overclocking, so I will save that for a future post.

During this time I also learned ethOS does not officially support Nvidia GPUs. There are people out there that have got it to work, and I did give it an honest attempt, but the SSD with ethOS was traded for a bigger hard drive and gasp Windows 10.

My shipment from GPUshack arrived on schedule. They upgraded me to a 7-GPU kit for the delay, and I started connecting everything together. The best advice I can offer here is start slow. Add 1 GPU at a time, shutdown and repeat. You will likely need to make some adjustments in the BIOS to get a system like this stable. Heat is going to be an issue. A box fan at the back of the rig pushing air through all the components goes a long way. I also would not bother spending too much time with direct mining until you have a few days of stability under your belt. I'm using Nicehash's miner under Windows during the testing. Nicehash mines a variety of different coins based on profitability and pays you in bitcoin weekly.

I got all 6 GPUs going within a few hours, pulling under 700 watts and left it to run nicehash all night. I returned to find the system down, attempting to power up every few seconds. The power supply had failed. GPUshack does an advance warranty replacement, so a new one is on the way, but I am now running 4 cards on a less efficient 750w PSU:

Ongoing needs:

I'd like to start directly mining coins to trade/hodl. I still like the way nicehash mines the most profitable coin, but I'd like the coins instead of bitcoin. What do others do?

I want to overclock and squeeze as much hashrate as possible out of these cards, but what are the best settings? My experience so far has been that this is a lot easier under Windows than Linux. I'm open to ideas.

I'd like to do some trading, and even jump on some ICOs, but there is so much noise I just don't know who to listen to. I see opportunities (holding ETH, Sia and Ripple), but I'd love to hear from someone successful not trying to sell something.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions!