My Gridcoin Journey
It has been quite a time that I have been involved with the gridcoin community and I would like to present my gridcoin journey and many factors that affected the different part of my stay in the gridcoin community.
I was introduced to the gridcoin community through the courtesy of u/techwizard in r/slavelabour and this was the post.
It was the post asking us to comment in his tech blog and we would be awarded with 10 grc for the job. So to get the reward I had to download the gridcoin wallet and I did. I researched for the gridcoin and learned about BOINC and got hooked. I got those 10 grc from him and got some more from Poloneix. Then started BOINC crunching. However I knew very little about how complicated the system was and how much effort was required. I just fired up my laptop 24hrs a day and expected to reap some reward, but to my dismay I had not followed the YouTube tutorial completely and was unable to get rewards as my bacon had not been sent.
I was angry and I deleted BOINC and Gridcoin from my computer and unfortunately I deleted the wallet.dat file as well and I lost my coins. At that time I didn’t care though. It didn’t feel good but still I continued to keep a close ear to the community on reddit (I didn’t know much about steem back then). And then after the grcpool was started I got involved again. This was the best thing that could happen in the Gridcoin for a long time. There now was no worries about payback time and all the technical difficulty for the newcomers suddenly disappeared. I got many of my friends involved with this. As we live in the hostel, we have free electricity so we had no problem firing the laptops all day. Though some of my friends had concern that running 24hrs a day would degrade the laptop so they would run 5-6 hrs. a day only. It has been a wild ride but I do believe in Gridcoin and will continue to do so. Love this community.
So through this I would just like to stress a few points about what can be done right now. I feel places like r/slavelabour and other similar places are the best way to attract people to get into gridcoin. The people when will get paid for small jobs with small amount of gridcoin will at the very least install the gridcoin wallet for it and I can be sure half of them will come and contribute. Other place where we can do the same is with the big facuets company and make them include gridcoin as the main coin. It will be attractive because of the low transaction fee they might accept easily.
Also I do feel the need to warn the newbies of the pitfalls of solo mining and encourage them to pool mining the very first time they think of BOINC mining.
(P.S. Will keep posting a lot so get used to with me.)
Pool mining is easier for newbies, but I always encorage people to go solo when they can, its better for the individual and better for the community
Rookie mistake. Breakfast is not the same without it.
On a more serious note, Gridcoin mining in itself will not degrade your hardware. CPUs and GPUs are the main components that experience heavy load under BOINC, and neither have moving parts. They are also designed to run at 100% load all the time by the manufacturer. That being said, do not run you CPU or GPU above 95 degrees C for extended periods of time.
In a nutshell, your hardware is very, very likely to become obsolete before it fails due to wear and tear. The only exception to this is your fans, including the case fan, which may need replacing at some point down the line (they will get noisy - you will know when they need some attention).
Welcome back to the community. =)
Would you say, it would be necessary or better to get/make an water cooled system? I currently ran an HD 7970 without watercooling. It got very hot, as you might know. Recently I got an watercooled GTX 980 TI, which isn't getting higher than 50-55° C. But I want to buy the new Vega 56, because the Power draw (as I read from Wikipedia) is lower and it gets more GFlops in FP32. Now I'm struggeling, if I should get an watercooling system (or just an Waterblock) for the Vega, when and if I'm gonna buy it.
And yes, as you might can read, I'm new to BOINC. Was into Crypto mining before. :)
Also following you because your post are very interesting :)
Thanks for the compliments. =)
You should only need watercooling if you are running your cards above stock settings, such as when overclocking and overvolting. Otherwise, the stock fan should easily be able to keep the GPU from overheating even at full load.
I have no experience with the HD 7970, but @vortac is an expert in those as his entire research operation is centred around watercooled rigs running several HD 7970 cards. He may be able to offer some more insight. =)
Thank you for the answer :)
I wouldn't OC the cards because it would consume too much power.
I looked at @vortac post with his quadro HD7970 watercooling. Lookes pretty nice. Thank you for the hint :)
Hello @jexkin and welcome back to Gridcoin! Watercooling should be considered for multi-GPU rigs (can be very difficult to aircool, unless you intend to build a mining rack in your basement).
Watercooling is also useful if your mining rig is going to be placed in the living room or anywhere else where constant noise might be an issue (water will practically reduce operating noise to zero, while allowing massive overclocks).
I dont think water cooling is needed, but I do live in the UK where it never really gets hot (if you are hot here, open a window!).
Overclocking GPUs doesnt work well for BOINC projects, though you can get away with a little bit, and CPU overclocking quickly consumes a lot of power so it isnt ideal to go too far either.
Yeah, I live in Germany. Even with window(s) open, it can get really hot in my room. That's why I thought about water cooling the GPU(s), so that my room doesn't heat up that much and not that fast.
I don't or won't OC the GPU(s) currently. Maybe some day, when I'm more into this theme.
Thank you for the answer :)
Your room will heat up at the same rate with, or without, water cooling. =)
Hot GPUs draw more electric power. Therefore, watercooled GPU will always draw less power than the same GPU cooled with air. Simply because watercooled GPU will always run about 30-35 °C cooler. And for every °C that the card runs hotter it needs approximately 1.2W more power to handle the exact same load.
More details here:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_480_Amp_Edition/27.html
Watercooling a PC doesn't make the room less hot, the water is only the (way better) heat transportation medium, the heat gets transported to the radiators and then it gets blown into the air.
Energieerhaltungssatz
So, as far as I didn't misundertand something:
Watercooled GPU(s) would make sense, if you want to consume less energy? For example: I live in Germany, power cost is 0.3$/kw. I don't mind about that. But less power consumption would be for sure good. Would you recommend to buy waterblocks, just for the fact, that the electrical bill wouldn't be that high? I know, "do what you want. If you can afford it, go for it" or something like that will most likely your answer. But, asking never hurts :D
Germany here too. Watercooling is more power consuming because for air cooling you use a bunch of fans and for water cooling you use the same amount or even more fans - and the pump. At least - for a good custom loop, not these all in one 120mm single radiator jokes.
The only upsides of a good custom watercooling loop are better gpu/cpu core temperatures and (if you can afford a lot of radiator capacity and high-end fans) a more silent computer - because the fans can run slower. And a way better inside look. ;)
I have an Thermaltake Core X9. I think, I have enough space for some radiators :D
I made these calculations: If I had 2x480 radiators and 8x120mm fans (Calculated with 15W per fan) it should consume 120W more, only the fans. I don't really know how much the pump would consume. I calculated about max. 50W. Maximum: under 200W more. If @vortac is right (or techpowerup) and a GPU is consuming about 1.2W more per °C and the water cooling might get 35°C less heat than an aircooled GPU (Sorry for sentence. Might be very confusing.), it would consume up to 42W less per GPU. Let's say I would have 6 HD7970's. It would be up to 252W less with an watercooling system. If the 2x480 radiators can handle the temperature, I don't really know.
I don't know if this makes sense. Might be not, but well, I tried xD
Water cooling your computer won't make your room cooler; if your computer uses 500 Watts then that's like having a 500 Watt heater in the room regardless of how you cool the CPU & GPU.
Hi, my experiences with fan are:
Welcome to the team :)