My mining computer running Ubuntu
May 02, 2019
Intro
Although it is a bit embarrassing to say it, I was definitely involved in the whole cryptocurrency craze back in 2016 (even went in on BitConnect, what a waste of money :/) but the past is the past and I’d like to think some good things came out of that period of time. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the underlying technology of what crypto is built on - blockchain & smart contracts as a whole. The software is genius and took some incredible minds to build such technology, thanks “Satoshi”, but I no longer believe in the longevity of cryptocurrency as a real investment strategy; it just isn’t a safe way to keep your hard earned money & it’s extremely volatile. I know there are many people still into it with some real die hard fans out there but most of those people don’t even understand how that software is actually working or blockchain in general. Not getting into the technology of blockchain here but the software is young and still in the works. If you have a mining machine you can get some real use from those expensive graphics cards you may have been running on your machines vs wasting electricity on Bitcoin, Tron, Z-cash, or whatever crypto is out there nowadays.
Mining Profitability Today
At a point mining was actually a viable means of passive income, there was the initial loss of building out a computer to be able to mine with, but ROI was actually easy and quickly became a solid means of profits on the side. If you think about it, it was quite literally free money all you needed was the knowledge or willingness to learn how to build a solid PC and running the crypto algorithms to mine for bitcoin or whichever cryptocurrency you wanted.
For me, once my machines made their initial ROI, I would quickly convert those funds back to USD and every few thousand dollars after I would convert it again. I NEVER kept any money as cryptocurrency; I was always converting the money made from the mining machines back into USD and that seemed worked out in my favor. Keep note, that I got into this back in 2016 when mining and the whole cryptocurrency craze was relatively young and it wasn’t overtaken by mining farms so the individual miners had a decent stake in the hashing algorithms.
Machines + example specs
I built several mining computers for friends and one I ended up keeping for myself that I will discuss later in the post. These builds were a lot of fun & there was a decent amount of learning to get these machines running how I wanted with the correct hardware to do the mining efficiently. Although each build was slightly different (motherboards, memory etc.) below is an example build if you are interested in some of the hardware used.
Motherboard
ASRock H81 PRO BTC R2.0 LGA 1150 Intel H81 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Motherboard
ASRock motherboard
Memory
Kingston HyperX FURY 16GB Kit (2x8GB) 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 DIMM - White (HX318C10FWK2/16)
CPU
Intel Celeron G4900 Desktop Processor 2 Core 3.1GHz LGA1151 300 Series 54W BX80684G4900
Didn’t need to go expensive as the GPUs do the actual mining
Frame
I would custom build frames here is one for a 6 GPU setup
GPUs
Opted for NVIDIA 1000 series graphics cards both 1060 and 1070 had similar hashing speeds. Here are a few that could be used appropriately for mining or gaming systems.
MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5 SLI DirectX 12 VR Ready ITX Graphics Card (GTX 1070 AERO ITX 8G OC)
MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB GDRR5 256-bit HDCP Support DirectX 12 SLI Twin Frozr Heat Pipes Dual TORX 2.0 Fan VR Ready Graphics Card (GTX 1070 TI Gaming 8G)
EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 GAMING, ACX 2.0 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC) 06G-P4-6161-KR
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 Gaming, 11GB GDDR5X, iCX Technology - 9 Thermal Sensors & RGB LED G/P/M, Asynch Fan, Optimized Airflow Design Graphics Card 11G-P4-6593-KR
Mounting GPUs on frame
Linux distro to use
I did a lot of research on the best operating system to use with the least amount of hassle/hacking involved to start working properly. I opted to go with a linux OS and downloaded Linux Mint to a thumb drive. From there, after going through the initial motherboard setup/BIOS settings it was straightforward to get the computers up and mining. At times I did have to configure some of the machines, for one of the builds I was getting into some really low level configuration and had to post on a PC forum board & the people on it were really helpful and knowledgable so I was able to get answers quickly.
System kernel setup
A completed build
Mining machine built and running
What next?
It has been approximately 6 months since I have stopped mining for cryptocurrency and for a while my computer wasn’t getting any use as I do most of my programming on my macbook or work computer. A few weeks ago I removed Linux Mint that was currently on it and installed Ubuntu (v18.04) OS so that I can use it as a general desktop. The computer is very powerful with 4 graphics cards running & I am able to do a lot with it. I’m currently learning some new software to make use of the GPUs (will make a future post on that). The only downside to the system would be the CPU as I went a little cheap with the Intel Celeron G1840 it only has 2 cores making the OS a little slow and not as snappy as I would like it. In the future I will probably upgrade it to an Intel Core i7-9700K Desktop Processor 8 Cores up to 4.9 GHz Turbo Unlocked LGA1151 300 Series 95W or the Intel Core i9-9900K Desktop Processor 8 Cores up to 5.0 GHz Turbo Unlocked LGA1151 300 Series 95W. Both CPUs are at 8 cores which will tremendously increase performance and will be much better for the personal projects that I am working on.
Personal blog by Alex Virdee, 