I recently spent some time in hospital and having a lot of time on my hands I came across the whole concept of crypto currency and crypto mining. As an Aussie I thought the whole concept of mining crypto currency was out of reach of the common aussie as our power costs are over 30 cKwh, but I decided to plan just one rig , using some spare parts I had , namely Intel P45 Based Motherboards pictured below !
The Main reason for using intel P45 based motherboards is that there are 5 or 6 pcie slots, which can power up to 5 or 6 GPU’s. I Already had one of these boards and I purchased two more off eBay for less than $70, and I got two E8400 3Ghz CPU’s for $15 and I’ve got 4 sticks of 4 Gb DDR2 800 MHz Ram For my first build I’m planning on using RX 570 4Gb Cards as the main GPU’s and for the second rig and beyond I’m going to use RX 580 8Gb ( as 4Gb cards might have limited lifespan when mining Ethereum ) Now I’ve got the idea of building these rigs , I’d started to think maybe a good idea to see if there was a way to expand how many GPUS on each rig, I found that I could use and pcie splitter 1 to 4 giving an extra 3 pcie slots per one slot taken off the motherboard. The Splitter I intend to use is pictured below as is the motherboard I intend to use for the new rigs once I run out of second hand boards which have a native 8 pcie slots via sub
So why did I decide to run 14 or 15 cards per rig ? the answer is the total power usage per rig – around 9.5 to 9.8 A Per rig, as I have 20A circuit breakers in my house and at lower card count I could only run 2 rigs per breaker and still have around 4 Amp left over. I will start with one rig and weekly roll the profits back into the rig ( adding more cards possibly starting with 10 cards each having a hashing rate of 27.5). The Basic setup will be two psu’s for the first rig a 800W psu and a 1600W PSU , any further rigs will use two 1300W / 1350W psu’s
My Aim is to have 8 to 10 rigs , with the first rig having a total hash rate of 412.5 , the second rig having an estimated hash rate of 428 , the same for the 3rd rig and any new rig will have a hash rate of 459 , with a total of between 3200 Hashrate and 4481 Hashrate ( depending on if I have 8 or 10 machines , or 5000+ of I have total of 12 rigs)
The key to running rigs in Australia is having the right power plan , specifically I have researched and found AGL’s rates where there is offpeak , peak and shoulder rates to be the best with the 30 % discount for paying on time.
The choice of OS – Windows 10 , EthOs , SMOS ( ethos and SMOS are Linux based OS’s) – I plan to use EthOs simply because I might have an issue with 10+ GPUS in Windows.
In the crypto currency world, the term wallet is used as a method to save your crypto currency , you have one for Trading ( An example trading platform I used is Bittrex and you might have a software wallet on your pc , for example I use one called Exodus,, which wallet to choose ? I personally have one that’s software based so that when I power off my pc its kept safe, there are also hardware wallets too. If you decide you don’t want to mine ( as the cost of setting up a good rig is in the thousands of dollars) you will need to setup a way to buy bitcoin to fund your trading – for Australians I suggest coin spot they are easy to open an account and setup
No matter what you’re doing, trading , buying bit coin or just mining , I can’t say loudly enough about security , setup 2FA – which is two form authentication – basically once setup up it’s a number that your phone will generate that is used on top of your login details – its a lot harder for some one to hack your email and phone , it provides a better level of security.
When it comes to investing in there are two thoughts on investing – for the long term and the short term or as it’s known as day trading – where you buy a number of coins where they are at a low and sell them when they have risen to a higher level
The Above picture shows what I am talking about for short term investing – buy at the low point and sell at the high point, with the red showing selling and the green (not easy to see is the coin being brought) Before purchasing any coins, I would suggest looking at its history, over 1 day, 7 days and a month to see if there is a noticeable cycle – ie you can see it repeat going up and down. The other thing to look at is volume, both the volume of the coin in general and the volume of the sell and buy orders ( which can be seen by the Hight of the red and green bars in the history of the sales . The Above method is very simple method , i'll go into more detail on other methods in another post.