I made an executive decision for the Logical Mining Company. Well, being the only executive, I can really do what I want, haha. I have really been doing a bunch of calculations on my mining farm, and it was really time to beef up my Monero hash rate beyond these little Mac Minis. So I decided to pull the trigger and purchased a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo from eBay that I will use to add some pretty solid hashrate to the XMR blockchain.
The Ryzen 9 3900X CPU that I got is going to be a nice little hashing beast according to the XMRig benchmark site. Apparently it gets around 16KH/s, so I'll certainly be increaing my XMR income!
Using DEFI Loans and Gift Cards
Using a DEFI loan in Aave against my USDT and WBTC holdings there on Polygon. I took a 70 USDT loan and purchased the remainder of what I needed to cover the purchase. I had a gift card from my last miner purchase with just under $20, so that was automatically applied, and I had purchased another $100 gift card with cash from the local Dollar General. When I am buying gift cards with crypto, I primarily use Bitrefill or Cake Pay if I am using XMR.
I do things this way so I can short the loan down while still building my collateral in Aave. This means I keep my loaned amount in USDT while BTC and ETH are moving up. But when I get a sell signal on my custom indicator, I then move the loaned amount into WBTC or WETH and let the price ride down. When I close the short, I just swap the loaned amount back to USDT, so therefore I owe less and less and once I get to a point that I have enough to available to borrow, I'll look into another miner, more solar, etc...
Recycling an Old PC Case
I had an old PC that I decided to use the case and the PSU for the new miner. I had to get into the case completely and strip it down. First thing that had to go was the old RX480 GPU. I have a stack of older GPUs that I am considering building out a GPU rig and running on Ravencoin, but that's another project for another time, lol.
Next thing to go was all the other internal parts. The old CD/DVD super drive that nobody uses anymore, an old 1TB hard drive that I am going to try and recoup and for some storage, but I will need a case or a dock for it. Then I got down to the motherboard and got it stripped out of the case. I am going to be using a USB stick with an Ubuntu install to run the XMRig mining software, so I really don't need a hard drive in the new rig anyway.
Now I am down to the bare casing with the PSU and it's wiring. I still have the power button, but I honestly forgot the wiring configuration because I just started pulling stuff and I didnt' take a picture of those wires. But I am a fairly smart dude, so I can figure it out. I will be doing a bit of cleaning up on the wiring to make it nice looking on the inside of the case.
The Corsair CX430 PSU is going to be perfect for what I am using this machine for. I will not be putting any kind of GPUs, so the power draw is going to be minimal, so it's got plenty of juice for the job.
I am excited for my new rig to come in the mail so I can get it installed and up on the mining shelf hashing and earning me some sweet virgin privacy coin! There is another one available from the same seller on eBay, so I may end up doing this again in a couple of weeks, lol. Let's see how this order goes. The seller had high rankings, so I felt good about it. I just haven't messed with a PC in quite some time as I am a Mac guy, so this is going to be fun!
Until next time...
Be cool, be real, and always abide with you my dudes!
