So I saw my colleagues buying all these components and making themselves powerful PC’s last year in October. I thought oau, people are really crazy about gaming. I searched the web for newest games and ended up discovering buggy, low texture, unsatisfying gameplay games that were sold way to expensive for that they were delivering. I investigated this further and found out that they were actually buying PC’s and laptops for mining cryptocurrencies. So I started reading about it and trying to see if I made an investment, would I turn it into profit or would it be a bad call.
To tell you the truth I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into but I said to myself I have to do something at the beginning of the year so I can reap the benefits at the end of it. So what I did was I invested around 500 euro in a PC to start my own mining rig.
I looked at the components and this is where you should know what to buy carefully or else you will end up with money spent for nothing. Of course I looked online for cheap components but what I found out is that yes, your main investment is in the GPU, the other parts are useful if you want to upgrade your rig to something more powerful. You have to know the kind of GPU to buy so that it would function with the motherboard.
Let me tell you the steps I took to building a cheap mining rig.
Choosing a GPU according to your budget
What I went for was the cheapest version of the 1000 Nvidia GPUs. The GTX 1050Ti 4G Gaming X from MSI which cost around 280 euro. Maybe I could have gotten it cheaper from other places but in my country this is way more profitable than getting if from amazon.
So, I bought the GPU, now I needed a motherboard. I chose the MSI Mortar B250M version with 2 PCI slots because I already had an old PC with a GIGABYTE GTX 650 2G OC version and I wanted to use that too, until I was going to upgrade it to something more powerful. This piece cost me around: 90 euro.
For the CPU I went with something cheap but good enough to work with windows 10. Yes I chose the windows way because the linux is currently beating me security wise. I chose to buy
a Intel Kaby Lake, Celeron Dual-Core G3930 2.90GHz. Remember you have to be careful what processor to buy and at what frequency because the next part has to fit with the processor well enough so it won’t cause any software issues.
This cost me around: 40 euro.
For the next part you have to pay attention to what the processor needs in order to function properly, and of course it should fit the motherboard slot as well. So I went with the Patriot Signature 4GB DDR4 2133MHz CL15 1.2v for the RAM memory of the rig. My first choice was the The HyperX Fury Black 4GB DDR4 2133MHz, but since all the stores were fresh out of it, I chose the cheaper version. Besides your rig needs to work, not to have famous brands in it. This cost me around: 47 euros.
I don’t have a picture with it right now but you can google for it. It’s not that pretty but it does it’s job very well.
OK, now I had a couple of old HDD laying around an old PC so I took one and used it. It’s a Seagate 1TB 7200rpm, it still had information on it but I just installed windows 10 without erasing anything. Because of the tight budget I couldn’t afford in spending another 50 euros on a HDD, but I advise you to buy a new one rather than doing what I did.
So to add a HDD to the list of expenses, let’s say a 50 euro HDD would be sufficient. A tip would be for you to buy a SSD, they are faster and you get a faster transfer rate of information on it.
Next I needed a power supply which I had laying around and decided to use it as well, but when I wanted to start my rig I noticed it made a couple of odd noises and wouldn’t start. So I immediately cut its power off and took it off of my rig to make sure nothing would burn before I even start.
Of course I had to buy another power source just to be safe. Given the fact that I have one GPU, for now I don’t need a powerful one, just enough to power my whole rig. So I went and bought a Corsair VS550.
The cost was: 50 euro.
Well, now I had the parts and I was ready to start doing something so I started assembling the whole thing.
I had all the parts but couldn’t leave them lying around the room like that so I got my old PC, cleaned the dust from it, and believe me, there was so much dust in there. After an hour or so of cleaning and assembly, I finally had my PC ready.
After I installed the operating system and the necessary drivers I was ready to start mining.
Of course I thought, wow this is going to be so easy, I’m going to install a miner with a GUI and that’s it. I did that until I found out the fees are way bigger than if you mine with a specific algorithm on specific pools of specific coins. To make it more simple, you have to follow a few steps.
Depending on what GPU you buy you have to look on the internet what algorithm is most suited for it. For example for the GTX 1050Ti the equihash algorithm is the most profitable of them all.
After you have the algorithm you have to search for the coins that can be mined with it and pick the easiest of them all. In my case I am mining Zclassic. Be careful because the difficulty of the shares vary from time to time, so keep an eye on the coins.
You download the software from github, set your wallet and the pool address and then start mining.
The most important thing from all of this is don’t interrupt your mining process. Leave it alone and resist the temptation of fiddling with it.
So now I invested about 507 euro in a mining PC, which I use to mine Zclassic and make around 1.3 euro / 24 hours. In about 1 year and 1 month I will have recovered my investment. Keep in mind the cost of electricity is not included. These are the results, if you invest a smaller sum of money into a mining rig, then you’ll recover your money in 1 and a half year, but if you spend a bigger sum of money like 2000 euro, you’ll be recovering your money in a smaller amount of time.
I hope you find my adventure useful and interesting. If so please don’t forget to upvote and follow me for more posts of life experiences and interesting facts of various topics.
See you next time with more interesting articles. :)