My First Time Experience Building + Running A Mining Rig
Putting the rig together was a breeze - if you've built a PC, building a mining rig is no different and I will be sharing a VLOG here soon as I am now acquiring components for my next rig build.
Mining Rig Frame
I went for the Veddha Mining Rig frame and I have to say the quality of the frame is excellent. Very strong, stable and looks real slick when setup with all the components mounted. I'm trying to think of a bad point but honestly, I can't, I am using the Veddha frame for my next build and will continue to use them.
Minig Rig Frame Fans
The 120mm Fans I purchased (AeroCool) were absolutely rubbish. I don't think they are doing anything to cool my rig and for my next build I will be looking to find something with high CFM.
Motherboard
I went for the MSI Z170A Tomahawk motherboard and it is a very nice board but it does require setting up through the BIOS settings. Out of the box, this motherboard did not work for me - I had to update the Bios and then play with the Bios settings for hours until I found a setting that worked for me but it was never perfect. I later discovered a PCIE port was faulty but I didn't bother RMA'ing it back to MSI, I just replaced the board.
I replaced it with a B250 with 19 PCIe slots, designed specifically for mining. They sell for around £250-300 but I found a seller through who was selling his for £200 saying it was opened but never used. He gave me a postcode to meet him at his flat but when I arrive, he didn't give me the address and instead he drove round to meet me in my car... alarm bells went off but when I saw him, he seemed genuine and regretfully I completed the transaction - only to get home and find the board was dead and I'd be conned out of £200.
Finally, I purchased the H110+ Pro BTC board with 13 PCie slots. No BIOS settings need changing, this board worked straight out of the box for me - I couldn't be happier and I have purchased another for my second build.
Processor (CPU)
I used the Intel Pentium Dual Core G4400 and I have to say this CPU was more than adequate. I tested it on various operating systems (Windows 10 Pro 64 bit, Ubuntu 16.04 & smOS). I have purchased this CPU again for my next build.
Memory (RAM)
Okay, so in my first build I used 4x 8GB Crucial DDR4 Ram sticks and this was total overkill. The first rig is currently running on a single stick of 8GB Ram and that is more than enough. I tested the rig even with 4Gb and it ran fine. So for my next rig I already have some Ram which I removed from the first build.
I purchased some RAM second-hand and it was an absolute nightmare because one of the sticks were faulty and locating the fault took forever!! It ran fine for a day and would fail after 24-48 hours randomly. I will now always buy new ram sticks only
Graphics (GPU)
I sold the NVIDIA GTX 970 and finished my rig with 3x R9 290 and 3x R9 290x AMD cards. These cards draw around 275w from the wall each and do run very hot, at around 75-80c when mining full load (without overclock). I may use these again for my second build but only if I can undervolt them to run under 200w each. Otherwise, I may opt for RX 480 or RX 580 GPU's.
I opened all cards, cleaned them and applied new high quality thermal paste
Network Card
I didn't need a network card. I used ethernet cable direct to router and later found out that smOS doesn't allow wireless anyway.
PCI Riser Cards
I went for the first cheapest batch of risers I could find and it caused me nothing but grief. Over the 8 weeks they all failed one by one. I then replaced with a set of 009S riser cards as these are the latest out at the moment and I found that they started to fail too. On closer inspection I noticed the gold contacts were half missing on the end of the 1x PCIE adaptors so after a long search online I found a seller who provided pictures of his showing better build quality.
I purchased his risers and they are 10x better quality. Still 009S but just a better quality. They've been installed for 4 weeks now with no issues and in fact it increased my hashrate by around 0.7Mhs on each GPU compared to the other two batches. I have now purchased a second set for my next rig.
Power Supply Unit (PSU)
The 850w power supplies are good to power 2x R9 290's but not three. So I ran with 3 power supplies and it runs great. I've now purchased another 3 for my next build. I went for the Corsair 850's.
Hard Drive
The SSD was perfect and I've since purchased another for my next rig but dont need the extra HDD for storage as the mining program takes literally nothing from 120Gb. In smOS they say you can use a USB drive but I had a lot of problems with boot errors using USB drives - the second I flashed smOS to an SSD all my errors went away and it's currently been mining for just over a week online, totally stable!
Operating System
I like Windows because it has MSI Afterburner but it doesn't run smooth when the GPU's are mining. Also it requires some time and a lot of messing around to disable Cortana, Search Update, Windows Defender and many other services that run on start-up... as well as adjusting virtual memory and performance settings.
I switched to Simplemining (smOS) and it's beautiful. It does lack some features but the dev (Anton) is really cool and very helpful. He is constantly updating it and working to better the UI and add new features with every update.
I did try Hive OS, PerfectMining and even just Ubuntu... Hive OS & Perfect Mining were giving me problems with fan/temp controls and overclocking controls. Ubuntu worked like a dream but I decided to go with smOS because the dev updates it and as he applies the update, it automatically updates my rig - so thinking about scalability, if I had 10rigs... rather than updating them 1-by-1 in Ubuntu, the dev in smOS can update them all simultaneously whilst I focus on other things.
At time's I've wanted to burn my rig but I never really give up and I'm glad I finally got my rig working. I do have problems with the temps as the cards run at 75-80c and with the weather now clearing up in the UK i'm worring about the upcomming summer so I'm looking at Air Conditioning and Heat Extraction solutions for the workshop.
I will do a thorough VLOG and write up for my second rig build and hopefully it will help anyone else who is thinking about getting into mining.