Post: #1

After reading the bitcoin thread here and some of the news articles on litecoin I decided to drop some cash into getting a mining rig setup. I have at best a rudimentary knowledge of how to build computer systems and virtually no knowledge on programming, but I built it anyway so if I can do it I'm sure you guys can too. Here's what my setup looks like:

The Hill Billy Rig


That grey thing on the right side of the pic is the 20 inch box giving it some more airflow, the cards get hot while running.

Here's a breakdown of the costs when I bought everything.

Motherboard: I paid $118 so shop around. Ideally you want to get a motherboard that is 1155 socket and has atleast 3 pci express slots, 6 pci express slots if you want to put 6 graphics cards on it which you can do on this motherboard. This one can actually have 7 graphics cards on it but it's not recommended!

Power Supplies x 2: Ok you can spend $350 on a big 1500w or you can do what I do and pay $130 less and get two 1000w power supplies and connecting them together with this whichs costs only 20 bucks. Now you have loads of power.

Graphics cards x4: I got one from asus for $240 on craigs, the other 3 i got em from Dell for $300. My advice, don't pay more then that. Try to pay less if you can and try to get the cards first because without them you can't mine. As you can tell these are out of stock on both links, the biggest challenge you will have is finding the cards. The ones you want to get are any brand of AMD 7950's(DO NOT buy XFC brand cards they suck for mining!!! They are the exception). AMD 7970's and 7990's are better performers but consume more power and are pricier. Your second best choice would be to get AMD r9 280x cards they are faster and a little bit more power hungry then the 7950's, all in all a great substitute as they are also more powerful too.

Solid State Drive: $50. get atleast 40GB one so you have a good amount of room. You won't need much more then that.

DVD Drive: $15. I'm sure you can get it for cheaper like I did I paid 5 bucks for one, you needed it to install the Windows OS and drivers.

Processor: $50. You don't need a fast processor the graphics cards are doing all the heavy lifting here. The intel celeron does more then enough. Make sure it is an 1155 socket processor or it will not work on your 1155 socket motherboard.

Ram: $40. That's a pretty good stick for this setup you won't need much more then 4gb anyway.

Dummy Plugs: $5 You need em so the graphics cards not connected to a monitor don't idle their speeds here's what they look like:

You'll need to buy the little metallic thingy inside of them separately at a fry's electronic store or a Microcenter.

Riser Cards: $20. Make sure you get exactly the ones I listed. I almost made the mistake of getting some larger looking ones that would not have worked.

Angle Aluminum Open Air Case:: I build it from scratch, can be a bit of a pain but it cost me just $20 for the aluminum and I kinda wanted to build it myself, plus I had the screws. If you want a premade case check here.

Operating system: Unless you like to torture yourself or are familiar with linux get Windows. Trust me. I'd still be trying to get linux to run the mining software right now if I didn't switch to windows. As soon as I did I had everything running in a span of about 2-3 hours. It's only $190 to get windows 7 ultimate *cough* Piratebay *cough*.

Grand total for all my hardware came to: $1800

Why would I say this is a good investment currently? For one digital currencies are in our future, and it's currently in it's infancy but there's currently enough programming infrastructure built in that it's generally easy for anyone who has a bit of money to get in and start mining ASAP as long as they got some hardware. Right now theres quite a few currencies and you can mine multiple cards with this setup. You can mine DOGECOIN one week, Litecoin the next week, and another the following week or focus on one, it's up to you.

Now if you've been mining several digital coins with good prospects you can trade them in for bitcoin and then for cash or you can trade them for other currencies and then bitcoin leading to cash, you have tons more options available going this route, waiting for currency values to move in your favor. Some of these coins even have values that some might say are tangible. For example Craftcoin is a coin you can mine that serves as real currency for the game Minecraft. So there might be an incentive to mine currencies that serve a virtual necessity via video games as well to retain a bit more investment security.

Now the other reason I think this investment is a pretty safe is aside from losing some time you can recoup a big portion of your initial investment by selling the hardware you bought. The graphics cards(assuming you bought them at the prices I recommended) are selling for 350-500 dollars. So if you bought 4 you can sell them all for $1200 to $2000 used easily. And the rest of the parts you can sell em on ebay as well. You have a good chance of getting most of your money back.

As for how much money I'm currently "making" with this mining rig here's a breakdown.

According to the cgminer (the mining client that I'm using) I'm making roughly 15,000 DOGECOIN per day which translates to 0.029 Bitcoin per day which is equal to roughly $20 per day. You can see the different profit estimates for each currency here Now this is the current estimated value according to coinwarz.com as I am mining at a hash rate of 2265(KH/s).

Now for a minor breakdown of valuation in terms of dollar amounts if as an example the value of 15000 DOGECOIN doubles then I'm potentially making $40 for that day when I trade it in to bitcoins and then cash. If it's present value(15000 DOGECOIN) gets cut in half I'm potentially making $10 assuming I make the trade from DOGE to Bitcoin to dollars with those hypothetical exchange rates. Also If I trade 15000 DOGECOIN for Bitcoin today and the value of Bitcoin doubles the following day I can potentially make $40, if it's value is cut in half I can potentially be making $10. So there are fluctuations in the value of the cryptocurrency you are mining, and there are fluctuations in the bitcoin price as well which you can take advantage of(or it can become a disadvantage if the prices change in a way where you lose value in what you mine/trade). Also the currency you are mining may go bust and for that reason I recommend mining multiple currencies not just focusing on one(even bitcoin can go down and most likely will) but the currency you are mining might even replace bitcoin in terms of value so again don't put all your eggs in one basket, just my suggestion.

Now how to start mining once you got the hardware bits in place. Ok here is the absolute best guide to get this working ASAP once you got your windows installed on your rig. Click here for the guide. Congratulations you have avoided spending tons of hours trying to figure it out the hard way like I did as I discovered that guide only recently and it got my rig working. You're welcome. If you have any trouble whatsoever with your mining rig visit this place signup and jump in their chatroom. The guys there are super nice and will guide you through any difficulty you might have, they helped me big time.

Now start mining and have fun! It's a pretty sweet hobby and I really enjoyed building it. I setup teamviewer on it so when I'm away from the area for a few weeks or so I can monitor my rig remotely at any time.

Post: #2

How do you get the actual money from mining - Is it sent to you by paypal/bitcoins/cheque in the mail?

And how often can you cash out (get paid for mining)?

Post: #3

I spoke to someone who has traded litecoins for cash and his recommended method for doing that is you first send your LTC(Litecoin) to btc-e.com, convert to BTC(Bitcoin), send those to coinbase.com, then withdraw to your bank account. I have not done this yet(I started mining consistently yesterday) but the guy did me a solid and helped me set up my cgminer perfectly so I'm pretty sure his method of transfer is legit. I also heard this reiterated on other crypto currency forums. It seems to be the cheapest route also.

The currency you are mining is deposited into the account you created in the currency pool website you have chosen. When you start mining these currencies you will want to join a pool as trying to mine solo is pretty much for the big boys. The share you'll get from mining is in proportion to your mining power which you can calculate on coinwarz.com pretty accurately. So if for example you chose to mine DOGECOIN and you chose to mine at the Dogehouse.org mining pool, the DOGECOIN you earned will be deposited on the account you created at Dogehouse.org just log in and you're account balance will show up on the "My Account" section.

As far as I know there are no limits to the amount of transactions you can make in a given day.

Post: #4

Are you maxing out those twin 1kW power supplies? Power is always the thing that gets ya when trying to mine. I know from experience in my area that 750 watts 24/7 is $50 a month.

Post: #5

Thankfully I'm not. An engineer buddy of mine let me borrow his power meter and from the looks of it the rig and the box fan is consuming about
950w-1010w of power on average. Here where I am that comes out to $2.30 per day.

Post: #6

(02-10-2014 08:35 PM)Jackreacher Wrote:  Thankfully I'm not. An engineer buddy of mine let me borrow his power meter and from the looks of it the rig and the box fan is consuming about
950w-1010w of power on average. Here where I am that comes out to $2.30 per day.

so you make $20 a day and it costs you 2.30 in electricity?

Then def def def SCALE UP, x it by 10, 50 or even 100 and you can be wealth in a few short weeks.

Post: #7

Thanks for the excellent write up.

Any opinion on those usb miner sticks? I ain't got the cash for a rig like yours...

Post: #8

(02-11-2014 07:02 AM)2014 Wrote:  

(02-10-2014 08:35 PM)Jackreacher Wrote:  Thankfully I'm not. An engineer buddy of mine let me borrow his power meter and from the looks of it the rig and the box fan is consuming about
950w-1010w of power on average. Here where I am that comes out to $2.30 per day.

so you make $20 a day and it costs you 2.30 in electricity?

Then def def def SCALE UP, x it by 10, 50 or even 100 and you can be wealth in a few short weeks.

I definitely want to but I want to turn a profit(real cash in my bank account) within 3 weeks first before I throw in another $1800. Right now for the most part things are looking good. I have other business pursuits that will require a good bit of cash as well so I don't want to throw in all my eggs into mining. It's still a dubious prospect at best until some return is made.

(02-11-2014 01:56 PM)polar Wrote:  Thanks for the excellent write up.

Any opinion on those usb miner sticks? I ain't got the cash for a rig like yours...

I wouldn't bother with the usb sticks. Unless they are churning out a significant k/hash rate and can be utilized for mining multiple currencies you're better off grabbing an amd 7850 card(should be cheaper than the 7950's but still good) and slapping it onto your existing PC to do your mining if possible. The amd 7850 cards churn out about 60% of what 7950 cards are capable of so that's still pretty decent if you can get them for $180-200. Here's a used one you can buy for $170 on amazon MSI R7850

Post: #9

This is interesting, a few months ago I did some research and everything I saw was that you can't make money using graphics cards, everyone has gone to using ASIC rigs which run $2K and up.

You're clearing around $18 / day, and you've got $1800 invested in the rig, so you'll break even in about 4 months, if I understand your post. I'm very curious to see if your payout stays the same or starts to go down as the complexity of the BTC chains increases.

Post: #10

USB sticks sound intriguing. . . one could, theoretically use the rig at work to do the work. Or rigs.

Post: #11

How long do you expect that you can keep that rate of return?

Post: #12

(02-12-2014 04:49 PM)RockHard Wrote:  This is interesting, a few months ago I did some research and everything I saw was that you can't make money using graphics cards, everyone has gone to using ASIC rigs which run $2K and up.

You're clearing around $18 / day, and you've got $1800 invested in the rig, so you'll break even in about 4 months, if I understand your post. I'm very curious to see if your payout stays the same or starts to go down as the complexity of the BTC chains increases.

You can't mine BTC anymore with graphics cards because of the ASICs, but you can mine any script/altcoin (litecoin, dogecoin, etc.) with graphics cards pretty efficiently.

Whenever you want to cash out, you just trade your altcoins for BTC on an exchange, and then just cash out your BTC for cash.

Post: #13

(02-13-2014 12:11 AM)Fisto Wrote:  How long do you expect that you can keep that rate of return?

It varies. There are sites that pool the efforts of people to mine for coins. They switch what they are mining depending on which non-BTC coins are worth the most at the time.

Look here and you can get an idea of what I mean. Values of different coins at any one time. It is set to default hash rate (basically your "crunching power"). What you earn depends on what your mining rig set up is.

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

The best one (from a comedy perspective) was coinye lol but Kanye sued. Shit you not this was real.

Quote:Coinye, formerly Coinye West, is a scrypt-based cryptocurrency that used the American hip hop artist, Kanye West as its mascot despite West having no affiliation with the project.[1][2] The project has since been abandoned by the original developers following West's filing of a trademark infringement lawsuit against them, though the network itself remains somewhat active.[3]

Post: #14

You are making 18$ a day now. Will you even break even? At least for bitcoins the difficulty is rising really fast, maybe this alt-coins it's a bit slower since there is not any ASIC miners out yet. However they are being developed right now and I guess that will drive the difficulty up a few jumps right. If you can sell the equipment later on it might be good and you might get the money back. But it will also lose value. If power is $2.3 a day then you probably wanna do at least the double in coins/day?
Correct me if I'm wrong.

Nice write up anyway.

Post: #15

I'm still trying to understand this, so maybe the answer is already there and I just can't see it.
Sorry, if this is the case.

My question is how does your rack have to look like (e.g.: $) so make at least $5k/month?

Post: #16

(02-13-2014 11:46 AM)friheten Wrote:  You are making 18$ a day now. Will you even break even? At least for bitcoins the difficulty is rising really fast, maybe this alt-coins it's a bit slower since there is not any ASIC miners out yet. However they are being developed right now and I guess that will drive the difficulty up a few jumps right. If you can sell the equipment later on it might be good and you might get the money back. But it will also lose value. If power is $2.3 a day then you probably wanna do at least the double in coins/day?
Correct me if I'm wrong.

Nice write up anyway.

Bitcoin difficutly has been crazy for a long time, he is scrypt mining, I believe, no asics at the moment. Don't forget, if it all goes to hell he can still either 1) sell for parts recover his investment 2) massive editing/gaming rig or 3) he could donate his crunching power to one of those scientific studies https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115314.0

There are no guarantees obviously, but if he gets to break even he ends up with some gear. There has to be some risk to make some money, unless you are a banker. http://boingboing.net/2009/10/19/investm...s-bor.html

Post: #17

(02-13-2014 11:50 AM)SwayMe Wrote:  I'm still trying to understand this, so maybe the answer is already there and I just can't see it.
Sorry, if this is the case.

My question is how does your rack have to look like (e.g.: $) so make at least $5k/month?

Something like this, lol. Probably more than that. Just figure out how much one gpu will make you per month and divide. Remember currencies fluctuate. I tried this as a hobby (small setup not the pic below). I was too cheap to buy microsoft windows for my experiment. I tried linux and it killed me. I am just not that technical. I returned the expensive parts and kept a couple of pieces to put into my pc.

Post: #18

LOL, a rack like the one in the op looks a little friendlier. You're pic is a little scary

I found this comparisons
http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...ring#gid=0

Actually Sluicebit sounds "doable".

Post: #19

(02-13-2014 12:20 PM)SwayMe Wrote:  LOL, a rack like the one in the op looks a little friendlier. You're pic is a little scary

I found this comparisons
http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...ring#gid=0

Actually Sluicebit sounds "doable".

I was sort of messing around. You can find all sorts of crazy rigs for mining coins.

Some of them are definitely a dumpster fire waiting to happen.

Just be careful of Sluicebit or any of these guys promising miners of scrypts. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=296585.0

I am not technical enough to understand it all, but when I was researching this matter a few months ago, I saw people debating if it was possible to get asic type miners for litecoin.

Post: #20

(02-13-2014 12:31 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  I was sort of messing around. You can find all sorts of crazy rigs for mining coins.

Some of them are definitely a dumpster fire waiting to happen.

Just be careful of Sluicebit or any of these guys promising miners of scrypts. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=296585.0

I am not technical enough to understand it all, but when I was researching this matter a few months ago, I saw people debating if it was possible to get asic type miners for litecoin.

I didn't take the picture too seriously

I would get them where I live maybe that's possible.

Is there anything that you can recommend? I just started learning about the topic this week
Alpha Technology looks better anyway for $2k.

Post: #21

I just want to build a rig to steal all of Emech's bitcoins.

Post: #22

My bitcoin knowledge is where my rig knowledge is

Post: #23

According to this article from International Business Times, Dogecoin can now be traded directly for Chinese yuan. Whether that leads to an increase in the price of Dogecoin or not only time will tell.

Post: #24

Just a quick update, crypto currencies have been in steep decline in value for the past month so I would advise against making a big investment on getting a rig going right now. I'm still mining but the cost of electricity is on par with the value of what I'm able to mine per day. If these prices stay where they are or if they go lower in the next two months I may even sell my rig. Maybe this is just a dip in the market. I'll keep you guys posted on any new developments I see.

Post: #25

Anyone mining these days? Seems like people have lost some interest, wondering if this may be a smart time to mine. Thanks for your thoughts!