My Future Mining Rig!

jackmanmania(59)

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Hey there Steemers, today I am going to be talking about my new Crypto-coin mining rig for the near future. I plan to mostly mine ZCash with this rig, but will also maybe mine a bit of Ethereum from time to time. I am soon to be also purchasing $100 of X11 Hash power with Genesis Mining. This is so that if my rig is offline, I know that I have another source of income. But enough of me rambling on, lets get onto the build!

CPU:

For the CPU, we have the Intel Pentium G3258, dual core processor. It is clocked at 3.2GHz and does not have hyperthreading. I decided to get a low end CPU as we will be using our graphics cards to mine. Coming in at under $70, this proccesor is a good choice in my opinion. We do not need any additional heatsink as the CPU comes with one already. We will not be overclocking this processor either.

Motherboard:

For the Motherboard, I decided to go with the ASRock Z97 OC Formula. This is a full sized ATX board which uses the LGA1150 CPU Socket. It supports up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM clocked at 3100MHz. However, we aren't using the Motherboard just to add lots of RAM; it supports up to 4-way CrossFire, which is what we will be utilizing. The price tag is pretty hefty, coming in at just above $150.

Hard Drive and RAM:

For the Hard Drive, all we need is 1TB of storage. The WD Caviar Blue offers great price per gigabyte. The drive will be used to install Windows 10 and will store all of our blockchains and wallets which are used. For RAM, we only need 8GB of Kingston HyperX Fury. This PC will only be doing activites such as mining, which does not rely on RAM.

Graphics Cards:

This is where things start to get interesting! To start off with, the Mining Rig will have two AMD Radeon RX 480s. Over the months when I have the money, I will add another two cards to maximize my profit. AMD cards are mostly preferred for mining over Nvidia due to the higher version of OpenCL found on the AMD Cards. It is also better due to the price for performance per card, which sadly beats Nvidia at this moment in time. The only downside to these cards is that they can run at hot temperatures when under load. This is not a problem if you keep the rig in a cool place, or keeping it near a fan. The model of the card is the Sapphire 4GB Nitro+. When it comes to mining, you will expect 30H/s per card when mining ZCash. However, if we decide to overclock, which I most likely will, we can get some extra hash power! When we combine the two cards, that is an average of 60H/s. With this, you could expect to mine just under 0.01 ZEC a day.

PSU:

For the rig to be running at maximum efficiency, we need a high quality and reliable PSU. We decided to go with the EVGA SuperNova 1000G2. The PSU has a maximum wattage of 1000 Watts, which should be plenty even if we decide to add two more cards.

Case:

For the case, I have decided that I will build my own one constructed from Aluminium. It will be much cheaper and will improve airflow. The graphics cards will be put on risers so that they can get better airflow.