My DIY Mining Rig! #1

What's up Steemians!

Welcome to my first post about my DIY mining rig!

• Today, I show the process of creating my first self-built Altcoin mining rig! Currently, it's not really a big mining rig because it only consist of 2 GPUs (a AMD R9 290 and an old NVidia Tesla C2050) As soon as the risers cards from AliExpress arrive, I will add more GPUs to it.

First of all, why did I build a mining rig?

• I decided to build a mining rig because I wanted to build something; I had some old graphics cards lying around and the best thing: I don't need to pay at all for electricity. So I thought, I would build my own mining rig!

But what does mining altcoins mean?

• To put it very simply, coins are made out of blocks and your graphic card is used to "solve equations" which then "mine" the block.

Which parts did I use?

I used common mining hardware:

• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B250-PLUS
• CPU: Intel Pentium G4400
• Ram: 4GB of HyperX Fury ram
• GPUs: 1x AMD R9 290, 3x Nvidia Tesla C2050 (at the time of this post, I'm only using 2 gpus)
• PSU: Corsair VS650
• old HDD with 500GB
• OS: Win7

I only bought the motherboard, the ram and the CPU for 170 Swiss franks. I already had the other stuff, which was great because otherwise I would have needed to wait a long time to get some good GPUs. The motherboard can hold up to 4 GPUs, which is enough for me because I only have 4.

I can't tell you the overall value of the rig. The Nvidia Teslas are some discarded GPUs of my father. The R9 290 is from my PC.

Now I had the parts, but nothing to mount them on. I went to our local public workshop to build my own mining rig frame. Here are some photos of the actual building process:

The mainboard is mounted on some placeholders:

The local workshops had this amazing clamping wedge machine:

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the finished mining rig. I only have this bad blurred out picture here:

The 2 GPUs are currently mounted on the mainboard. But as soon as the risers arrive I'll mount all the 4 graphic cards on the wooden retainer.

But the real question is, how much MH/s do I get?

At the moment, I'm mining Ether. The rig achieves 38MH/s. This sounds bad for 2 GPUs but the Tesla C2050 is already very old, which leads to only 8MH/s. The R9 290 gets 30MH/s, which is good. As soon as I can install the other 2 Teslas, I will get total of 54MH/s.
With this power, I would earn:

As I said, I don't need to pay for electricity, so I get the full revenue. In 1.1 month my rig will pay of and then it's FREE MONEY :D

To sum up, it was a great experience to build a mining rig. I already built 2 PC's so I knew how everything works. If you're a complete noob, just read some articles on the web if you also wan't to build one.
But currently I wouldn't recommend building an altcoin mining rig because everybody does it which leads to a GPU shortage. Also, don't use a Nvidia Tesla C2050 for mining for the reason that it needs 200 watts for 8MH/s, which is really bad if you have to pay electricity. I only built this rig, because I already had the GPUs and I wanted to build something, otherwise I wouldn't have done it.

I hope you like the post :D Do you want more?

@jbp