So finally my 3 USB risers came in the mail from China today and straight away I plugged everything in, screwed everything down, and did some southern engineering on a power connector so I could have enough plugs to plug everything in and to my surprise it all works.
I haven't quite got to the point where I feel like an official cryptocurrency miner yet but I'm well on the way.
Here is what I've learned so far. For starters I chose this
motherboard as my base simply because it was reasonable on price and seemed to have everything I needed to complete the task of building a mining rig. Sorry about the rotation. I've had no complaints or issues with it so far and as of today it's running 5 video cards just fine using a 1000watt power supply.
I chose Nvidia cards mostly because of familiarity with them in a Linux environment. Yes at 55 I'm a penguin kind of guy, again because I'm poor and can't afford nor would I want to pay a dime to that their Bill Gates.
The first 2 cards were GTX 750ti's and averaged about 300 h/s. At $129 a piece I guess that's not bad. The last 3, just installed as of this posting were GTX 650's I got all 3 for $179 so I figured why not just to prove to myself the concept and see if it would all work. The interesting thing is, the 750's 640 cuda cores out perform the 650's 768 cuda cores as the 650's average a little less than 150h/s. All in all I am getting right at 1kh/s mining monero and xdn on minergate using merged mining.
Recommendations:
If you're thinking about doing something like this I guess the piece by piece way I have done things thus far is fine if you're on a budget like I am. If I had they money tho I would have invested in a higher caliber video card to start with like a GTX 1060 , 1070 , or the pricey GTX 1080ti. I also think I would have gone with a higher core Xeon CPU or a octacore I7 but again I'm poor, but I am well pleased things are working and I'm earning a good deal more crypto than I was when trying to mine with just 3 cellphones.
Looking Forward:
I plan to upgrade my video cards as I already have another motherboard coming to start a new rig with so it will get the old ones. I also have signed up and got all things in order to start solo mining Ethereum as soon as I get a little more time to sit around and wait for the thing to sync to the blockchain I'll be on my way, I think. There is just so much to read and so much to learn, I hope things continue to work out well as they have so far.
That's all for now. Feel free to comment and point an old dog towards useful advice if you like cause I'm really doing all this in the dark in my spare time.... Time for dinner