How to start crypto mining; full DIY guide januari 2021

Building a crypto miner / space heater can seem like an intimidating challenge. However, it surely is not.

Here is a simple steps program to follow:

• Determine the current most profitable crypto coin: visit www.2cryptocalc.com or www.whattomine.com (my fav).
  
• Get a crypto wallet.
  
• Determine your local electric installation capabilities. 
• Determine your budget / hardware.
• Pick your software.
  
• Make sure your hardware operates correctly.

 Below i will describe in further detail any caveats, list may not be all inclusive. 

 

Get a crypto wallet:
I use www.Exodus.io. Note your wallet is always in the cloud, only accessible with the correct keys / mnemonics). Exodus allows one to see your individual wallet keys and mnemonics, this means you are the real owner of the wallet. I would advice against installing exodus on a heavily used device.
To me it seems very important to make backups of private keys and mnemonics. I use an old resetted mobile phone without wifi / mobile connectivity, simply photograph the codes, quick and easy. If you have a spare SD card, you may wanna keep copies both on the phone and the SD card. If you ever need to read the code, "Google Lens" often can help. These code's, you generally never ever fill them out anywhere online on any website, except in some cases on an official coin it's website, where you navigated yourself manually, thus not clicked a link in any email or non-reputable search engine.

An "hot" exchange wallet is also handy if you want to exchange these coins into real money, or speculate on other coins. www.binance.com is the biggest exchange worldwide, with advanced charting software,  however the whole binance experience feels abit cluttered to me. AFAIK you dont get the private keys to these wallets, this is why it is known to be safer to tunnel money to your own wallet, contrarious to letting it sit in your Binance wallet.


Determine your local electric installation capabilities:
This can seem tricky, but the key is in your fusebox. To be precise, its on your fuses.
The fuse describes Voltage and Amperage. Simply multiply those to determine how much MAX watt you can use from a single fused group. MAX watt means you likely want to keep atleast a 10% margin below that at all time.

Next, you need to research how much groups you have available for your crypto setup, if the group(s) needs to be shared with other (future) devices in the area (of which you also have to determine the max watt combined usage, to calculate how much watt you have available for mining).

Determine your budget / hardware:
Ofcourse there are possibilities to "cheat" abit here, provided you didnt went for the power hungry cards. You can use multiple older power supplies (bridge green with a black wire), if you have enough space and trust them enough (inspect inside closely for  blown capacitors, burned smell and/or visuals) , assuming you will be using USB pci-e risers. The RoHS logo should be able to provide some of that trust. The PSU should not have a 110-220V switch on the rear. Other difficulties lay within their often multi-rails. You need to determine the amount of +12V rails and their capabilities. Usually the PSU describes the wire color for every rail. It is okay to connect one GPU with multiple rails, but not multiple PSU's.  Older light power supplies often have a dedicated rail for the CPU, called the P4 (4pin) connector. Modern PSUs have the EPS (8pin) connector for the same purpose. The 4 wired - P4 connector can supply max 150 watt, the EPS doubles that. Ofcourse, you would want to keep a nice margin of atleast 10% but preferably 20%. So what you would search for on aliexpress is "p4 pcie cable".

  I would always use the P4 for the main PCI riser power, because some cards do not respect pci specs (75w max) and sometimes try to draw much more from the pci-e slot. Light multirail PSUs allow more power to be drawn from the P4 connector as from all the other molex / sata connectors. For the other cable, searching aliexpress for "molex pcie cable" should get you started.

Never use the SATA - 6pin cables. The SATA connector is rated for 56+- watt, whereas the 6 pin requires 75watt. A single or even double molex to pci-e cable would be a very safe bet. Also, never daisychain multiple risers.

Always feel if any cable runs hot, during testing.


For information on mining mainboards, try https://cryptominertips.com/mining-hardware/gpu-mining-motherboards/ DO NOT SKIP as there is some important information, especially regarding using non-mining boards with multiple gpu's (and why it may not work).

Mostly, your mainboard needs to have a bios setting called "above 4g decoding" and set enabled. If you use the onboard video aswell and have its memory assignment set to "max" instead of the highest provided numeric value,  your system may not post, as i experienced.

Another setting is pci-e link speed. If you set it to auto or gen3, you are likely to run into stability issues. Setting it to Gen2 can solve that while maintaining the same hashrate.

Ofcourse, if you have some old boards laying around, you could even use a cheap USB2 vga card for some good old 800*600 video (to keep your terminal logins from interfering with hashrate, or because some cards (rx580) need to be set to compute mode and cannot be attached to an actual screen for that) and install some gpu's on the pci-e slots, perhaps (also) using a "pcie bifurcation device" or " pcie riser port splitter".

Basically, 8gb memory should definitely be enough. It depends if you are planning to perform "dual mining", and if yes, what mining software you use. If it's capable of caching both DAG's into the system memory or perhaps even GPU memory, would make a significant difference, the miner should not constantly be swapping memory to the hard drive back and forth, therefore monitoring tools are your friend. In Windows, press CTRL-SHIFT-Escape and click performance.

CPU depends on if you want to perform CPU mining aswell. Currently, many people have their cpu's mining monero. I would recommend this only if you have researched your cpu's max temperature and use reliable temperature monitoring, and ofcourse if its profitable. I would not set it to use 100% of cpu, as that might even interfere slightly with gpu mining speed, you might miss some miniseconds which causes some share to become expired, that adds up overtime.

Pick your software:
Operating system should be whatever you are comfortable with and used to. On Windows, AMD requires older cards (RX580) to explicitely set in the adrenalin control panel to "compute" instead of "graphics". This can only be switched if no actual screen is attached to the card.

Another good idea is to goto power options and set it to max performance (also disable pci-e link state management), also set it to screen off within 5 minutes.

There is many mining software available.  GMiner and Kawpowminer working both on AMD and Nvidia. Determining which works best on your setup can be done automatically using the Nicehash software. You should finetune your cards first on your preferred coin(s) however, unless you plan to stick with nicehash (which i do not recommend). In your AMD control panel, and/or in msi afterburner clock and voltage speeds can be adjusted.
Deprecated is clayminer, mentioned because it used to be recommended everywhere.

 

Make sure your hardware operates correctly:
How do you do that? Well. You need (free) temperature monitor software like speedfan, and you need MSI afterburner. In MSI, you must check all your gpu temperatures, and you must do this on a really hot day (unless you use airco), and you must google the relevant max temperature specifications, for example the videoRAM (VRAM) chips often are rated max 95 degrees (celsius).
Some cards that you can buy on the used market may have construction errors which causes them to get really close to the limit. In that case, it might be wise to start buying some heatsinks and thermal pads, to modify the card.
I would keep the VRAM to stock speed (don't wanna risk breaking anything), VRAM voltage to stock, set core clock slower, keep voltages at automatic, until you get the best efficiency / watt (which the mining software tends to report). In AMD Adrenalin you can play around with settings like power limit per card in percentages, i would keep that at Auto, unless i experience (potential PSU) instability. And again, very important. Feel all the PSU to GPU wires for overheating.


Now, if you want to use this thing as a space heater, the sky is the limit in how far you can go. You could mod all the CPU('s) / GPU's to use water cooling, and even connect that with a buffer vessel, which perhaps is connected to a central heating system, your floorheating system. In that case, you may want to use nicehash to ensure the device always continues mining, or any software that allows setting up backup pools, using multiple "stratum" links. Connect the system using ethernet wire, wifi, aswell as adding a usb sim card reader, would ensure no connectivity issues.


That concludes my quick but detailed guide on building a cheapo miner, thank you for reading and good luck not toasting your cards and/or burning down your house ;) (pro tip: fire alarm, when you sleep two things can wake you, sounds and smell. The problem is, when you smell it, it' s too late).