My Bitcoin miner
Because I believe in the future of Bitcoins I built this 1.4 Gh/s mining rig:
- MB: MSI 890FXA-GD70 (4 usable PCIe slots)
- CPU: AMD Sempron 145 (2.8GHz, there’s no need for a fast CPU in mining)
- RAM: KINGSTON 1GB CL7 KVR1066D3N7/1G (cheapest available RAM)
- GPUs: 4x Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme (came in stock at Amazon.at and price went up additional 40€ the day after I bought them)
- PSU: CoolerMaster Silent Pro 1000 Watt (80% efficiency guaranteed, but the most expensive item in my rig)
- H-Disk: Transcend JetFlash 600 16GB, USB 2.0 (USB stick, houses Ubuntu 11.04)
- Router: Linksys WRT54GL-EU Wireless Access Point (connects to my main router, wireless)
The only thing that bothered me with this setup is the USB drive. It’s noticeable slower compared to a normal disk and I had to flash the mainboard bios to get it to boot. Once it’s set up it works absolutely fine, though.
The installed rig looks like this:
Two cards are overclocked to 900/300, the other two to 875/300 because of stability issues.
I’m currently thinking about a good cooling solution. Temporarily a fan with a trash-bag is keeping the GPUs down at 61°C, 72°C, 74°C, 77°C (left to right) with fan speed between 70% and 90%. (The 61°C is not a typo btw.)
Here’s the temporary cooling solution:
I’m currently mining with these settings:
poclbm VECTORS WORKLOAD=128 BFI_INT FASTLOOP=false AGGRESSION=13
Yields a whopping 361Mh/s on a 5850 @ 900/300 and 351Mh/s on a 5850 @ 875/300.
I followed this Ubuntu mining guide for my setup. I added AMDOverdriveCtrl with a customized profile to be able to underclock the memory clocks below 500Mhz and get a nice automatic fan control.
Update: Fan-control with AMDOverdriveCtrl doesn’t really work. Sometimes it does, but most of the time I have to set the fan-speeds manually.
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