Tag Archives: cryptocurrency

How not to embarrass yourself when writing about mining (or anything else)

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Disclosure: I work with Flexpool.io but I am not writing in any official capacity or with any proprietary knowledge. You should mine with Flexpool, but it’s not mandatory.

Disclaimer: Hashrate rental can be expensive and unprofitable if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do know what you’re doing and can manage your risk, check out Nicehash and MiningRigRentals and maybe you too can embarrass the tech media. (Referral links may earn me a little bit.)

This morning, some “news” pieces came out in some of the tech press. Not the big names most people have heard of, but venues with some reach and some expectation of basic knowledge.

The headline from notebookcheck dot net

The “story” was that some unreleased and possibly even non-existent GPUs were mining to Flexpool, the number 5 Ethereum mining pool in the world This sounds pretty amazing, even unbelievable, although after the April 1, 2021 Captains Workspace reveal video on the “RTX 4090” you realize some people will believe anything.

The evidence? High hashrate and workers named “4090TI-Overclock-Test,” “RX7000-Control-Test,” and “RX7000-Overclock-Test.”

The “story” got a lot of coverage, starting at wccftech, spreading to Notebook Check and Digital Trends, and later with a bit more justifiable incredulity from Windows Central and TechRadar. Also seen at TweakTown after this was originally posted.

A couple of these mention later in the article, after breathless references to the scale and/or specs of the cards named and the vast amounts of Ethereum that could be mined by these farms, that it’s unlikely.

How could this happen?

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Quick Take: Is It Too Late To Get Into Crypto?

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Short answer: Maybe. But read on.

In January 2021, I refreshed my involvement with cryptocurrency mining, after two years of Ronco-mode Ethereum mining. Set it and forget it worked pretty well, except when a power supply died.

I started a post then, and had told some friends about my calculations for Ethereum mining with the new 30-series from NVIDIA or even my old RX580 cards. A $1500 rig that could pay for itself in six months? Amazing.

But in the week or two after I said that, as James Burke might say, the universe changed. Or at least the crypto and GPU world started to transmute in strange ways.

Continue reading →

Building the Intel NUC Chia Plotter

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In an earlier post, I shared a design for a Chia plotter/farmer based around the Intel NUC NUC10i7FNH tiny computer.

Today I built that machine, and it’s running its first plot as I type this.

If you landed here, you might be interested in my other recent Chia posts:

Pricing disclaimer: All prices, availability info, and links are accurate as of the writing of this article (May 3, 2021) unless otherwise noted. Prices vary from day to day and availability does too. Use this info with a grain of salt especially if you are reading this in 2022 or beyond.

Here’s a quick rundown of what was involved in the process.

Shopping List

Feel free to shop in your preferred venues online or locally, or if you already have components, use them. These links are Amazon affiliate links, and if you use them, I get a few bucks to go toward my next hardware adventure. (I bought my NUC and RAM from Central Computer, a local computer store in Silicon Valley, and the NVMe drive came from Amazon.)

Base computer – NUC10i7FNH1 currently $570 at Amazon. You want the i7, and you want the FNH which is the “high” case that holds a 2.5″ drive as well as the m.2.

RAM – 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2666 or better SODIMM. Crucial 16GBx2 kit around $182 at Amazon. You can install 64GB, but you probably don’t need it with this processor.

Boot drive – I used a Samsung PM851 that’s not available on Amazon at the moment. Any 2.5″ SATA drive will do, even a HDD. Amazon has the WD Blue SSD 250GB for $45 or 500GB for $60. If you have something else on hand that’s at least 120GB, go ahead and use it, or if you want some internal plot storage, get something bigger. 

Plotting drive – 2TB Inland Premium NVMe is popular with its 3200TBW rating, about $240 on Amazon but out of stock for the next week. If you watch your drive life, you can use cheaper NVMe or even SATA m.2 storage. But check the TBW (Total Bytes Written, or Terabytes Written) and warranty for your drive and take that into account. 

OS install drive – Get a USB 3.0 drive with 16GB or more space, and use Balena Etcher or Rufus to burn Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to it.I like the Sandisk Ultra 32GB for price point and quality, about $10 at Amazon. 

External long-term plot/farm storage – I’ll be using an 8TB external drive in the near term, but you can use whatever you have, even NAS storage. 

Bonus: Staging disk. A user on r/chia suggested using a staging drive to copy your final plot file to, so that your plot process ends faster than if it has to be copied to slow disk. You can then automate moving the plot files to your external HDD at your leisure, and get back to plotting again up to an hour faster. For this, you can use an external USB 3.0 or better SSD like the WD My Passport SSD ($150 for 1TB), Crucial X8 ($148 for 1TB), or pretty much any SSD that will hold a batch of your plots (1TB will hold 9 plot files). You can also use a directory on your NVMe drive for this, but make sure you don’t let it fill up.

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Wrestling with an ONDA B250-D8P-D4 mining motherboard

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Most casual crypto miners use a conventional motherboard, especially if they have a PC/case/power supply with sufficient PCIe slots for their GPUs. But when you get beyond 2-4 GPUs, you either need a rat’s nest of riser extenders, or maybe (just maybe) a dedicated mining motherboard.

I recently got a new-to-me mining motherboard, and found it painful to find some information and resources I needed. I’m aggregating this information in this post, and it will get updated as I get more relevant experience with the ONDA motherboard in question. If you have any info to share, feel free to comment below and I’ll update. (Last update 2021-03-14)

I’ve mined with an Octominer 8-slot motherboard for 3 years now. In addition to an onboard Celeron 3855U and a single DDR3 SODIMM RAM slot (max of 8GB), it has eight PCIe x16 slots, so you don’t need to use the common x1-to-x16 risers. It’s complicated in that you have to power the motherboard with a number of additional power connectors (in this case, 6-pin PCIe power leads from the power supply). But it sits flat on a custom frame I ordered in 2018, and it doesn’t have much that I don’t need (like lots of drive controllers, extra memory slots, audio, etc). And if you get a custom mining power supply (or breakout board) with only 6-pin connectors, you’re in good shape. 

Octominer has discontinued their 8-slot boards, and the boards may not support the latest GPUs on the market (much like the Ethos mining distro I used on it until this past week). I couldn’t get the board to boot with an AMD 5500XT GPU (Amazon, eBay) in the first slot, for example. So it’s chugging along with eight Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 8GB cards (Amazon, eBay), seven of which have been chugging for almost three years now.

While they still make custom boards, the only ways to get their products are either to find the rare used item on a marketplace, or to buy the one integrated rig they currently sell in quantities less than 10 (their x12 rig with everything but the GPUs, which runs almost $1,000 shipped to the US). 

Another company making custom boards is ONDA. You can usually find them on eBay or other marketplaces for a couple hundred dollars, with a range of slot support. I found a good deal on the B250 D8P-D4 recently, and since I wanted to aggregate a mess of old GPUs, it was an easy way to go. Continue reading →

Getting Started with Cryptocurrency Mining – Building Your First Rig

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This is a post I’ve started three or four times, with different aims and detail, but since I haven’t gotten it posted and people keep asking, I thought I’d start with a simple build plan and some caveats and considerations.

Where I refer to a ‘rig’ here, it’s simply a system dedicated to, or purposed for, mining cryptocurrency of some sort. It might be a single board computer, or a dedicated device, or a PC with one video card (or just a good cpu), or an open frame build with lots of GPUs and a beefy power supply.

Big Hairy Audacious Caveats

The numbers in this article, from prices to currency rates, are based on the time of writing (which may have been a while before the time of posting). They are not guaranteed to last even as long as it takes for this article to post. I am not advising on the value or prospects of any mining or cryptocurrency. You may gain money, lose money, or break even, or your entire city may sink into the ground like a big ole glowing gopher, if you engage in cryptocurrency mining on any level. Do so at your own risk. 

Other Reading

See the sidebar: A note about mining pools

See the other sidebar: Setting up your cryptocurrency wallet

Givens and Druthers

Two ODROID HC1 single board computers, next to a Transporter NAS device.

There are a lot of options out there, from multi-thousand-dollar ASIC miners for Bitcoin to sub-$50 single board computers that can mine Verium or the like. Your budget will determine a lot of the details of your rig, and your power cost may influence it as well. It’s also worth keeping family approval requirements in mind, since an Antminer may be noisy and generate a lot of heat, whereas a Raspberry Pi or ODROID might fit better behind something in your living room.

You can build a starter rig with one GPU, and depending on the GPU, you might be able to bring in $10-20 a week or more from that. Considering that you can do this with an existing PC and operating system, it may be an economical way to get your feet wet, and it won’t require messing with special power supplies, excessive cooling, or riser cards.

If you’re looking to impress people or make a lot of money, well, good luck. But you’ll be looking at open frame systems with riser cables or even multiplexers for PCIe. That’s beyond the scope of this post. Continue reading →