Project: Royal Mine

wndsr

wndsr

wndsr

Soldato
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Manchester, UK
If you've seen some of my other threads in the past few days you'll know I'm trying to get into this mining lark - rightly or wrongly! :p

In addition to the below, I also picked up a AMD HD 7990 for £630 on eBay. It was an eye watering price to pay, but cheaper than all retailers.

YOUR BASKET
3 x Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £329.99 (£989.97)
1 x SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 1300W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £199.99
1 x Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 AMD A85X Chipset (Socket FM2) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £101.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (ST500DM002) HDD £36.95
1 x AMD A4-4000 3.00GHz (Socket FM2) APU Richland Dual Core Processor (AD4000OKHLBOX) £31.99
1 x Samsung SH-118AB/BEBE SATA 18x DVD-ROM (Black) - OEM £12.95
Total : £1,373.83 (includes shipping : FREE).



I'm going to take 8GB of memory out of this machine so didn't have to buy any of that.

For the time being, one card will be connected using a 1x/16x PCI riser cable. At a later date I may put all 4 cards on riser cables. A case won't be required, I'm going to fashion something myself.

I'll keep you updated with photos as I go on. It's a learning curve (albeit an expensive one!) for me so any feedback would be appreciated.

Current Mood: Nervously excited.
 
Oh god, I know! When it came up on the day I was like "Nvidia till I die" then I got the mining bug... Well I really am kicking myself now.

What's even worse - the bloke I bought it from on eBay bought it from OcUK on the day!
 
Completed my first power on.

Installed the CPU, HDD, Memory and 1 GPU. Currently waiting on my other machine to format my USB drive then I will go ahead and install Windows. I'm going to tweak one card to see what sort of hash rates I'm getting - will give me a head start for when I'm ready to install the other 2 x 290 cards.

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The Motherboard will seat on something much sturdier than just its box - it's only temporary to get everything installed and running.
 
Awesome, looking forward to the end result.

Im dissapointed its just for mining really and with that cpu it wont be great in games but a simple cpu upgrade will make it a pretty beastly game machine when you get bored of mining.
 
That will be an epic miner! Could spend a bit more for a decent cpu and that would be amazing for gaming as well.

Would that PSU power 4 290's (assuming you'll be undervolting)?
 
That super flower PSU looks sexy, any good? I need an 850ish after crimbo. Seems to be well priced.

Mathematics said:
Could spend a bit more for a decent cpu and that would be amazing for gaming as well.

Would that PSU power 4 290's (assuming you'll be undervolting)?
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I believe he has GTX 770's in SLI on his gaming rig, the flash so and so!
 
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:D Very nice, keep the pictures updated.

Not sure i'd ever take the plunge into buying a massively expensive rig for mining, surely the opportunity has dried up unless you're looking at new crypto currencies all the time.
 
Thanks for the comments guys.

This is only for mining, nothing else. The PSU is doing really well so far, it's a very well made product and has been great. I'm only powering one of three 290's and the 7990 at the moment. Currently getting about 2.3Mh/s. Once I have all four if the GPU's running I'll see how many watts it's pulling. Got myself a little energy meter to keep tabs on things :p

You're right this would be a pretty epic mining rig - I could have got a much better CPU but given it won't be used I didn't bother.

I don't even have a monitor plugged in now, all done via Remote Desktop :-)

Will keep you updated :)
 
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I'm actually thinking about doing this myself, I have a spare crosshair v formula-z board and a HDD so I'm nearly half way lol

Could you run windows 7 on 2 different computers with the same install disk?

Wish I'd picked up a few more 7990 when they were sub 400 quid!
 
Mathematics said:
I'm actually thinking about doing this myself, I have a spare crosshair v formula-z board and a HDD so I'm nearly half way lol

Could you run windows 7 on 2 different computers with the same install disk?

Wish I'd picked up a few more 7990 when they were sub 400 quid!
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Hmm I'm not too sure, but my copy of Windows is... ;)

Doing some more tweaking today. I'm having real trouble getting the 7990 to a sweet spot where each core is doing more than 750kH/s.
 
Spent all day ****ing around with this damn thing, but finally I think I have made some progress.

I was using GUIMiner as it was a bit more noob-friendly than CGMiner, but for some reason it didn't work well with my 7990 at all. As you know, the 7990 has two chips on the single card, so when I booted one chip up and got it going it would hash at about 650kH/s which is acceptable. When I got the second chip going, the first chip would drop significantly and the second chip wouldn't do anything at all - very annoying.

Anyway, I tried doing two instances of CGMiner instead and lone behold, it works. Each chip is now doing approximately 670kH/s so multiply by two, that's a generous 1300kH/s from one card. There is definitely still some scope for tweaking though, so I'll probably do that in the next week or so. I'd love to be able to get close to 1500kH/s out of it.

The R9 290's are also giving me about 880kH/s which isn't bad at all. Again, some scope to improve but my main priority today was getting everything set up and running stable.

I have one more R9 290 to go in - that will be done by using a PCI riser cable from the PCI-1 socket on the motherboard. When the cable arrives I'll get that set up.

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The sound from just these three cards alone is surreal. I can hear it from downstairs even with the door closed!

 
wndzr said:
Hmm I'm not too sure, but my copy of Windows is... ;)

Doing some more tweaking today. I'm having real trouble getting the 7990 to a sweet spot where each core is doing more than 750kH/s.
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Yeah I hear you! :D

I can get my 7990 over 760 khash/s each core on air, but the temps don't like it (102'c) and that's undervolted to 1150mv, now mine are at 680 khash/s each with temps in the low 80's withy 1080mv. :)
 
Mathematics said:
Yeah I hear you! :D

I can get my 7990 over 760 khash/s each core on air, but the temps don't like it (102'c) and that's undervolted to 1150mv, now mine are at 680 khash/s each with temps in the low 80's withy 1080mv. :)
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Are you just running yours in your PC case in the house? When I move this down the cellar it will be much cooler and I'm going to hook up a desk fan to the side to shift all the hot air.

I'd like to see the 7990 do about 750 on each chip.

I haven't undervolted anything yet - I really should because it's pulling about 1350W from the wall and I only have a 1300W PSU. Plus it will save some money!
 
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