DIY Mining system for less than £50

[HoneyBadger]

Howdy,

Thanks for tuning in! I'm hearing a lot about mining lately and figured I'd jump on the band wagon - but with a twist, I want to get it all done for under £50 - in case this is a bubble that's about to burst...

I didn't want to do it on my gaming rig (spec in sig) as a couple of guys at work have tried it on their daily PC's at home and the stress on the system seems to have caused weird issues, so one guy had built a system on an ivy bridge CPU and a Maxwell Titan X GPU and he reckons he's getting about £100 a month. The difference is he lives with his mum, so he's not paying for electric! I will be!

I hasten to add I know nothing about mining, so will have to get up to speed!!

So, what prompted this was 2 things:

A facebook Linus video where he hooked up 13 GFX to a special mining board and work having a clear out of old old gear...seeing as I manage the IT setup, I decided to borrow a couple of old bits we were going to dispose off.... (Yes, of course I'm WEEE accredited!)

First up, the system (Which will be running in my garage)

An old DELL PowerEdge 2950 Rack Mount.
32GB RAM
4x 146GB 15K RPM SAS HDD on a PERC 5i controller with RAID5)
2x 750 Watt PSU's (One live, one redundant)
2x Intel Quadcore LGA 771 Xeon CPU's

I think it's a good base, I have a spare 750 Watt PSU in the garage doing nothing so will hookup to this.

But it has virtually 0 graphics grunt...

Cost: £0

PCIE 16x -> 1x adapter

This will allow me to add a 'normal' graphics card to the server, it can physically house one, but can accept up to 3.

Cost: £6

Not strictly needed for this project, but grabbed them from work as otherwise they would have been chucked.

The Cisco is PoE and the battered DELL is a layer 3 switch. Always come in handy with my home lab.

Cost: 0

Now...graphics...

I was looking on ebay for used quadro cards, or 780Ti's, 980, 980Ti's but they're all still commanding quite a price...then I remembered I have a Pascal Titan XP...only it didn't work, I stepped on it ages ago and heard a crack

So I have a motherboard mounted on my wall, so plugged it into that and forgot about it...a weird bit of wall art

So...now I've decided to inspect the card and try and figure out if I can repair it...

Cost: 0 - (As my insurance company replaced it.)

I'll make progress when I can, pretty much over the weekends.

I've ordered a small tool rack to clamp it all too in the grarage, that was from Amazon and cost me £18.

Total cost so far: £24.

 

[Armageus]

If youre paying for electric, then that 2950 is probably the worst thing you could use as a base for mining.
Fbdimm ram, 15k sas drives and a power hungry chipset will eat a lot of power before you even start.
CPUs can't be used productively for mining either, and how are you going to power risers/GPUs when there are no connectors?

I know you want free/cheap but you honestly would be better with any old desktop that has a couple of pcie slots.

 

[HoneyBadger]

If youre paying for electric, then that 2950 is probably the worst thing you could use as a base for mining.
Fbdimm ram, 15k sas drives and a power hungry chipset will eat a lot of power before you even start.
CPUs can't be used productively for mining either, and how are you going to power risers/GPUs when there are no connectors?

I know you want free/cheap but you honestly would be better with any old desktop that has a couple of pcie slots.

OK cool, thanks for the heads up! See, I said I know nothing about mining! The sever under full load cannot pull more than 750 watts though, or have I missed the point?

We have about 40PC's at work we're ditching too, so looks like I'll be better off grabbing one of those.

I was going to remove 3x drives and just run with one - and sell the rest on ebay.
In terms of riser power, if you look at these adapters, they take it from a molex which I gather is 'OK' - the server has ample molex adapters to plug into so that's not really an issue...

Edit: Mrs HB looked up what we're paying per KW per hour and assuming the server was running 247/365 on full chat, it would cost £801 for the year to run ...

 

[Armageus]

OK cool, thanks for the heads up! See, I said I know nothing about mining! The sever under full load cannot pull more than 750 watts though, or have I missed the point?

Nope you are correct it won't pull more than 750 watts, however even with a reduced specification (e.g. single hard drive), I think you would be lucky to get an idle power reading of less than 150 Watts (whereas most recent PCs are ~30-50 Watts)

In terms of riser power, if you look at these adapters, they take it from a molex which I gather is 'OK' - the server has ample molex adapters to plug into so that's not really an issue...

I'd be surprised if it actually had that many molex connectors - they aren't really used in servers. Also as well as powering the risers, you still need to power the GPUs with 6 pin connectors.

We have about 40PC's at work we're ditching too, so looks like I'll be better off grabbing one of those.

Would be a more sensible idea I think - if they are off the shelf OEM PCs, then most HP Mini towers are a good bet (core2duo era), as the board normally has 1x PCI 16x and 2x PCI-E 1x slots. PSU will likely be an issue though (as most don't have 6 pin connectors)

 

[HoneyBadger]

Thanks for the heads up