Project: Royal Mine

wndsr · 18 Dec 2013 at 16:23

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!

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.

wndsr · 18 Dec 2013 at 19:24

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!

wndsr · 19 Dec 2013 at 10:36

Had a few deliveries this morning.

The GPU is huge! Much bigger than my 770's in this rig I'm sure.

wndsr · 19 Dec 2013 at 22:13

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.

The Motherboard will seat on something much sturdier than just its box - it's only temporary to get everything installed and running.

wndsr · 20 Dec 2013 at 21:54

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

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

wndsr · 21 Dec 2013 at 09:39

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!

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.

wndsr · 21 Dec 2013 at 17:39

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.

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

wndsr · 21 Dec 2013 at 18:14

Mathematics said:
Yeah I hear you!

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.

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!

wndsr · 21 Dec 2013 at 23:16

Doomedspeed said:
That sounds like a ******* Jet engine.

It is! Can't wait to get it downstairs in the cellar

wndsr · 22 Dec 2013 at 12:15

J05H86UK said:
Loving the ghetto test bench, make sure that thing is on full pelt when you are on TS, that way it will drown everything ou! Much load, many monies!

You won't be able to hear me raging

Everything is boxed up again now ready to be moved into the cellar

Will update later!

wndsr · 22 Dec 2013 at 16:57

I spent most of this afternoon fashioning a a case to put the mine in. It was fine just resting on the desk, but I wouldn't want to have it like that long term. The GPU's needed some support too as they were leaning under their own weight which I'm sure over time will put huge strain on the ports. To do this, I took a saw to an old case I had in the cellar and decided to cut in in half!

This left me with the half that I was going to use. Where there are no sides, that's where my desk fan will go to blow air into the case and over the GPUs. I also fashioned some rubber feet for it.

I had a slight problem trying to fit the extra large AMD 7990 into the bottom PCI slot as the case isn't designed for three GPU setups. In true wndsr style, out came the drill! I managed to drill a few holes in the metal just below the last motherboard screw to allow the silver backplate of the GPU to fit through. I did take a photo, but can't seem to find it now.

Everything installed - into the cellar it went. I had to route an ethernet cable from the back room where the router is, under the floorboards and through the beams of the cellar. It was a pain in the backside.

It should be fine like this for a while, at least until I get my desk fan and PCI riser so I can fit my third R9 290 card.

wndsr · 22 Dec 2013 at 17:34

Not currently, they are on 75% and the temperatures are currently 75-87 for all cards, with the exception of the one that's squashed in. I think that card will need to come out and go on a riser cable to be honest.

wndsr · 22 Dec 2013 at 17:50

The second R9 290 is at about 95 degrees currently and has been since getting it going. I don't imagine it will go much over that now to be honest, but we will see.

I'm going to leave it running overnight to see how he gets on.

wndsr · 22 Dec 2013 at 23:41

Stonehouse said:
If thats the case is it not better to put them the opposite way with the 7990 at the top ??

Tried that, but for some reason it didn't like it at all. I could be wrong, but I think it's to do with the R9 290 being a newer chip than the 7990 so it didn't like being trumped by an older card.

wndsr · 24 Dec 2013 at 15:52

With my current setup pulling over 1300W off the wall, I opted to buy a second PSU to power two of the four cards.

I won't be setting it up until after Christmas though. Then I'll have the third R9 290 plugged in too - mega hash!

wndsr · 26 Dec 2013 at 01:09

My last 290 is now plugged in and I'm finally doing all 4.5 MH/s - woo! I think I have the ugliest rig in the entire Project Logs section, but it was worth it!

I even learnt how to use two PSU's together using a safety pin - result! The noise and heat this thing generates is insane. We haven't had to turn the radiators on in the living room due to the heat coming up through the floor from the cellar.

wndsr · 26 Dec 2013 at 01:31

In terms of GBP going into my bank account nothing.

I've mined over 250,000 Dogecoins (currency deemed most profitable on CoinWarz) in about 48 hours. Somebody today offered me £400 for 500,000 - so I'll let you do the math and work out how much I could potentially make per month.

That would be a strict mine-sell setup for instant cash. I'd prefer to sell say, 60% instantly for the income and keep 40% in reserves that I can then trade for other currencies. WorldCoin is an up and coming currency that is expected to rise greatly next year to in excess of $1 a coin so I've just put 1.5MH/s mining that.

Hope that answers your question - there's no clear answer really as it depends on each persons approach to it.

wndsr · 26 Dec 2013 at 02:09

I am so tempted to now sell my 7990 and buy 3 x 280's!

wndsr · 26 Dec 2013 at 02:30

It's not using as much as I thought to be fair - got my energy meter running

wndsr · 26 Dec 2013 at 17:56

Aye that's pretty much right buddy.

As I said in the other thread, I today sold 100,000 Dogecoins for £65 on eBay and have another 150,000 up there on auction due to end in about 48 hours - currently at £55.

I have decided I am going to put the 7990 up for sale and buy the 3 x R9 280 cards. That will give me 6 GPU (3 x 290 & 3 x 280).

My 290's are currently doing an average of 880kH/s and I am going to push the 280's to get 750kH/s, perhaps more if possible. That should take me up to nearly 5000kH/s which I would be very happy with.

All the cards will soon be raised off the motherboard and fitted into a wooden frame that my dad is going to build for me as I'm hopeless at that sort of stuff.

I've also just bought a fan to keep them nice and cool - I'll put this behind them and blow air in the direct of the exhaust. In our cellar there's two bits - the main bit where the mine is and another bit that we is walled off, but there's a hole in the wall that I'm going to use as my intake. For some reason it's much colder in there than the rest of the cellar so it's ideal.

Will update shortly.