5 things I learned after four years of mining crypto
What I learned as a miner in four years of mining, tips, and tricks for beginners and advanced users.
I started looking into mining Ethereum and crypto in general in the summer of 2017 when the price of Bitcoin and other currencies was going ballistic and a few months later towards the end of the year, I started building my mining farm. Right from the start, I had problems with hardware and software and when I managed to fix those I started having cooling problems, in this article I will go over 5 things I learned after mining for about four years and what I would have done differently. I started mining with around 80 GPUs and a few weeks later I bought some more with a total of over 130, right now I have a much smaller number of graphic cards, although I maintained the hashrate by buying newer models with much more hashrate per watt.
Mining rigs uniformity
As soon as I started assembling my rigs I noticed that I made bad purchases since I had many different motherboard models, some supported the 6 GPUs I wanted to have per rig and many others didn’t support them, although they had 6 PCIe lanes. If I simply have made an informed purchase and known beforehand that mining motherboards work the best I would not have lost so much time with buying, testing, and returning motherboards.
Try to keep your rigs all the same model and brand, avoid spending more time configuring each motherboard bios differently, having to buy more cables to hookup monitors, or finding out that the specific motherboard you have doesn’t support the number of GPUs you want to use on that rig.
The second problem was the overclocking and bios modding of the graphic cards that were not all the same model and brand, most of them were 580’s but from various vendors such as MSI, Sapphire, and Asus. They cost me a lot of time trying to bios mod each one and tweak the overclock of each one individually.
TIP: Keep rigs simple with the same motherboards, same GPU and power supply. The CPU and Ram memory should not matter as long as they are supported by the motherboard.
Operating System
Back in 2017, I had no idea about Simple Mining or any other Linux Operating System, and for that reason, i started using what I was familiar with which was Windows.
I never, ever hated my life more than when I was using Windows to mine, having constant reboots, crashes, and blue screens. I was installing and uninstalling different drivers almost every day and googling solutions, bought more ram per rig, and added more power supplied but in the end nothing helped.
One day instead of looking for solutions on Google how to mine with Windows I looked into other Windows substitutes and found Simple Mining OS, the first setup and the following hours it felt like I was a professional miner because the rig was working perfectly without having to reboot it manually or having to install drivers. Simple Mining comes with the drivers pre-installed and not much configuration is needed, simply plug and play.
TIP: Use Simple Mining and make your mining life easy from the start don’t lose more hours messing with Windows.
Overclocking and bios modding
When it comes to overclocking and bios modding using Simple Mining is pretty easy to changes these, but it’s not the applying of these tweaks that i want to talk about but about how these can turn into real headaches and problems.
Avoid constantly tweaking and trying to get the best hashrate possible, just because one of your GPUs can reach 33 Mhs doesn’t mean all the others will achieve that number even if they share the same brand and memory type, it all comes down to cooling and ASIC quality(luck).
Constantly tweaking GPUs and rigs will create more downtime, and you will end up losing hashrate and that means losing more money, all you will gain is a major headache.
TIP: trying to get 1 more mhs from a gpu can create crashes and reboots, making your profit at the end of the day lower.
Cooling
After applying overclock you will see a gain in Mhs/Watt, but you will also see a lot of more heat coming from the graphic cards and that heat needs to be exhausted out of your mining room, or within a few hours the room will be so hot that your rigs will start dropping hashrate in order to not catch on fire.
Cooling the memory on the Gpus is very very important and without a good enough cooling solution, your mining experience will suck and drive you crazy.
Start by having a good exhaust solution for all the hot air that the rig produces while mining and make sure it’s immediately sent out of the room. Focus more on outtake instead of the intake of air, if you have enough outtake power the intake will be automatic as the air always find a way to travel.
You should also look at the GPUs and repaste and apply new thermal pads as these help immensely with cooling.
TIP: focus on outtake of the hot air and keep your rigs as cool as possible. A cool rig will produce a lot more crypto compared to a hot one.
Power and power supply
When it comes to the power supply I learned my lesson the hard way, i bought a bunch of 2000W rated Chinese power supplies, and they all burnt after a few months of use even if they were only pushing around 1200W. Not only i lost my money from this purchase, but they also burnt some of my motherboards making me lose even more money and time since i had to redo my rigs and buy new hardware.
Remember that without stable or good power your rigs will be constantly rebooting and creating huge downtimes.
Buy respected and known brands when it comes to PSUs and if you can use server ones as these are made for high availability and long duration under heavy load.
Another important factor is to know the limitations and conditions of your house or mining farm location when it comes to the power it can deliver. Maybe you have three-phase, maybe you can install 220V, honestly, there is no way around it here call your local electrician and schedule a visit to your farm, so he can help with his professional opinion.
TIP: If you have a big farm ask for help from your local electrician, use good cables and good power supplies.
