Building an Ethereum Mining Rig (8 GPU) — 3rd part
Second update to the guide “Building a Mining Rig for Ethereum” — 8 GPU Mining Rig.
This update supplements and does not replace the Guide to Build a 6GPU Mining Rig for Ethereum published on our site. In this article, we will apply what we have learned so far in building an 8 GPU mining rig.
The substantial differences are due to the installation of the latest version of the Windows 10 Operating System, the mining on the Ethermine pool, the transition from 6 to 8 XFX RX 580 8gb GPUs on the Asus Z370-P motherboard. This second update is also perfectly compatible with the previous one.
The first variant is found in Part 4 of the guide: it is no longer necessary to add the environment variables as they will be integrated directly into the bat file to launch the mining.
The second variant is found in Part 7 of the guide and is related to the change of pool — Etheremine — which leads us to use the Claymore software.
Download the latest version at the following link: https://github.com/Claymore-Dual/Claymore-Dual-Miner
Once downloaded, unzip the folder on your desktop. Then open the start.bat file contained in the Claymore folder simply using Notepad. Delete the contents and copy-paste the following command string:
start config.dll -epool eu1.ethermine.org:14444 -ewal “your ETH wallet address” -epsw x -worker “worker”
EthDcrMiner64.exe
Where EthDcrMiner64.exe is the executable, -epool indicates the pool to mine and its port, -ewal is the wallet address and -epsw is the password that we leave blank (X).
Instead of “your wallet address” you will have to put your Ethererum wallet — obviously without the quotation marks — and instead of a worker you will put an identification number in case you plan to build more RIGs (such as RIG1, RIG2, etc … ). We opted for the eu1 pool.
At the following link, many other useful commands for your Rig:
https://github.com/Claymore-Dual/Claymore-Dual-Miner
Below is a short video of the performance in mh / s of our 8 GPU Mining Rig.
Ethermine
The Ethermine pool offers a very well crafted and descriptive interface. In the Payouts section, after only 5 minutes of mining, you can decide the minimum amount of Ether to be sent to your wallet by simply entering the IP address of the RIG.
We have decided to mine directly on the Ethereum address of our Exodus wallet. It is not recommended to mine directly on Coinbase, as reported on the site itself. Sin.
The third variant is, as always, the most difficult of all. Once in Part 5 of the guide you can decide whether to continue or follow this update / variant. If you are here it is probably because you have run into some problem that the guide or the other updates do not allow you to solve.
With the latest version of Windows 10 you may run into a kernel conflict between the operating system and AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute or 2019 Adrenalin drivers. This conflict will prevent you from using Atiflash after installing the driver.
Important: Before making any changes to the BIOS, back up each GPU.
Important: first of all flash the GPUs with the original bios if for any reason you are forced to reinstall the operating system.
The drivers
After installing the Blockchain or Adrenaline drivers, check by means of GPU-Z that the RAM of your video cards is of the relevant brand.
In this round we used the XFX RX 580 8gb with Micron RAM. Start mining to check the performance of “virgin” GPUs. If the results are bad you will have to proceed with a modification of the Bios.
First of all, uninstall the DDU drivers from W10’s temporary mode only in case AtiFlash fails to operate.
Then proceed to flash the GPUs and then reinstall the AMD drivers.
Since each video card is different from any other, the bios mod of the GPU being mined could crash the operating system showing the classic blue screen and displaying an error related to the Atimkdag.sys file.
This could be due to the fact that some GPUs have significantly higher performance in the calculation phase than others. We could call it a factory overclock but not using them for gaming we cannot say it with absolute certainty. These differences can sometimes be noticed when starting the first initial mining with “virgin” GPUs.
After evaluating these two drawbacks, the only solution that eliminates all doubts is to flash all the GPUs, disconnect them except the first, reinstall the drivers (plus Atimkdag patch) and launch the mining command verifying that the operating system is not crash in the next 5 minutes. Turn off the rig again and connect the second GPU so on up to the eighth.
Any software conflicts with GPUs
In the event that one or more video cards should crash the system, disconnect them (including the first). After that, use DDU from the provisional mode, reconnect the GPUs you disconnected and flash with their original bios. At this point, reinstall the Blockchain drivers (plus Atimkdag patch) and start mining to check the performance.
With great surprise we found that all our 8 video cards could not hold the Bios Mod we had applied (we had to put the original bios back on all of them). Reason why, not having been able to test it, it will not be released in this update. All these steps can be “skipped” with a version of Atiflash perfectly compatible with Windows 10 with which the steps between Bios Mod and Original Bios will only require restarting the Operating System.
All the operations relating to the use of Atiflash, DDU and driver installation are reported in Part 5 and Part 6 of our guide to Building a 6GPU Ethereum Mining Rig.
The overclocking of an 8 GPU mining rig
At this point all that remains is to “operate” with an overclocking software. We opt for OverdriveNtool as usual. Our constantly updated guide is available at the following link:
https://www.cryptoall.it/guida-completa-a-overdriventool/
By mounting the original Bios you can proceed with the most extreme overclocking, obviously always in small steps, saving the profile for each GPU. Our guide on OverdriveNTool explains in detail how to do it.
Below is a short video of the yield on the Ethermine pool of our energy-saving 8 GPU rig:
We remind you that all our videos are available on the Youtube channel of miningrigbuilder.it!
Hoping to have been of help, we give everyone an appointment for the third part of the update in which we will experiment with new variants on the Ethermine pool.
Feel free to contact us if you encounter any problems for which the guide has not been fully helpful.
See you soon.
By: cryptoall.it
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