Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Power Supply Lesson #11

"Not as fun" of a miner update today.... This is my first multicard miner, built back in June of 2017. I was dabbling with a few 2 card miners before this one because I had a bunch of old mother boards but this 4 card motherboard is the first one I bought specifically for mining. Today I woke up to find the miner "throttled back" on hashing so it wouldn't overheat. The right fan on the front card had stopped working or was working very slowly which caused the card to heat up so the mining software slowed the hashing rate down to keep the card cool enough to live. I Macgyer'd an extra fan in front of the broken one to keep air blowing on the card. That was an easy fix but when I went to start the rig up, the main power supply had gone out. That was "cheap" eBay power supply 2 of 3 before I learned that not all 800W power supplies are the same and the Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum rated power supplies actually are better than none rated power supplies. Fortunately I had a good Bronze rated power supply new in the box from Best Buy ready to take it's place. Unfortunately that new power supply didn't want to stay running for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. I got the rig back up and running Ethereum (ETH) with a small extra power supply. With this smaller power supply, I could only run 3 of the 4 cards so I moved the 4th card over to another rig to mine Electroneum (ETN) until I can get a bigger power supply in the Ethereum rig.

If you're looking to mine, use this as a lesson on how IMPORTANT the power supplies are in a mining rig. I'm still not going to drop $300-400 on a 1,000 watt power supplies but I am looking for a couple more of those industrial server power supplies.