Mining Blog #1 - Unboxing and setup of a few rigs

Hi everyone! Thank you in advanced for checking out my 2nd Steemit post.

A few friends and I were wanting to start a side project and we had just started to research cryptocurrencies and Ethereum and decided to start setting up a little mining operation. Although we know that mining is not nearly as profitable as it was if we started in January of this year (or earlier). It's better to be late to the party than not show up at all, right? The hope is to make back some money with Ethereum mining but be ready for the next cryptocurrency when we discover it.

So here’s what we got so far.

9 x Wire rack shelf
9 x Intel G4400 processors
9 x MSI Z270-A Pro motherboards
9 x 4GB DDR4 ram
9 x Corsair 1200 watt power supply
50 x USB risers
14 x XFX RX 580 video cards
Now we are waiting for the rest of our video cards. We were able to order more RX 580’s and it looks like they will be arriving this weekend or early next week.

All of our systems will be running on Windows 10 because it’s what we are most familiar with. I did have a miner before that I attempted to install ethOS on, and it confused the hell out of me. So for that reason I think it’s best to stick with what I know.

I’m not going to go into full details of how to do the configurations but here is the process that was followed. If anyone has questions about any of the steps or even have suggestions for me please post them in the replies below.

1. Install Windows 10
2. Install AMD Beta driver for blockchain compute
3. Install missing motherboard drivers
4. Update BIOS
5. Unzip Claymore and modify mine.bat
6. Change windows settings (power settings, startup, automatic login, etc)

And now… the fun part (not really) BIOS modding the video cards.

Basically the settings were lowering the clock speed to 1135, changing the memory speed to 2100 with 900mV, adjusting the fan settings and copying the mem strap from 1750 to 2000.

Here’s a picture of what each rig will look like.

Currently each card is getting 29.5ish MH/s for Ethereum and 410MH/s for SIA.

I completely forgot that I wanted to blog about the setup of these rigs that I didn’t take proper pictures. I promise blog #2 will have better stuff to look at.

Since I am new to blogging please post in the replies what you would like to see and know? Also if anyone has some insight on the future of mining since the difficulty of Ethereum is getting harder and it looks like they will be moving to PoS let me know!

I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Previous posts:
My introduction to Steemit and first blog ever!