People that have no idea what they are doing

pandora's box

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 7, 2004
Messages
4,844
Sigh, for ****s sake.

Friend of mine is trying to get in the mining side of cryptocurrency now. He started off with a Titan X (Maxwell) that he bought off of me last year. He bought an EVGA AIO 1080 Ti and a Asus Strix 1080 Ti in the past week. His EVGA card came today and he's getting frustrated that the card wont install correctly in windows. Turns out he used 1 power supply cable (the one with the 8pin and 6pin pcie connectors) to power up the card. Told him he needs to use 1 cable for each power connect on the video card. Kept questioning why and couldn't understand why it would make a difference. He reluctantly tried it, and what do you know? The card works just fine. He said that the card came with a pci-e power cable too and that he needs 3 connectors to power the card....

Last night he bought the parts for a dedicated mining rig (huge ass mining case, mining motherboard, cpu, ram, power supply. He plans on using pcie riser cables to each card as well. I told him I won't be helping with that. Said if he wants to dive head first into this, he better be prepared to diagnose and deal with issues that will come up. If he's going to get frustrated at 1 card not being recognized by windows because he can't connect power cables correctly - god help him. This mining rig along with the video cards he's bought and the money he's invested in the coin market now has him at $10,000 invested. He invested $5,000 into coins at the beginning of January (when bitcoin was at $19,000). He's lost almost $2,600 so far.

This kind of **** frustrates me to no end. People that have no business or no prior knowledge of building mining rigs just see dollar signs and want in without knowing what they are getting into. Going to start charging a fee for people like this that want my help, friend or not.

Oh and on a side note: He opened a NewEgg and Amazon store credit cards to buy the EVGA and Asus 1080 Ti's.
 
Turns out he used 1 power supply cable (the one with the 8pin and 6pin pcie connectors) to power up the card.

It's technically got nothing to do with it being one cable. 1080 Ti Strix has two 8-pin connectors, so if the cable could do two 8-pin connectors, he'd be fine.
 
It's technically got nothing to do with it being one cable. 1080 Ti Strix has two 8-pin connectors, so if the cable could do two 8-pin connectors, he'd be fine.

well.. almost every guide tell you how to connect / wire up your stuff. a few moments of Youtube would have saved him some time.

I hope this guy has better luck than I for been fighting with my 7GPU rig staying up over 3 hrs. that's 135 ETH MH left on the floor when its down and it ALWAYS goes does after I pass out. to the OP's point.. I to just downloaded a miner years ago (when you could mine LTC on GPU's) and than went head first. I consider myself lucky but more than willing to share my XP to help others not make the same mistakes.
 
Well as far as the whole power cable thing fixing his driver issue with the card; that could have been what fixed it or the million other things he was trying at the same time, despite me telling him to try 1 fix at a time. he was trying switching pcie slots, switching power cables, running display driver uninstaller all at the same time.

now he's trying to overclock the card. his system crashed hard when he tried +200 core and +1000 memory. No fucking shit it did. Said he found those numbers on a reddit post. I just told him he needs to go learn how to overclock a video card since he's never done it in his life. He asked me what my MSI Gaming X 1080 Ti is running at and tried running those settings and he crashed again....
 
Some people simply cant learn how to solve problems themselves and need everything spoon-fed.
 
Well as far as the whole power cable thing fixing his driver issue with the card; that could have been what fixed it or the million other things he was trying at the same time, despite me telling him to try 1 fix at a time. he was trying switching pcie slots, switching power cables, running display driver uninstaller all at the same time.

now he's trying to overclock the card. his system crashed hard when he tried +200 core and +1000 memory. No fucking shit it did. Said he found those numbers on a reddit post. I just told him he needs to go learn how to overclock a video card since he's never done it in his life. He asked me what my MSI Gaming X 1080 Ti is running at and tried running those settings and he crashed again....
LMAO...On a serious note, though...charge him. I would set it up for him for a modest fee, since he seems to have no intention of learning this stuff.
 
And this is the biggest issue the PC enthusiast community and now industry has with the mining community. People like this guy that aren't affiliated with the industry jumping head first because they want to try and make a quick buck.

It has created a large demographic of people that are often buying tens to hundreds the volume of hardware a typical customer would thus the insanity we have today on supply shortage.

I'd say your friend is lucky to know you.
 
It's particularly bad when I hear of people buying into mining on credit cards, loans from friends, loans from banks, etc. They could be setting themselves up for some major problems if it doesn't pan out. Then on top of that some of them, maybe many are at risk of setting things up incorrectly and burning up hardware, or worse...
 
he should have just walked into best buy and bought a few rigs with Ryzen + 1080ti's and gone to town. He'd have completely functional systems and warranty + tech support for the hardware he doesnt' understand. I'm actually considering just buying whole rigs with current GPU prices. I want an 8700K for my desktop so I was eyeballin that + 1080ti for my main rig and move my ryzen to mining only.
 
he should have just walked into best buy and bought a few rigs with Ryzen + 1080ti's and gone to town. He'd have completely functional systems and warranty + tech support for the hardware he doesnt' understand. I'm actually considering just buying whole rigs with current GPU prices. I want an 8700K for my desktop so I was eyeballin that + 1080ti for my main rig and move my ryzen to mining only.

Not following what significance Ryzen has in anything.
 
Not following what significance Ryzen has in anything.

Just the fact that prebuilts most likely have a Ryzen3 or 1600 and if including a 1070/1080/1080ti might be worthwhile given the current landscape of high end cards.
 
Well... at least this fellow started out with NVidia cards.

Sounds like he would be 100% screwed if he had gone AMD and had to do the whole bios flash / clock + volt tuning circus act. I have been doing this mining thing for years now and that crap still fought me like hell.
 
LMAO...On a serious note, though...charge him. I would set it up for him for a modest fee, since he seems to have no intention of learning this stuff.
This. It's fine to help people, don't feel you have to fix it all for free. It sounds like he doesn't know how to diagnose or properly research. Be nice about it and if he throws an attitude just inform him that it's marketable knowledge and he is fine to research it himself.
 
Not following what significance Ryzen has in anything.
Ryzens are great miners. Intel with fewer cores and less cache aren't as good per $$$ for mining. Intel is of course far superior in most of what I do everyday.
 
I sell things on ebay and my customers have ended up being a bunch of newbs lately. People that are first time PC builders, trying to build multicard systmes (which is a challenge in troubleshooting even for PC building veterans) and damaging brand new components because they don't know what they are doing --- worse yet - claiming they are DOA and I get them back with physical user caused damage. :(

Sounds like your buddy is in over his head, You'll of course help him because he's your friend. I started mining first among all my friends, and because I'm the most tech savvy, I get all the questions. My wife get annoyed at how often my buddies call for troubleshooting help. And it doesn't stop. The rigs never are stable long term. Patch updates, driver updates, failing risers, powersupplies, motherboards, whatever. It's definitely a bit of a pain. I've gotten to a point now where I tell friends and acquaintances who are interested, but not tech savvy that they should just avoid it - it's too complex. When at first I was pretty much encouraging people I knew to get into it that were borderline techie enough.
 
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