Thinking about mining Ethereum with 4xGPU's, setup?

Nebell

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 20, 2015
Messages
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EDIT:

Alright so what I've ended up with is:

Rig 1:
Intel Pentium 4 G4560
MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon
4gb Corsair Vengeance LPX
5x Asus Phoenix 1060 3gb
Corsair RM850x 850W
64gb USB stick for Windows 10

Rig 2:
Intel Pentium 4 G4560
MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
4gb Corsair Vengeance LPX
5x Asus Phoenix 1060 3gb
Corsair RM850x 850W
64gb USB stick for Windows 10

Rig 3:
Intel Core i7 6700k
Gigabyte Z170x Gaming G1
32gb Corsair Dominator Platinum
1x MSI 1080Ti Gaming X
Seasonic Platinum 1200W

Rig 3 is my gaming machine, it won't be mining constantly, but it will mine about 20 hours per day.

The first problem I encountered was that I bought 2 Kaby Lake CPUs and a Z170 and Z270 mobos.... stupid yeah, but fortunately my main PC is Skylake and I was able to use my old 6700k to flash the BIOS so it can support Kaby Lake. The problem is that my main PC has custom water cooling so I had to disassemble it...

Also I read that USB sticks are fine. Honestly, that was the biggest bullshit I've read in a while. I should have gone for a cheap SSD instead. While my OOOOOLD (6+ years old) Kingston HyperX 64gb is acceptable even though it degraded from old age (used to be 200mb/s and now about 30-40mb/s) it does remind me of early 2000-era HDDs. The NEW Kingston HyperX Savage 64gb is PURE CRAP! It's unusable! Takes 4-5 minutes just to get to Windows from the login screen! There's nothing wrong with it though, diagnostics are showing 200+mb/s transfer rates on it. But whatever Kingston did on this new shit, it's not good for portable Windows installations.

I'm working on setting my system up, but trying to figure out what was wrong with the damn USB stick and having to swap CPUs took too long and now I'm trying to update Windows before I connect everything. And with USB sticks it's bloody slow.... should have bought the damn SSD....
 
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Just one thing to note, even if the price stays the same it will probably take more than 4 months due to the difficulty increases as more users start to mine. Though once it's no longer worth it you can always just sell the GPUs and get the money back.

850W is probably too much, I'm running 3 GPUs on a 500W FM2 APU system (1 470, 2 580s) everything stock. Ram doesn't matter and HDD size doesn't matter as long as you can install windows and have enough room for drivers plus mining software.
 
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Just one thing to note, even if the price stays the same it will probably take more than 4 months due to the difficulty increases as more users start to mine. Though once it's no longer worth it you can always just sell the GPUs and get the money back.

850W is probably too much, I'm running 3 GPUs on a 500W FM2 APU system (1 570, 2 580s) everything stock. Ram doesn't matter and HDD size doesn't matter as long as you can install windows and have enough room for drivers plus mining software.

Thanks for a quick reply. I didn't know I can run it that low, but I guess I'll get 700W just to have some headroom. Maybe even try to oc.

I can't seem to find a 4-way AMD motherboard here in Sweden, seems I will have to go with Intel...
 
Thanks for a quick reply. I didn't know I can run it that low, but I guess I'll get 700W just to have some headroom. Maybe even try to oc.

I can't seem to find a 4-way AMD motherboard here in Sweden, seems I will have to go with Intel...

Minor correction, it's a 470.

You can use risers to run more GPUs, though with my AMD boards I can only get 3 GPUs working :(. I ordered some USB risers that should come in today so hopefully that will allow me to run one more GPU.
 
Hmmm trying to go with 4 580 Nitro+ the price goes up to €2000 for everything, not sure if that is better compared to 4x 570 Pulse ITX (mini).
 
I'd go bigger on the PSU. 500w for three cards not undervolted is maxing that one out. They are generally more efficient and live longer when loaded to 70-80% peak. I'd stick to the 750-850w range for 4 cards.
 
I think that I'm just gonna swap. I have Seasonic Platinum 1200W in my main rig and I will just put it in my mining rig. My main rig is only a single 1080Ti so a 750-850W PSU is enough for it.
 
A 600-650w is more than enough for a GTX 1080T Ti. I'm running a Seasonic MII-620

Yeah but I want to be on a bit safer side, I have 11 fans, a pump, about 15 usb devices (I blame Oculus Rift and all those sensors) and I also overclock a lot.
 
Everything will cost me about €1500. I've never done mining before until lately, but I don't really want to use my main rig for that as I want to be able to play video games (it's a 1080Ti @ 2ghz and reporting 34mh/s)
For the 1080 Ti, the memory clock is important to maximize performance in Ethereum. I get about 38.5 mh/s with core clocks at around 1700 MHz and memory clock at 5950 Mhz and I can reduce the TDP limit so that the Nvidia reported power usage is 165 W.
 
Alright so what I've ended up with is:

Rig 1:
Intel Pentium 4 G4560
MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon
4gb Corsair Vengeance LPX
5x Asus Phoenix 1060 3gb
Corsair RM850x 850W
64gb USB stick for Windows 10

Rig 2:
Intel Pentium 4 G4560
MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
4gb Corsair Vengeance LPX
5x Asus Phoenix 1060 3gb
Corsair RM850x 850W
64gb USB stick for Windows 10

Rig 3:
Intel Core i7 6700k
Gigabyte Z170x Gaming G1
32gb Corsair Dominator Platinum
1x MSI 1080Ti Gaming X
Seasonic Platinum 1200W

Rig 3 is my gaming machine, it won't be mining constantly, but it will mine about 20 hours per day.

The first problem I encountered was that I bought 2 Kaby Lake CPUs and a Z170 and Z270 mobos.... stupid yeah, but fortunately my main PC is Skylake and I was able to use my old 6700k to flash the BIOS so it can support Kaby Lake. The problem is that my main PC has custom water cooling so I had to disassemble it...

Also I read that USB sticks are fine. Honestly, that was the biggest bullshit I've read in a while. I should have gone for a cheap SSD instead. While my OOOOOLD (6+ years old) Kingston HyperX 64gb is acceptable even though it degraded from old age (used to be 200mb/s and now about 30-40mb/s) it does remind me of early 2000-era HDDs. The NEW Kingston HyperX Savage 64gb is PURE CRAP! It's unusable! Takes 4-5 minutes just to get to Windows from the login screen! There's nothing wrong with it though, diagnostics are showing 200+mb/s transfer rates on it. But whatever Kingston did on this new shit, it's not good for portable Windows installations.

I'm working on setting my system up, but trying to figure out what was wrong with the damn USB stick and having to swap CPUs took too long and now I'm trying to update Windows before I connect everything. And with USB sticks it's bloody slow.... should have bought the damn SSD....
 
Let me know how things go. I have most of the parts for my first mining rig, waiting on a couple things now. Hopefully the market will stay OK for a bit.
 
I ordered 2 SSDs. I can't be arsed with USB flash disks and the cheapest mechanical HDDs are almost the same price as SSDs. It takes way too long to update Windows.
 
Tried 5/10 cards, they are terrible at mining because they use Hynix memory. My cards are hashing 15mh/s out of the box and 18-19 overclocked, while other 1060 with Micron/Samsung can go up to 23mh/s.
 
Got one machine working with 5 GPUs.
Both rigs (5x1060 and 1x1080ti) are reporting 128mh/s, the second 5 GPU rig should run the same as the first one, about 91-92. That puts me at 220mh/s. Well, I shouldn't complain, but as soon as Ethereum is done I'm buying 20 Antminers and moving to China. Seriously.
 
I think your issue is going with the 3GB cards, they reportedly won't attain over 300Sol/s in ZCash/ZEC where as the 6GB will.

Keep an eye on DAG size, 3GB won't be able to mine ETH in a few months was the rumor mill, and with the huge spike it might be sooner than later.

Just did a franken rig order, 570, 580, 1x 1060 GB(just to see perf per $) and 2x 1070s. 8TB external drive for Burst and then it's on a SLI Plus Ryzen board with a 1500x that I may have mine monero but at least it can plot the 8TB quite easily along side the GPU plotter.

Have 3 other pcs going each running Dual 570s or 580s just due to not wanting to stop them to move stuff around and tinker with it when it's all currently steady and generating money lol.
 
Does overclocking the core help at all on those? The GTX 1060 3GB's are cut down GTX 1060's, missing 10% of their CUDA cores. This isn't exactly widely-advertised; they should have made them the GTX 1060 3GB and the GTX 1060 Ti 6GB. I'm not sure how much that impacts ZEC mining, but I'd think if it does, bumping core clock may help.

On my 1070's, core clock had a decent impact on ZEC mining speed. I ran them fairly underpowered, but once you got down below a certain number (1600MHz? 1700MHz?), you'd see some considerable drops in performance.

EDIT: Oops, the mention of ZEC and sol/s in the last post confused me. Not sure if the lesser CUDA core count would matter much for mining eth or not.
 
I think your issue is going with the 3GB cards, they reportedly won't attain over 300Sol/s in ZCash/ZEC where as the 6GB will.

Keep an eye on DAG size, 3GB won't be able to mine ETH in a few months was the rumor mill, and with the huge spike it might be sooner than later.

Just did a franken rig order, 570, 580, 1x 1060 GB(just to see perf per $) and 2x 1070s. 8TB external drive for Burst and then it's on a SLI Plus Ryzen board with a 1500x that I may have mine monero but at least it can plot the 8TB quite easily along side the GPU plotter.

Have 3 other pcs going each running Dual 570s or 580s just due to not wanting to stop them to move stuff around and tinker with it when it's all currently steady and generating money lol.

These cards were €200 each, way cheaper than everything else. It's not 3gb, I was reading about other 1060 users and some of them have 3gb that hash 23mh/s. It's just cheap card with cheap memory.
Also, some reports say that 3GB will be unusable April 2018, some say early 2018. No problem, by that time I plan to get rid of these cards anyway.
470/480/570/580 is impossible to find.

EDIT:
I don't mind them having low hashrate. They were so cheap that I was able to buy more of them. If I went for 6gb cards I would only have the budget for maybe 7 cards... even if they had a higher hash rate, it would not be worth it as 10 of these would outhash 7 of 6gb cards.
 
Does overclocking the core help at all on those? The GTX 1060 3GB's are cut down GTX 1060's, missing 10% of their CUDA cores. This isn't exactly widely-advertised; they should have made them the GTX 1060 3GB and the GTX 1060 Ti 6GB. I'm not sure how much that impacts ZEC mining, but I'd think if it does, bumping core clock may help.

On my 1070's, core clock had a decent impact on ZEC mining speed. I ran them fairly underpowered, but once you got down below a certain number (1600MHz? 1700MHz?), you'd see some considerable drops in performance.

EDIT: Oops, the mention of ZEC and sol/s in the last post confused me. Not sure if the lesser CUDA core count would matter much for mining eth or not.

I have not tried mining zcash. I'm focusing mainly on Ethereum, as it has some chance to go way up in price. I'll just mine until my cards are useless then sell when it's time and get something else.
Overclocking the core on Ethereum doesn't help.
 
Ehhh, I wouldn't say it doesn't help, it is just a matter of diminishing returns. Mining ether on my 1080 Ti, I've found that running underclocked somewhere around 1600MHz (it fluctuates between 1570-1645MHz due to power limit settings) gives solid performance at relatively low power. I can start adding core back in, and my hashing goes up, but it starts to use more power than it seems worth to run that slight bit faster.

Both my 1070's and 1080 Ti were able to be underclocked a good amount before it started to affect hashing speed (really, same on ether on the 1070's, I just didn't do it much when I had them), but they are also considerably more powerful than even a full 1060. I'm just questioning how large of an impact impact the core clock is on a gimped 1060. It may help. It may not.
 
Ehhh, I wouldn't say it doesn't help, it is just a matter of diminishing returns. Mining ether on my 1080 Ti, I've found that running underclocked somewhere around 1600MHz (it fluctuates between 1570-1645MHz due to power limit settings) gives solid performance at relatively low power. I can start adding core back in, and my hashing goes up, but it starts to use more power than it seems worth to run that slight bit faster.

Both my 1070's and 1080 Ti were able to be underclocked a good amount before it started to affect hashing speed (really, same on ether on the 1070's, I just didn't do it much when I had them), but they are also considerably more powerful than even a full 1060. I'm just questioning how large of an impact impact the core clock is on a gimped 1060. It may help. It may not.

On my 1080Ti, I gain at most 0.5mh/s when I bump the core from -400 to +100.

My settings are:
Power Limit: 80%
Core Clock: -400
Memory Clock: +700
Hashing about 36mh/s - 36.2mh/s

I tried increasing the power limit to 117% (can't go higher) and core from -400 to +100 and barely any difference.
 
On my 1080Ti, I gain at most 0.5mh/s when I bump the core from -400 to +100.

My settings are:
Power Limit: 80%
Core Clock: -400
Memory Clock: +700
Hashing about 36mh/s - 36.2mh/s

I tried increasing the power limit to 117% (can't go higher) and core from -400 to +100 and barely any difference.

Nice!

On mine, I'm running:

Power Limit: 55% (this is a 300W TDP card, so this is 165w)
Core Clock: 0 (bounces betwen 1570-1645)
Memory Clock: +900 (AfterBurner reports this as 5900MHz or 11.8GHz on this card.. for some reason this card runs at 5500MHz when not loaded and 5000MHz when loaded. It absolutely cannot handle the +900 when not loaded)

When doing normal office and web browsing, I get 35.7-35.9. When the machine is otherwise idle, it gets somewhere in the mid-upper 37s.
 
Nice!

On mine, I'm running:

Power Limit: 55% (this is a 300W TDP card, so this is 165w)
Core Clock: 0 (bounces betwen 1570-1645)
Memory Clock: +900 (AfterBurner reports this as 5900MHz or 11.8GHz on this card.. for some reason this card runs at 5500MHz when not loaded and 5000MHz when loaded. It absolutely cannot handle the +900 when not loaded)

When doing normal office and web browsing, I get 35.7-35.9. When the machine is otherwise idle, it gets somewhere in the mid-upper 37s.

I tried your settings, +900 memory didn't work out for me. Mine is stable at +700, I will try +800 and see how that turns out.
What card do you use and type of memory? I have MSI 1080Ti Gaming X with Micron memory.

EDIT:
Seems to be doing ok at +800 memory.
 
Gigabyte AORUS 1080 Ti (not the Xtreme).

GPU-Z says Micron as well. Hmmmmmm, it also reports it as 1601MHz, which would be 12.8GHz, not 11.8GHz. I wonder why AfterBurner reports it as 5500 unloaded, 5000 loaded (not OC'd) and 6400 unloaded (which crashes) and 5900 loaded (which works fine). Strange.
 
I lose a lot of mh/s when I go down to 70% TDP. At 80% it hashes 36.8 or so with +800 memory and +125 GPU, but if I drop it to 70% TDP it goes down to 30mh/s.
Which is weird, as if I set it to 80% TDP, GPU-Z is still reporting about 67% consumption, so 70% should be fine without losing that much performance.
 
I managed to get these babies running at 65-70W from the wall. The whole system is drawing about 375W from the wall and hashing 92-93mh/s. Not too shabby, too bad they still hash only 18.5mh/s when oced.
 
Ive got a 2x1070 and had a 1060 in it but is now a 1050 ti because blower style cooler needs a lot more space.

1060 if running cold can do over 300 Sol/s in Zcash and 1070 450 sol/s

And a word of warning, nvidias drivers are absolute garbage and required a lot of device manager uninstall on 1060 and reinstall using same drivers and apparently if you don't install geforce experience it will not allow more than 2 cards to run.

Zcash on 1070s looks to be a lot more profitable than ETH
 
And a word of warning, nvidias drivers are absolute garbage and required a lot of device manager uninstall on 1060 and reinstall using same drivers and apparently if you don't install geforce experience it will not allow more than 2 cards to run.
Good to know. I'm planning on mining in Linux and apparently they don't have the same limitations but I'm still researching (will have all the parts by tomorrow I think).
 
I actually had no issues with latest nvidia drivers (or the recommended ones for Claymore). All I had to do was turn off IGP, turn on 4G decoding (or encoding or whatever it's called in MSI BIOS) and then just plug in cards one by one. It was that easy, plug and play, works like a charm. I never tried more than 5 cards though.
 
I actually had no issues with latest nvidia drivers (or the recommended ones for Claymore). All I had to do was turn off IGP, turn on 4G decoding (or encoding or whatever it's called in MSI BIOS) and then just plug in cards one by one. It was that easy, plug and play, works like a charm. I never tried more than 5 cards though.

Hello, !! look... i have the same mobo as like you, and i have 4 GPU GTX 1060. From the first time works like charm! but one day ago one GPU fails. I don't know if risers fails, or MOBO configuration is incorrect, i don't know... my question is about what is your bios configuration??? you update the bios?? I have all the PCI-E on GEN1 and enable 4g Decoding.

Please help me.
 
Hello, !! look... i have the same mobo as like you, and i have 4 GPU GTX 1060. From the first time works like charm! but one day ago one GPU fails. I don't know if risers fails, or MOBO configuration is incorrect, i don't know... my question is about what is your bios configuration??? you update the bios?? I have all the PCI-E on GEN1 and enable 4g Decoding.

Please help me.

Yeah I updated my bios to 1.7.
I have one PC with 6 cards and one with 7. Both work great.
Did you overclock too much?
If you think it's the risers, swap the cards and ports and see if it still keeps failing.

I followed this guide:
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/11404/msi-z170-7-gpu-bios-setting-step-by-step

But I have since then activated iGPU because I still like to use the computer. No slowdown with iGPU.
 
I have Z270 Gaming pro carbon

It's the same procedure.
I have 2 PCs, one with Z270 and one with Z170, both MSI Pro Carbon. The only difference is the amount of cards they support. Z270 I think supports only 6 GPUs while Z170 supports 7 (or it's the other way around).
 
You said you had the same board as he has.

He does. I have both Z170 and Z270 (the same as him) while I linked a guide for Z170. But there's no BIOS difference between Z170 and Z270. Especially if you update both to the same version.
Both of my mobos are working flawlessly with 7 respective 6 GPUs (I ditched rig 3 in my original post and bought 3 more 1060).
 
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