Messing about

[Diddums 4,346]

Tired of being bored shitless at work, I decided to pack some hardware into a suitcase and take it with me for tonight's shift. I've got:

 

Thermaltake Berlin 630w PSU

 

Asrock H61 PRO BTC motherboard

 

Celeron G1610 CPU

 

4gb DDR3

 

Nvidia 750 ti (MSI Gaming edition)

 

 

Now a few notes, this is going to be a mining PC, hence the 750 ti. I've got another one at home and they're excellent low power cards which actually perform very well for gaming for their price. They have basically revolutionized the GPU world because not only do they perform well, but they don't even require a separate power plug - they get all their juice from the motherboard, and draw no more than 40 watts. Compared to my 290, which is happy to suck 300w from all it's power connnectors. What this means is that you can plug one of these babies into any PC and play games. These cards will NOT run in SLi, which is a real shame. Two of these in SLI would spank most cards out there for next to nothing. I'm assuming Nvidia did this on purpose because two of these in SLI would make most of their mid-range cards obsolete instantly. 

 

The CPU I've gone with is the lowest power model on the market, the Celeron G1610. It's a dual core 2.6ghz jobbie with no hyperthreading. It's made for low power and low cost, and at £30 it's a steal. Running with two Ivy Bridge cores too. 

 

The RAM is half of my main PC's RAM, so Corsair Vengeance 4gb 2133mhz. I've got it running at 1600 because I'm not fussed about performance here, it's all about the mining, so the GPUs are where it's at. 

 

The motherboard is a model designed specifically for mining, and as such has extra power connectors and PCI-E slots. It will take up to 6 graphics cards on risers, although I'll only be using three for now. 

 

I will probably load up some games on to this at some point and see how they fare. Unfortunately the internet here in the headquarters of the biggest telecomms company in the world is so slow I could probably feed this PC binary and it'd be faster, so that's not going to be a for a little while. 

 

 

Here's what it looks like right now:

 

 

Once it's all set up at home, I'll add another 750 ti, and then a 7950. This will be a cracking little miner which will hopefully turn a wee profit slowly. The only issue I foresee is that these 750 tis are Nvidia chips, and the 7950 is AMD, so I might have to work around some driver conflicts but it shouldn't be too hard. 

 

 

That's it. Just felt like rambling on a bit. Any questions, fire away!

[Diddums 4,346]

Oh and I typed up that post on this system, before anyone wonders if it works

[Dattebayo 446]

Yes...I agree, that's interesting.

 

<---doesn't know sh*t about tech stuff

[Diddums 4,346]

Right so I finally managed to test it out a bit, albeit only with WoW, and out in the open I was getting average 70FPS, peaking to over 100, and here's the clincher: I had everything set to Ultra. 

 

Obviously WoW is very easy going on GPUs but I'm still amazed that it did so well. This means I could raid with it quite easily. Excellent, and a good start. I've got the system at home now so I'll assemble it at some point soon and give BF4 a run, see if that helps at all. 

 

On a side note, going back to a mechanical hard drive is just.... wow. 

[Sennex 1,903]

Good or bad?

There are things that Mechanical harddrives excel at, and when I say excel, I mean absolutely crush SSD's.

 

Just as in you really can't beat an SSD for load time

 

Also, give Rift a try for me, I would love to hear what your consistent FPS is in a normal event

[Harrison 202]

Cracking stuff Dave!

[Diddums 4,346]

I think imma take it to work again tonight. Friday nights are always dead anyway. I'll have to see how much space I've got, but if it's enough I'll pack the 7950 as well.

I'll try download rift. Not sure how long it'll take but it's worth a shot.

And for the drive I meant bad. It's so slow compared to an ssd, and that scratchy noise is enough to drive anyone up the wall.

[Sennex 1,903]

And for the drive I meant bad. It's so slow compared to an ssd, and that scratchy noise is enough to drive anyone up the wall.

 

sounds like a bad platter reader

if you can hear scratching then its going, even if its just the platter motor "whirring" thats a sign its going on you

[Diddums 4,346]

Oh it's definitely going, it's nearing a decade old. I refuse to get rid of the bastard though because it was the drive I had in my first "proper" PC and it's also the last component I have from it. It also marks the era where I went from a kid who lived off hand-me-downs to a self-sufficient adult who is capable of buying the stuff he wants.

 

When it dies I'll turn it into a storage box or something.

 

Until then, rock'n'roll.  And scratch. And... stuff.

[Palle 491]

What are you mining? Also which currency is it that you're most likely to make a profit from? I've been interested in building a mining rig of my own but just I don't know if it would be worth the money.

This idea is interesting to me but I haven't found any info on how effective it is

[Diddums 4,346]

I'd stay a mile away dude, it's dead at the moment. I used to mine whatever and convert it to BTC but even the alts are on their arse.