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!