What is best? A few cards in many machines or a lot of cards in a few machines.

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hcforde

Gawd
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Oct 29, 2006
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Considering I am planing on mining 1 coin only, Litecoin, will one scenario be better over the other? So much I do NOT know. Does a higher hash rate in a single machine give you more over all mining power? I currently have 2-2GB HD5870's, 2-290's, 1-570Ti & will probably be getting another. Total of 6, 4 high power usage, 2 low power usage

Current PSU's

750Watt Apevia - 2 Pcie Slots
500Watt Antec -
550Watt Antec SmartPower - 2
420Watt Antec - 1 pcie slot
350Watt Sparkle - 2 Pcie slots

I also have 2-290X cards in my gaming machine(which will be a miner when not gaming) with a 850TX Watt Corsair.

My goal is to use what I have currently if I can get away with NOT having to buy another PSU or Multi-Pcie slot motherboard. I have an ASUS P7P55 WS board that has 5 x16pcie slots and 1 x1pcie slot. This was my old gaming board but can now be re-purposed.

Fewer the number of cards in a system
-the easier it is to trouble shoot
-can easily try different pools or mines or coins

More cards in a system
-lower power usage due to lower system overhead

I will stop here, but any input will be appreciated. Please do not feel you have to answer everything.

Thanks
 
Depends.

If you already have hardware then put it to use anyway you can. Now if you were purpose building a machine, I'm a huge fan of super hash density. The more cards I can get on a board the better. It's just less money I have to spend on hardware other than gpus.

You "hashing power" is just the aggregate of all your gpu's put together. You could build five machines with 1 mh/s, or you could build 1 machine with 5 mhs. It's the same.
 
A mobo with the most slots per price is what really matters. Hard to beat the BTC mobos with 6 slots for $70 bucks. You can always go with a 7 slot board but those are usually $150+ and may not be worth the 1 extra slot. You can use as many power supplies as you want, just make sure they are at least Bronze rated or you're throwing money away on power. I only use Gold or Platinum rated power supplies since they'll pay for themselves, not including mining, in a short time when used 24/7/365. Space to put the rig and available breakers are also a concern. My entire basement is on one 15 amp breaker and will only reliably hold one mining rig pull down 700W. Adding another rig with 2x 290s will blow the breaker every time. I can't put a rig upstairs so I'm stuck with adding a new circuit to my breaker box (or trying to fish an extension cord from upstairs, ugly solution).
 
Why just litecoin? There are auto-switching pools that mine the current most profitable coin, then switch automatically when another becomes more profitable. Most only take like a 1% cut. If you are looking for straight profit that's the way a lot of people do it.

As far as configuring the actual miners, just use some common sense and just don't spread your psu's out too much and you'll be ok. It's ok to drive a mobo & a card or two on one psu, then power a few more cards with another psu on the same rig, people do it all the time.

It's not any harder to redirect a miner with a lot of cards to a different pool than one with only one or two cards. Cudaminer or CGminer handle transferring everything between your cards and the pool you are using.

I also wouldn't mix nvidia cards and amd cards on the same rig. I personally have one Nv rig (6x 750ti) and one AMD rig (2x 7950 & 1x 270). They use different mining software and different graphics drivers, getting both to work on one machine is probably pretty awful to get working stable.

I'm personally a fan of a lot of cards in the fewest amount of rigs possible. I've changed pools a lot since i've started mining, it's nice only having to redirect a couple mining programs vs. many

Also.... TEAMVIEWER IS YOUR FRIEND.... google it if you don't know what it is.

Good luck!
 
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right now the golden child in the hardware world is the R9 270 and nvidias low watt usage 750ti

They don't make for high density rigs, but the performance per watt and/or per dollar is quite attractive.

I'm not a fan of going out and buying 1200W PSUs and 290's at double MSRP, I use any extra hardware I have at home and buy when I find a good deal. Currently at 13GPU's :)
 
_r2h said:
Depends.

If you already have hardware then put it to use anyway you can. Now if you were purpose building a machine, I'm a huge fan of super hash density. The more cards I can get on a board the better. It's just less money I have to spend on hardware other than gpus.

You "hashing power" is just the aggregate of all your gpu's put together. You could build five machines with 1 mh/s, or you could build 1 machine with 5 mhs. It's the same.

EDGE929:
A mobo with the most slots per price is what really matters. Hard to beat the BTC mobos with 6 slots for $70 bucks. You can always go with a 7 slot board but those are usually $150+ and may not be worth the 1 extra slot.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I did not know if there was an advantage to having a bulldozer VS 10,000 tiny pick axes. I already have a ton of motherboards I can use. The P7P55 has 6 PCIe slots which I will probably use for the R9 290 & HD 5870 AMD cards I have and use the Nvidia cards in another system.
 
jbean7457 said:
Why just litecoin? There are auto-switching pools that mine the current most profitable coin, then switch automatically when another becomes more profitable. Most only take like a 1% cut. If you are looking for straight profit that's the way a lot of people do it.

As far as configuring the actual miners, just use some common sense and just don't spread your psu's out too much and you'll be ok. It's ok to drive a mobo & a card or two on one psu, then power a few more cards with another psu on the same rig, people do it all the time.

It's not any harder to redirect a miner with a lot of cards to a different pool than one with only one or two cards. Cudaminer or CGminer handle transferring everything between your cards and the pool you are using.

I also wouldn't mix nvidia cards and amd cards on the same rig. I personally have one Nv rig (6x 750ti) and one AMD rig (2x 7950 & 1x 270). They use different mining software and different graphics drivers, getting both to work on one machine is probably pretty awful to get working stable.

I'm personally a fan of a lot of cards in the fewest amount of rigs possible. I've changed pools a lot since i've started mining, it's nice only having to redirect a couple mining programs vs. many

Also.... TEAMVIEWER IS YOUR FRIEND.... google it if you don't know what it is.

Good luck!
Click to expand...


Yeah, I was planning on putting AMD & Nvidia cards in different systems. Thanks for the tips on Auto-switching pools, and TEAMVIEWER. I take it that pools are better than going it alone then if you are a small player. Less of a gamble.

I was looking here https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/3895-unofficial-multicoinprofit-switching-pool-thread/ and found these pools. Are there any that you recommend over others?
 
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jbean7457 said:
TEAMVIEWER IS YOUR FRIEND
Click to expand...

The truth sir!

If one of my miners crashes and I can't get to it, my wife, who is an Office product genius but a hardware illiterate, can now restart the rig, reset the overclocks, and start cudaminer all from her iPad at the office with Teamviewer. Three weeks ago all that iPad ever did was send lols and smileys
 
LZ_Xray said:
The truth sir!

If one of my miners crashes and I can't get to it, my wife, who is an Office product genius but a hardware illiterate, can now restart the rig, reset the overclocks, and start cudaminer all from her iPad at the office with Teamviewer. Three weeks ago all that iPad ever did was send lols and smileys
Click to expand...

Finally, we have a legitimate use for an iPad, all because of mining.....I don't own one, and got rid of my Samsung Galaxy tablet 2 years ago. I had too many 'portable' devices.
 
If you go with BAMT you can forgo teamviewer and use RDP. Teamviewer is nice for remote rigs though.
 
hcforde said:
Thanks, I did not know if there was an advantage to having a bulldozer VS 10,000 tiny pick axes. I already have a ton of motherboards I can use. The P7P55 has 6 PCIe slots which I will probably use for the R9 290 & HD 5870 AMD cards I have and use the Nvidia cards in another system.
Click to expand...

I started with a 2 GPU's per rig plan mostly because you could do 2 in so many boards without the use of risers and they were super cheap. I bought whole systems for this minus case of course down in the $50 range. I STARTED with those and as it made money I slowly upgraded to 5 GPU rigs. The boards I've tried 6 on gave me issues so 5 seems to be nice and easy without having to do any real work.

These days though USB risers are cheaper than I used to pay for the ribbon risers...
 
hcforde said:
Thanks, I did not know if there was an advantage to having a bulldozer VS 10,000 tiny pick axes. I already have a ton of motherboards I can use. The P7P55 has 6 PCIe slots which I will probably use for the R9 290 & HD 5870 AMD cards I have and use the Nvidia cards in another system.
Click to expand...

All the P55 boards I've ever seen have no more than 4 PCIe slots. You cannot use regular PCI slots for a video card, even with a riser.
 
hcforde said:
Thanks, I did not know if there was an advantage to having a bulldozer VS 10,000 tiny pick axes. I already have a ton of motherboards I can use. The P7P55 has 6 PCIe slots which I will probably use for the R9 290 & HD 5870 AMD cards I have and use the Nvidia cards in another system.
Click to expand...

I am fairly certain your R9 290X and 5870 cannot be ran on the same system together. If you mix HD 5xxx cards with HD 7xxx series etc, the driver cant handle both types. I have a few rigs with my 5870's and then different machines for 7950/7970's. cgminer will just spit out 'invalid nonce' errors when you mix
 
nubbles said:
I am fairly certain your R9 290X and 5870 cannot be ran on the same system together. If you mix HD 5xxx cards with HD 7xxx series etc, the driver cant handle both types. I have a few rigs with my 5870's and then different machines for 7950/7970's. cgminer will just spit out 'invalid nonce' errors when you mix
Click to expand...

Thanks, I was actually not planning on using them together but for other reasons. But that is good info for anyone to know as I really appreciate it. Since I can use numerous machines with no effect on mining output, I can put smaller machines all around the house and monitor them wirelessly.
 
I've had the best luck doing that, many machines vs. just one or a few super rigs. I initially built a super high end rig with 7970's and it's been nothing but a headache. At least 1 card is constantly in RMA land, and they all need constant babysitting. I started just throwing 5870's into any old $10 craigslist box with pci-e i could score and have had great luck going that way. Just make sure your electricity is cheap, watch out if your city has tiered rates. I run a business that uses insane amounts of electricity and is flat rate so I have my boxes plugged in there. If not for that I am not sure how electricity usage compares between the two ways of doing it
 
Depends on what you have and how much you pay for power. Be warned ROI for must new builds if you mining 24/7 is going to be 4-6 months in areas that get cheap power. Here in CA my new 6GPU 750TI dedicated cruncher has almost a 10-11 month ROI atm due to high power costs.
 
I'm also running many smaller rigs instead of a few big ones. 3 cards per system for me.

I find it easier to manage that way. If I lose a system (driver crash or something) or have to take it offline for a short while, I've only lost 3 cards worth of hash power.

I also find it easier to divide hash power amongst multiple pools if needed.
 
Pitbully said:
All the P55 boards I've ever seen have no more than 4 PCIe slots. You cannot use regular PCI slots for a video card, even with a riser.
Click to expand...

This P55 board is an ASUS workstation board with a Nvidia NF200 chip in it to boost the number of PCIe lanes thus it has 5 x16 slots and 1 x1 slot. Check out the board here. http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P7P55_WS_Supercomputer/

It also actively supports Cuda processing.

If a Nvidia partner produces a 1 slot 750Ti I will populate this board with them. Currently I can put 4 cards directly on the motherboard with no problem.
 
nubbles said:
I've had the best luck doing that, many machines vs. just one or a few super rigs. I initially built a super high end rig with 7970's and it's been nothing but a headache. At least 1 card is constantly in RMA land, and they all need constant babysitting. I started just throwing 5870's into any old $10 craigslist box with pci-e i could score and have had great luck going that way. Just make sure your electricity is cheap, watch out if your city has tiered rates. I run a business that uses insane amounts of electricity and is flat rate so I have my boxes plugged in there. If not for that I am not sure how electricity usage compares between the two ways of doing it
Click to expand...

I live in Texas where the electricity is fairly cheap.
 
Carbon_Rod said:
I'm also running many smaller rigs instead of a few big ones. 3 cards per system for me.

I find it easier to manage that way. If I lose a system (driver crash or something) or have to take it offline for a short while, I've only lost 3 cards worth of hash power.

I also find it easier to divide hash power amongst multiple pools if needed.
Click to expand...

Bingo!!!........By being in different pools simultaneously you can see how the pools are performing and make a switch if necessary.
 
hcforde said:
This P55 board is an ASUS workstation board with a Nvidia NF200 chip in it to boost the number of PCIe lanes thus it has 5 x16 slots and 1 x1 slot. Check out the board here. http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P7P55_WS_Supercomputer/

It also actively supports Cuda processing.

If a Nvidia partner produces a 1 slot 750Ti I will populate this board with them. Currently I can put 4 cards directly on the motherboard with no problem.
Click to expand...
better just to build an open air PVC case for 5-10$ in materials and use USB risers.
 
Vengance_01 said:
better just to build an open air PVC case for 5-10$ in materials and use USB risers.
Click to expand...

It is already in a HAF X case. If single slot 750Ti's come out that will be considered if I want a 6th card. BUT, I hear the the 6th card can be tricky to get to work.
 
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