PART 5: CHEAP DOGECOIN MINING RIG

SOFTWARE SETUP

PART 4: CHEAP DOGECOIN MINING RIG

ASSEMBLY

I'm not going to go into detail on PC assembly, if you are not familiar with computer hardware there is a three part tutorial by Newegg that you can view Here.

If you are familiar with PC assembly then this simple video should tell all.

PART 3: CHEAP DOGECOIN MINING RIG

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

We will need some additional materials due to the overcrowding of the GPU's in a traditional computer case. All three of the GPU's will not fit on the motherboard and certainly will not keep cool enough in a traditional computer case. So I have adopted a design from Crypto Badger. Below is a list of additional materials needed to build the rig.

3X PCI-E PCI Express 16X Riser
1/2W Watt 68 ohm 68R Carbon Film Resistor 0.5W (going to need 9 resistors total)
2X Plastic Storage Crates
8 to 16GB USB Thumb Drive
USB Network Adapter (unless your rig is going to be close to your router)
Square Self Adhesive Vinyl Bumpers
8" Plastic Cable Zip Ties
PC Power Switch
Something to rest the GPU's on

The end result will look something like this. All plastic crates are different, more than likely you will need to make some modifications to the crate in order for it to work, this will require some sort of saw. The resistors are to make dummy plugs for the video cards, if you don't have dummy plugs the OS will idle any card not hooked up to a monitor. The USB thumb drive is going to be the hard drive of the rig, running xubuntu. You will actually need two thumb drives at first, one with a bootable image of xubuntu and one blank 16GB one, or you can do the 16GB USB and an optical drive, hard drive, ect. The reason we use a thumb drive is to save on power use. The USB network adapter is only necessary if you cannot run an ethernet cable from your router to your rig. Vinyl bumpers are placed on the plastic crate underneath the motherboard. I used plastic zip ties to secure the GPU's to the crate and a thin 18" metal thing I found at Walmart to rest GPU's on. You will need a power switch to initially get the rig going, but later we will change BIOS settings to automatically power up, so maybe you can just temporarily borrow a power switch from a PC you already own.

Click here for instructions on assembly including a video.

PART 2: CHEAP DOGECOIN MINING RIG

HARDWARE

The most important part of your rig is going to be your graphics cards, known as GPU's. For this rig we use cheap Radeon 7850's that get about 300 KH/s per card and use very little electric power. There are better cards to use but as you might already know, good graphics cards are either scarce or extremely expensive due to the cryptocurrency mining craze (at least GPU's are hard to come by at the time of writing this article). The most important thing to know is that AMD cards are the best at mining, Nvidia cards are pretty much useless. The second most important part of your rig is your PSU or your power supply unit. You want an efficient PSU because it all adds up. The rig I describe here uses 425 watts which costs me about $30.00 USD a month. You can learn more about PSU efficiency here.

For a list of cards and their perspective hash rates you can go here. The title is "Litecoin Mining Hardware Comparison", but this site can be used as a reference for any scrypt alt coin. Below is a list of cards that you can use in a rig but make sure you consider the fact that there will be different power needs with different cards.

Usable GPU's for your Scrypt Mining Rig
Radeon 7850 (the cheapest option)
Radeon 7950 (the best option)
Radeon R9 280X
Radeon R9 290

Below is a list of hardware that I purchased for my cheap scrypt miner. Keep in mind that I put a few extra bucks into the motherboard, CPU and RAM. I did this because sooner or later companies like Alpha Technology are going to come out with ASIC miners like this which are going to render GPU miners useless. This is what happened with bitcoin when ASIC miners came out for sha-256. So I put a little extra money into my gear so I can convert it into a decent gaming rig later on.

GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD5 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Motherboard
3X PowerColor Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 AX7850 2GBD5-DH
8GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Ripjaw Series 2 x 4GB
AMD FD6300WMHKBOX FX-6300 6-Core 3.5/4.1 GHz Processor Black Edition
Corsair Professional Series  HX 750 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Gold (HX750)

If you want to save a little money you can buy an alternate CPU, Motherboard and RAM like the ones below.

AMD Sempron 145 Processor (SDX145HBGMBOX)
ASRock MB-970EX4 Socket AM3+/ AMD 970/ AMD Motherboard
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

This concludes the list of main hardware that you will need, the next section will include all additional materials needed. Click here to continue to PART 3 additional materials.

PART 1: CHEAP DOGECOIN MINING RIG

INTRODUCTION

First of all, this rig will efficiently mine any cryptocurrency that uses scrypt. The two most popular scrypt or "alt coins" at the time of writing this are Litecoin and Dogecoin. This rig will not mine Bitcoin very well, in fact don't even try to mine Bitcoin with this rig. This rig will provide at least 900 KH/s (kilohashes per second) on the base settings and use about 425 watts. You can insert these specs (hashes and watts) into one of the many online profitability calculators to figure out about how many alt coins you will produce and about how much money you stand to make. A calculator for dogecoin can be found here.

To figure out the best alt coin to mine you can use several sites out there that calculate the most profitable coin at the time. Such sites are Coin Warz and Coin Choose. I prefer Coin Warz over Choin Choose, seems to have more accurate information. At the time of writing this, dogecoin is by far the most profitable coin to mine.

The first step to building a mining rig is to acquire the needed hardware. Click here for a list of hardware.