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.