Recently the Logical Mining Farm has been going through some rearrangements, upgrades, and have had to deal challenges of ASICs that have really turned me off of them for good. One major issue with ASIC miners is that they have these proprietary boards and controllers that are really hard to replace if something goes wrong. Also, they are not known to be the best in quality. Most ASIC miners are built by a bunch of Chinese companies that really don't care if they last after they leave the factory. This is why I like CPU and GPU mining. They are more decentralized and easy to access for the every day person, as well as I can build the machine from the ground up, maintenance it, and replace parts with OEM stuff, not a bunch of hard to get proprietary boards.
Failure of One of my Mini Doge ASICs
But the biggest issues are with power and heat. Not only do they make things more expensive, but also more dangerous. Not only that, but these power supplies come with crap wiring and cheap ass plugs that get hot, melt, and can cause issues where they can catch fire.
My Mini Doge V1's power connection was on the back of the miner, right under where the hottest air comes out. Really a stupid design that was changed on the V2 and continued on my V3 where the connections are in the front, so that helps a ton.
As you can see, this was not a good situation. What really caused me to look was I kept getting hardware errors and it was only mining a small fraction of the hash it was supposed to. So I had just pulled the plug from the wall and let it sit because I had a new Mini DOGE V3 coming in from Amazon. When it arrived and I went to replace the miner, was when I saw this... So naturally I started checking EVERYTHING! I even moved to different plugs on the working V3 miner to be safe. I mean they have been going non stop for about a year now, lol, so it's good to check things like that.
New ASIC Came in DOA
And of course my luck... The new ASIC miner I ordered came in DOA. It powered on and connected to the network but immediately started throwing hardware errors that I couldn't fix. I tried flashing the software as instructed, nothing. So here we go submitting a return. I had to send it back to damn China, which it is delivered but still haven't gotten the Amazon refund.
Monero Farm Upgrades
With this frustration, I am just going to focus on really beefing up the Monero farm, which is all CPU mining. I built my second Ryzen 9 3900X box to add to the farm and finally got it off the workbench. My buddy gave me the case for free, and was seriously nasty, so this is super clean compared to what it was, lol. But hey, free is free. I replaced all the fans, and stuck a motherboard/CPU/RAM bundle I purchased used on EBay using gift cards I purchased with crypto. Got it all powered up and started hashing.
Worked on getting it all set up but wasn't getting the proper hash rate as my other Ryzen machine with less RAM gets. After trying all kind of tweaks with the help of ChatGPT, I wasn't able to figure it out. Said it was cheap motherboard limitations, which could very well have been. Well after letting it mine overnight, I noticed the GPU fans were not spinning... Well, it was an old RX480 I had left over from my old 2018 mining farm, but it was bad. So I went digging and found an even older RX460 that worked perfectly fine and actually fixed my CPU hashrate issue. So now I am mining at what I can with the RAM I have, which will be the next update for this machine...
But first... To finish the first Ryzen machine...
Updates Coming to Ryzen1
This machine only has 8GB of RAM where the other has 32GB, but with Random X, you need 2GB of RAM per thread to get the full on hashrate it is capable of. I learned this fighting with the Ryzen2 machine. Once I learned what I needed, I found where my DOA ASIC return money was going to go... 64GB of RAM for both machines, or actually I am going to start with one and leave some in the gift card balance to let be my daughter's Xmas gift, lol.
But the big upgrade that I am getting for this one this week is a Nvidia RTC 3060 12GB GPU to throw in this bad boy then it's DONE! That will get me max XMR hash on the CPU and then give me a nice beasty GPU to use with the MoneroOcean pool I use that also profit switch mines other coins including GPU coins like Ravencoin and Ethereum Classic, then autoswaps the rewards into XMR to add to my payout balance of actual XMR mining rewards.
4 Machines, One Screen and Input Devices
Another addition that made things just incredibly awesome was the 4 machine KVM switch. This allows me to use one monitor, keyboard, and mouse for 4 machines. So I can easily control all 4 machines in one spot without having a bunch of crap everywhere.
Makes for a pretty cool work station!
Dual Purpose Machine- Drones and Monero
One change I made too was that I took one of the Mac Minis that I mine with, the M2 chip, and loaded up all my drone flight simulators on it, so now I have a dedicated sim machine and I can lighten the storage load on my laptop! When I want to sim, I just turn off the miner on that machine, fly the sims till my heart is content, or my eyes are going crossed, either way, then I turn XMRig back on and it's back to mining!
The Last ASIC
This was the first and will be the last ASIC in this farm. I have had ASICs before, so I have been down this path of machines turning to bricks when they break or become useless. It's to the point that it's not even really profitable but the solar offset helps a bit. That and the fact that I subsidize the power with income from options trading. But the DOGE and LTC that I mine with it for a while will be going into TGLD from @leostrategy which launches this week! My XMR is basically my Bitcoin, so I hold on to that and invest in more CPU mining infrastructure, because that's what it's going to be from here on. I can always use and or sell beefy PCs for different purposes, or just part them out and recoup my money if needed. But I don't and I want them to hash away, hash away!
I'll update again once I have gotten the parts and doing the machine upgrades!
Until next time...
Be cool, be real, and always abide with you my dudes!
Posted Using INLEO
It's a terrible time to be buying RAM but it's also not going to get much better in the future, prices of ram (new) have doubled in the last month it's crazy! Flippin AI eating up all the supply.
Melting power connectors are scary man... It's one reason I will never ever ever buy a GPU with the new HPPCIe cables..
I had a gander into mining Monero before but quickly found out that CPU/GPU mining anything really is only viable if your energy is free or extremely cheap. Here in the UK it's flat out impossible to profit without solar. I doubt even with more modern hardware helps much.
I do have some solar and the premiums I made this week alone on selling RIOT blockchain options contracts on the stock market have way more than covered this month's power bill, so this is basically an extra way I get paid and how I go from fiat to crypto without KYC, lol. Fresh minted coins, lol. Y'all's power is certainly more expensive as well. I am not about the 'profit' with mining, but more building out my freedom money infrastructure.
That's pretty much my thought process with my hive witness over the years, The server it's on at one point was costing my £80 a month at the peak of the energy crisis in the UK, now it's about £50~ for the longest time it was always running at a loss, was profiting for a bit and now with the current price it's at a loss again.
But I just think of it as that money spent on power just becomes HIVE. Easier than dealing with getting fiat into the crypto sphere, and also there's the long game of witness rankings to play.
There are a few coins I'd love to do stuff in 'just because' Like Gridcoin with it rewards citizen research via BOINC. Monero perhaps cause privacy etc. though I still haven't really look deeply into it.
But can't justify the increased energy usage for what I get. It's an exceptional loss with gridcoin considering it's a 1.5mil MC coin, great project, actively developed just no exchanges and heavily under the radar.
I've been in Monero since I started crypto in 2018. It's more what I feel bitcoin was supposed to be. I thought about a Hive witness, but with the shape things are in these days, I'll do better mining XMR without having to e-beg for votes.