Our Mining Rig
Intro: You are listening to the Crypto Core Podcast, exploring the fascinating world of cryptocurrency with your hosts Blake and Brandon De Shaw. Please visit us as www.cryptocorelabs.com.
Blake: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Crypto Core Podcast, with your hosts Blake…
Brandon: And I am Brandon De Shaw. Hello everybody.
Blake: So today we’re going to go over miners. If you haven’t checked out our other episodes, please go ahead and do that. We just went over the cryptocurrency apocalypse, which is a good episode to listen to. And we mentioned in that one that we built a miner. So yesterday, we got our parts and I built our first mining rig. So I guess we’ll start this episode off by just going over what’s in our miner. So kind of the nonessential parts are we’re just doing an Intel processor, an Asus motherboard, PSU at 750W of power, which is, if you do some of the mining calculators, that’s a good place to be around and it’s more than sufficient for a 2 GPU unit. And then we did plug in 8 GB of RAM. In terms of pricing of those, those we’re definitely affordable part of the mining rig. And the holy trinity comes together with the GPU units. So we purchased and built it using 2 NVIDIA 1070 TI Mini graphics cards. When those are running, mining kind of playing games at high speeds, they’ll be around 180W each. And so a total, that’s about 360W, and including the other components such as the processor, it is well under the 750W of power that we’re supplying. If you have any questions about those Brandon?
Brandon: Yeah. We should just make everybody aware that without mine building company, it’s very dependent on the supply chains. So I think a lot of you listening probably noticed, but the processing is done by high-end graphics cards. In fact, it really makes the gaming industry, the gamers really mad because it cause their graphics cards, the prices to shoot through the roof. But the supply chain on those, it is stretched so thin, it’s very hard to get capable graphics cards. And so our mining rigs will be built with whatever we can find that is a good unit. And it will have the description, every rig that we sell will have a complete description for what is in it of course. We’ll tell you exactly what’s in it. But the price will vary based on what equipment we use, and equipment’s going to vary some. Like we’d like the cases, at least for right know, we’d like the cases, the motherboards fine. Most of the components will probably stay the same, but definitely on the graphics cards, it’s going to really depend on what we’re able to procure and supply. Because our goal is to build and sell miners here, and then do mining ourselves, and we’re going to be dictated somewhat by the market. And that’s just the way it is. And so we’ll be very honest about what’s in the machines, and the pricing will adjust based on what we have to pay for the components. But just be aware, everybody, that the machines will not all be exactly the same.
Blake: And I’d like to challenge our audience actually that if you’re able to find 1070 TI cards that we’re using, please let us know. Because I think right now, we have two of the last ones that I was able to find through the typical Tom’s Hardware, Newegg, Amazon websites. So this machine is for sale, and I think if you want to take advantage of the high-end graphics card in the market where it’s hard to find, is that please go look at our unit. And it’s going to be on sale at www.cryptocorelabs.com/miningrigs. Well we’ll name it something and then, like Brandon said, we’ll be sure to specify all the parts. And probably throw Amazon links so you can go ahead, and if you want to use those then I think it gives us a little cash back. Right now we’re not going to set up a pay online. We’re just going to do a forum. In terms of if you want us to customize the operating system for your wallet, your email that way is truly plug and play, then we’ll talk to you, and over phone is much easier than to take care of your payment that way. So it will be kind of whoever gets to us first, and once we talked to you it will be solved. And we’ll keep on looking for graphics cards, we have a few more coming, and we’ll keep you informed on those. For anything mining rig just go to www.cryptocorelabs.com for more information. On to kind of finish off that, Brandon mentioned briefly the case. So we’re using Thermaltake Core V21 case. It’s a little cube, it’s nice because there’s plenty of room to support different units. But also it’s very customizable in terms of the fans. So you can kind of move the metal linings, and I think we have three fans in addition to the one that came with the case right now running. And it’s an extremely quiet machine. I set it up last night in Brandon’s office and I don’t even think he noticed it running when he came in to work.
Brandon: Well I noticed it not running, Blake, because the power went out. Uptown Butte, Montana, USA, and so the power was out. And so I looked at the mining machine, and it was off and I was like, “Oh no! Our mining rig is off!” Because we were doing a test and making sure that it was going to mine good for whoever buys it, or if no one buys it we’ll just keep mining with it. And so the power was on so I turned it back on and it hopped back on, right Blake? And it started mining again once we got it turned back on, and it just logs on by itself and then starts mining. But it was incredible quiet. I was blown away by how quiet it was. Sometimes your laptop will be sitting on your lap or you’ll have it on your table, and the fan will kick on and it’s pretty loud. Or your desktop computer will have white noise coming from it. This thing, it’s just shocking how much processing ability you’re doing and you’re literally mining crypto and making money as this thing is just very quietly working in the corner. So yeah, it’s really sweet. Great job Blake on putting it together.
Blake: And I think that’s a good segue. We covered the components, some of which as long as they work together that’s what’s important. You don’t need a big CPU unit or anything like that, just enough to run the GPUs. What operating system are we using? So rather than installing a hard drive and using something like Windows or even Linux, we’re actually using simple mining operating system. So if you bought the machine right now it just comes on a 32 GB flash drive. So I just flashed it using my Windows laptop. You configure it just simply by putting in your email, and then once you need to put that right into the machine it automatically updates and starts mining for you right away. What’s really nice about simple mining, before I forget it, it’s just $2 a month. I will be sure to test out some other ones, but this seem like the easiest possibility right now. You pull up the simple mining website, you enter the same email that you used to flash the disk, and you can see the rig running. You can see the cores just running on, it’s mining right you can even pull up the same screen that the console that’s actually running on the mining rig itself. And that allows you to then configure, and so you can configure to your wallet, and there’s ton of additional settings. You can also control which pools you join in, and for someone who’s just beginning in mining, it was a very easy and it was up and running in a minute. And so I think it’s a good solution to offer, especially if our customers want it to just plug and play, they were able to create that machine. And you can get a hold of us at www.cryptocorelabs.com/miningrigs, we can get your information from you and make that completely customized to your wallet and to your email.
Brandon: And what are we mining right now, Blake?
Blake: We are mining Ethereum.
Brandon: Okay. What can this miner mine?
Blake: So it’s mining right now just at standard settings, about 50MHz per second. So putting that into a calculator with sort of the price of power here in Butte, we’re looking at about $1500 a year at the current price. Now, as all mining machines there is a comfortable level that you can overclock and monitor the temperature, that’s kind of, as you mentioned earlier we’re kind of, in our lab, optimizing these machines for our customer. Once they plug and play they’ll know exactly what is the optimal mining rate that they can use while it’s still in the safe temperature and at the lowest wattage use.
Brandon: And then as far as the coins, this thing can mine a whole variety of coins.
Blake: Yeah, exactly. And so that kind of goes back to the simple operating system, and these pools. You can configure it to mine multiple coins. We’ll create another podcast on this more because it’s a very difficult to understand. So there’s even differences between Radeon cards and video cards in terms of what they can mine, because all goes off of these configurations that people have made. So as we continue in this Wild West, you see more and more configurations popping up that maybe, for example, some coin that wasn’t able to be mined by NVIDIA now can be supported by NVIDIA cards. So we’ll go into that more, I think I have some notes on that. But down the road in terms of mining episode, update on our bills. We can talk more about mining pools. So right now I’m in a pool called Dwarf Pool. It was just part of the configuration I configured to US servers. And basically you’re pooled with other machines and at some point you are able to get your coins out. Each pool kind of differentiates on at what point you can take them out, how much you needed, things like that. So I think it will be interesting for both of us and for our experience to dive into that a little further. Mining wallets, so that’s another thing. I have just a Jax wallet set up on my laptop. And I read online that you almost need better wallet that can handle microtransactions that you experience with mining. And so on our next mining episode, we’ll be sure to cover a few wallets and the advantages and disadvantages of those. Altcoins to mine and then dual mining capabilities, you’re able to mine multiple coins at one time if you set up the machine at a certain way.
Brandon: When do you think we’ll do that episode? Maybe next week? Maybe a week from now or something like that?
Blake: Yep. I think a week of mining and messing around with the different configurations on simple mining will let us learn quite a bit.
Brandon: Yeah. And I want to throw this out there, since we are enterprising entrepreneurs like you all are, if you like to put a contact form and get a hold of us at www.cryptocorelabs.com through the contact form. Email us at cryptocorelabs@gmail.com. And if you want, like if you don’t have the time to build a system or unit and you have an idea on what you want, then we will put our manpower to use here, we’ll give you an estimate. It might be a little bit of a loose estimate based on because the graphics processors, the prices run up and down so much. But if you want us to build you some sort of customized system, then let us know and we we’re very enterprising, we want to serve, so we can probably put something together for you.
Blake: Yeah. Most definitely, Brandon. And I think in the future, we’re building these small rigs right now, getting used to it. And we want to go down the line and start taking advantage of if the GPUs are coming out at cheaper prices again, doing an open, larger scale rig where you can deploy up to 12, even more GPUs at one time. And those I think, at a certain price point, would be great to have a little mining rig. So we’ll get back to you on that, hopefully in the future, here. But yeah, so we’re mining finally at Crypto Core Labs which is exciting.
Brandon: Okay. Is that about to wrap for this episode?
Blake: Yeah I think that is it. So thank you for listening, and please check out www.cryptocorelabs.com.
Outro: Thank you for listening to the Crypto Core Podcast. Please visit us at www.cryptocorelabs.com or email us suggestions and your feedback at podcast@cryptocorelabs.com.