Mining Ethereum (ETH) is easier said than done, but with a solid guide it’s a relatively easy weekend project and quite rewarding as a passive income generator. I want to share the build I built to save time for others who want to get mining but don’t really know where to start.
Parts list for building an ETH Mining Rig
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/defna/saved/FmGRBm
The show stoppers of this rig are the Radeon RX480s. This is a great card for the ETH hashing algorithm (Ethash) considering its price point of $250 (I’ve even seen these floating around for $200 a few months ago). Given the difficulty of ETH mining, two RX480s will get you a hashing rate of about 58 MH/s which equates to roughly $13.05 per day in profit (p/d) if you sell your rewards immediately and do not include appreciation.
The other benefit of the RX480s is they’re versatile and can be used to mine other cryptos like ETC ($10.57 p/d), UBQ ($10.39 p/d), EXP ($9.58 p/d), ZEC ($6.93 p/d), DCR ($4.17 p/d) etc. One concern of ETH mining is the ever-approaching transition to Proof of Stake. With this build, you won’t be dependent on the viability of ETH mining because you can easily switch to another mining pool by changing a few settings and the RX480s will perform well.
After you order your parts and build your machine, I’d recommend purchasing the Linux-based software PIMP (Portable Instant Mining Platform) https://getpimp.org/. For $30 it is well worth your money as it bypasses the need for a Windows license and will save you the struggle of configuring the GPU drivers on other Linux distributions yourself. It will install directly onto your SSD and your machine will be fully optimized for mining Ethereum.
With that being said, the grand total of the build including software is $991.58. Given the current payout for ETH mining, you could expect to make back your investment in 76 days! Also, this rig is capable of supporting two additional cards which would increase the initial investment by 33% but would also increase the capacity to generate revenue by 100%. If you opt for the 4-card system, you could expect to make back your investment in 57 days!
For those of you who want more information please let me know and I’ll be happy to provide. Also if you have any questions about mining or get stuck during the process of getting your own rig, just shoot me a message and I’ll see if I can help you out :)
Happy Mining!