After a lot of time spent doing research into mining, I've decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it a go. The plan is to start off small, and hopefully build on it over the next 2-3 years. However, there's a few things that I'm hoping some of you might be able to advise me on. The plan right now is to build a small rig to do a sort of "proof of concept" experiment. Once that's paid off, I should have additional capital to go to a larger setup, with 10-20 GPUs on a backplane. With that, I'm trying to keep this initial rig to a relatively low budget, aiming to pay it off in about 5-6 months. With that, here's the idea:
1. GPU selection
I figured I'd start off with what seems to be the trickiest aspect of the whole thing. With AMD cards desperately scarce and their prices rising, I've been looking into some NVidia options. Keeping within the budget, going with 3 x EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB SSC seems to be a pretty economical decision. They can be OC'd to ~23MHs on Ether, which looks pretty good to me. They're readily available, and price looks good. I did consider a few othrs, like the 1050 Ti, and a 1070/1060 combo, but 3x1060 3Gb seems to be the best option, especially if I can get one of the models with Samsung memory in it, as that seems to be better performing. I also can't seem to find any decent information on the new 9Gbps 6Gb models. Whether they can put out a better hashrate, I don't know, but the one I mentioned seems to be pretty good.
1a. Expansion plans
Although I know I have to "walk before you run", the plan is to hang on for those new P104-100 cards to be released before I expand. But they're very much on my radar right now.
2. Other hardware considerations
I've seen some pretty... creative.... solutions to utilizing all the lanes on a motherboard for GPUs. However, my plan is to avoid hanging 47 1/2 GPUs from a clothesline cooled by the wind. If this rig works out, I'm going to be expanding this pretty rapidly. The plan is to put this rig in a proper chassis, with proper cooling. So, I'm considering a liquid cooling solution. My thoughts on this are, if I'm going to be overclocking the 1060s to get up to the 23MHs range, liquid cooling might be the way to go. Any thoughts on this?
I'm also planning on using a GIGABYTE GA-X99-UD3P mobo. It's a nice price, supports the Xeon processor I'm planning on using, and has enough slots to get me up and running. Plus, if I expand to using a backplane, I'll still have space for the PCI bus. Any other suggestions for a mobo that's similarly priced and will support Xeon 2011 series processors would be greatly welcomed!
3. Managing my return?
Eventually, assuming I get some sort of a return, I'm going to want to withdraw some money. I'm currently using coinbase and quadriga (because quadriga works in Canada). However, I'm doing some research into the coin-based Visa/Visa Debit cards. There seems to be a new one of those every week! So I'm struggling to find the "best" one. The biggest problem I'm having with them is that some of the ones that seem to be very good, have some hefty charges for any forex transactions. As I'm living in Canada, dealing in USD or EUR is not really an option, so getting charged 2-3% per transaction adds up pretty fast. Any suggestions on "banking solutions"?
Other than those queries, my hardware is all fairly standard. As mentioned before, I've been doing a lot of research on this, reading through a lot of message boards, online guides etc. I think I've got a fairly good grasp of it, but it's also kinda new territory for me! So any help, tips, advice would be greatly appreciated!
I'm aiming to buy the hardware in the next week or two, so I'll be keeping you all updated too!
-n