Building a mining machine can be a daunting task when trying to figure out the right balance of investment versus return. This build is a minimum investment build which yields a high return, both in terms of hashrate/solves as well as electrical usage.
VBIOS Modding
After the initial setup and build I began the process of modifying the VBIOS on the cards as well as tuning the settings on the cards to get the highest performance while maintaining a low electrical footprint.
The VBIOS I used was originally modified by Shados and was the 1500 strap modified BIOS. I used the ATIFlash utility to flash all of the cards and eventually put together a batch file to better facilitate this. Please be aware that flashing your VBIOS can render you card unusable if you don’t know what you’re doing, take care when doing so ensuring that you’re using the correct flashing utility for your respective card.
The ATIFlash utility is available here: Download ATIFlash Utility
The VBIOS used was originally downloaded from anorak.tech and all the credit for this goes to shados. The video cards I used all contained Elpida memory therefore I used the msirx570gamingX_memshift_1500Mem2000.rom. If your card has a different type of memory make sure you either modify the VBIOS yourself or find one that matches your chipset.
Performance Tuning
I found that for the series of GPUs I was using, namely the 6x MSI RX Radeon 570 Gaming X cards, the following settings worked best using Claymore’s Dual Miner while mining Ethereum.
-cclock 1075
-mclock 1900
-cvddc 900
-mvddc 900
Build Components
The following is a breakdown of all the parts used in my build.
- ASUS Z170 PRO GAMING LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 ATX Intel Motherboard
- 6x MSI Radeon RX 570 DirectX 12 RX 570 GAMING X 4G 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support ATX Video Card
- 6-Pack USB RISER PCIe 6-Pin PCI-E 16x to 1x Powered Adapter Card w/ 60cm USB 3.0 Cable & PCI-E to SATA Power – GPU Mining Ethereum ETH Zcash ZEC
- Intel Celeron G3930 Kaby Lake Dual-Core 2.9 GHz LGA 1151 51W BX80677G3930 Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 610
- Rosewill Quark Series 1200W Full Modular Gaming Power Supply with LED Indicator, 80Plus Platinum Certified, Single +12V Rail, Intel 4th Gen CPU Ready, SLI & Crossfire Ready – Quark-1200
- Biwin® 120GB MLC m.2 80mm Sync NAND flash SSD Solid State Drive, Read: 561MB/s Write: 450MB/s
- Steel Crypto Coin Open Air Mining Frame Rig Case For 6 GPU ETH BTC Ethereum
- G.SKILL NT Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Intel Z170 Platform / Intel X99 Platform Desktop Memory Model F4-2133C15D-8GNT
What PSU are you using in this system?