Hardware Discussion Thread

[Crystallas]

You're not wrong.

Everyone is pushing out these optimized architectures on 14nm, which allows more dies per wafer. Yields are fantastic on the GPUs. HBM/2 is a little wonky, but still not far off traditional yields.

Yet, coin miners swallowed everything whole all of a sudden. E-sports gamers in Asia decided to go full-upgrade mode recently. Prices are fucked.

I wish we had more competition in the GPU space. Even when S3 was the last 3rd option in the PCIe era, it was on par for the price range and would help out in times like this.

 

[xer0h0ur]

Miners have absolutely fucked everything. Vega is the current holy grail for mining which is going to make it near impossible to even get one unless you're willing to buy one of these launch gamer packages where they force feed you two games along with the card. I still gotta sell my waterblocked 295X2. Been dragging on putting that up on eBay. Its looking like I am just going to wait for Volta / Navi and pick the king of the two while sticking my water cooled GTX 1080 into the 16 core Threadripper build when it happens. Funnel that would be GPU money towards NVMe storage instead. Daddy wants Special person fast OS performance.

 

[fatbeard]

Miners have absolutely fucked everything. Vega is the current holy grail for mining which is going to make it near impossible to even get one unless you're willing to buy one of these launch gamer packages where they force feed you two games along with the card. I still gotta sell my waterblocked 295X2. Been dragging on putting that up on eBay. Its looking like I am just going to wait for Volta / Navi and pick the king of the two while sticking my water cooled GTX 1080 into the 16 core Threadripper build when it happens. Funnel that would be GPU money towards NVMe storage instead. Daddy wants Special person fast OS performance.

It's not just Vega, it's all the AMD cards. They all mine better than Nvidia so finding one at a reasonable price is a veritable unicorn hunt. I haven't seen an Rx 580 that wasn't marked up at least 50-75%. The markup on the secondary market is even worse, and you know you're getting something that some miner has already put through the ringer.

 

[Ares]

Have any of you tried your hand at bitcoin mining?

 

[Crystallas]

Have any of you tried your hand at bitcoin mining?

Yep. I'm close to the first phase, been using it since late 2010 and was mining from 2011 to 2013 (with a few curiosity tests after, but not as a full time miner). The tech side is a great discussion, but cryptocurrency talk always derailed by someone who wants to discuss the investment side of it, which is barely anything.

 

[Mitchapalooza]

****, I still use my pc that I built back in 2010 lmao. AMD 6 core 1090t black edition was the bees knees when I built my rig. 7 years later and it still runs everything I wanna do. But I still should upgrade, been getting the building bug lately.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G890A using Tapatalk

 

[Monsieur Tirets]

got my 1080 for 415 bucks, so im pretty happy with that... especially seeing as vega 64 is at best on par. im good with my 7700k/ gtx 1080 rig for1080p gaming for the foreseeable future.

 

[Ares]

So I'm back to looking at setting up a server at home.... I am considering installing a rack mount cabinet and just starting with 1 blade for hosting and streaming all my media.

Then i could add on blades in the future if I want additional machines for other purposes.

Any thoughts?

Are racks/blades more trouble than they're worth?

 

[Scoot26]

Is the graphics card market still fucked by Bitcoin?

 

[Crystallas]

Is the graphics card market still fucked by Bitcoin?

Right idea, wrong coin completely. And yes, plus a number of other issues from brilliant(sarcasm) industry leaders that tried to push people to mobile hardware, when consumers were mostly happy with their mobile hardware and instead people wanted traditional hardware to their idiotic surprise. Thus creating a hard to repair memory shortage across the world.

 

[Crystallas]

So I'm back to looking at setting up a server at home.... I am considering installing a rack mount cabinet and just starting with 1 blade for hosting and streaming all my media.

Then i could add on blades in the future if I want additional machines for other purposes.

Any thoughts?

Are racks/blades more trouble than they're worth?

How big of a cabinet are you considering? Also, blade cabinets need to be planned from top to bottom IMO. Not like traditional rack, because you're going to have cooling issues trying to match space and power with some modular(designed to be) configuration. Blades are popular for retrofitting standard racks to fit more systems per 1U space, not because they offer any advantage for any other purpose. So it's really a configuration solution, not a performance or application/cost solution. You can actually wind up wasting space going with 'blade' systems, if you don't plan enough of the rack. Blades are half-width, you will likely(not 100%, just likely) just want as full width 1U enclosure to start, because it will be more flexible to maintain.

 

[Burque]

Anybody have any idea what the ROI on a crypto mining rig might be?

I mean what would it take for the thing to pay for itself if it ran properly and its only job was mining?

 

[Crystallas]

Anybody have any idea what the ROI on a crypto mining rig might be?

I mean what would it take for the thing to pay for itself if it ran properly and its only job was mining?

There are calculators everywhere. All depends on what coin you want to mine, the hardware/software configuration(don't assume all parts of the same number get the same performance results) you have along with the resources you throw at it. And the rest is speculation.

So I would just google some calculators and if you're lazy, just google the hashrate for similar spec'ed hardware as your own. /derail.

 

[Burque]

There are calculators everywhere. All depends on what coin you want to mine, the hardware/software configuration(don't assume all parts of the same number get the same performance results) you have along with the resources you throw at it. And the rest is speculation.

So I would just google some calculators and if you're lazy, just google the hashrate for similar spec'ed hardware as your own. /derail.

This actually leads me to my next question which is more on topic.

Is there a place that you would recommend to find a build out specifically for mining? Or is there a rig that you are aware of that is designed specifically for that?


I know that I just got a gaming rig, but I do not want to mine with that for a specific reason. I have an idea to save on the cost of mining, but it would require me to not have the rig at my home. so considering I have no clue what makes the best mining rig I thought this might be a good place to ask if anyone knows the basics, or a good place to learn the basics.

 

[Ares]

How big of a cabinet are you considering? Also, blade cabinets need to be planned from top to bottom IMO. Not like traditional rack, because you're going to have cooling issues trying to match space and power with some modular(designed to be) configuration. Blades are popular for retrofitting standard racks to fit more systems per 1U space, not because they offer any advantage for any other purpose. So it's really a configuration solution, not a performance or application/cost solution. You can actually wind up wasting space going with 'blade' systems, if you don't plan enough of the rack. Blades are half-width, you will likely(not 100%, just likely) just want as full width 1U enclosure to start, because it will be more flexible to maintain.

I was considering 12U cabinet... seems like some blades are larger than 1U and I wanted to be able to fit 3-5 at least.

When i was asking about headaches I was thinking of cooling/setup/maintenance... I know the blades have no specific performance difference over towers.

I have an entire closet in my office that is basically empty.... the 12U cabinet I was looking at could fit inside half of the closet.... there is no door on the closet.... I would just need to ensure airflow.

 

[Crystallas]

This actually leads me to my next question which is more on topic.

Is there a place that you would recommend to find a build out specifically for mining? Or is there a rig that you are aware of that is designed specifically for that?


I know that I just got a gaming rig, but I do not want to mine with that for a specific reason. I have an idea to save on the cost of mining, but it would require me to not have the rig at my home. so considering I have no clue what makes the best mining rig I thought this might be a good place to ask if anyone knows the basics, or a good place to learn the basics.

This is 2018. Unless you know what coin you want to mine and speculate on, it's useless to try to recommend any rig. BTW, you're not going to mine bitcoin with any regular computer hardware, despite what some articles written by content aggregators(people who just push content, not any form of expert on what they discuss). ETH maybe, but then you need to plan rigs, and right now with hardware in limbo, only established miners add to their machines by taking profit and expanding. New miners to something like ETH, need to build headless machines that are basically not useful for gaming or anything but hashing, so using your system would be a long term gamble on any ROI, to which may or may not happen.

 

[Crystallas]

I was considering 12U cabinet... seems like some blades are larger than 1U and I wanted to be able to fit 3-5 at least.

When i was asking about headaches I was thinking of cooling/setup/maintenance... I know the blades have no specific performance difference over towers.

I have an entire closet in my office that is basically empty.... the 12U cabinet I was looking at could fit inside half of the closet.... there is no door on the closet.... I would just need to ensure airflow.

For a first system in a rack, I always suggest something that works as a standalone. Then you can work on redundancies and modularization. So you want something super flexible, like a 2U full width by my suggestion, because then you can run a number of boards, a number of power supplies(including ATX PSUs which wind up dropping costs a bit, just make sure you get a compatible case), and ATX board standard(EATX, which is what I run along with a supermicro e-atx conversion), a good case will let you run a LOT of drives(which is the most important component of any data/media server.)

Then after that, you can build off redundancy. Backups, specific serving needs, etc.

 

[Ares]

For a first system in a rack, I always suggest something that works as a standalone. Then you can work on redundancies and modularization. So you want something super flexible, like a 2U full width by my suggestion, because then you can run a number of boards, a number of power supplies(including ATX PSUs which wind up dropping costs a bit, just make sure you get a compatible case), and ATX board standard(EATX, which is what I run along with a supermicro e-atx conversion), a good case will let you run a LOT of drives(which is the most important component of any data/media server.)

Then after that, you can build off redundancy. Backups, specific serving needs, etc.

So are you saying... build one of those that can run as a stand-alone tower, but later be rack mounted if need be?

Meaning, don't buy a big rack/cabinet now.... do that later when I want to build multiple servers?

 

[Crystallas]

IDK what realm of budget and future planning you have, but I'm doing a 2x dual Phi 7250 system for a local business. Just one is a $14k system, 4U, and basically serves 60 other wimpy NUC-like machines/laptops in house.

If you want to go Phi, it's going to cost you, plus needs a lot better cooling than any 2U concept. But maybe that's what you want to blow money on? Everyone into system building will do one SMP system at least once.

 

[Crystallas]

So are you saying... build one of those that can run as a stand-alone tower, but later be rack mounted if need be?

Meaning, don't buy a big rack/cabinet now.... do that later when I want to build multiple servers?

Uh, those are options too. I'm saying if you're doing the cabinet(which is fine, they last forever if planned right), make the first system more versatile than just a 1U or blade. Rack cases support different formfactors, and my suggestion was that you use something that gives you the most flexibility. Like an EATX supermicro case.

And when I say case, the thing that slides into the rack is also a case.