Mining farm building in 2018 implies the connection of additional capacities to a conventional computer. Part of the processing power is spent on the production of crypto currency. In a simple way, how does a mining farm work?

Recently, Bitcoin and crypto currency in general, are of great interest to users. This topic is new, but farm setting up is not complicated – thanks to a lot of instructions both on the Internet and, directly, with the equipment that you acquire.

Principle of operation

The calculation is done by a video card. Mining usually causes the problem of overheating, so when choosing a video card, it is worth paying attention not only to power, but also for thermal stability. But do not forget that good cooling will ensure stable operation of “hottest” video cards.

Assembling and starting a mining farm

Components and equipment purchasing

When choosing a motherboard for a farm, pay attention to the number of slots for video cards. Most likely the board will not have enough connectors for coolers, so if you want to make the farm more powerful – buy a special hub that forks one connector to 3-8.

Hard disk, CPU and RAM do not mean much for your farm.

When choosing video cards, pay attention to the rating tables and recommendations on the miners forums.

The more video cards you want to use, the stronger power supply is needed. The required power can be calculated based on the power consumption of video cards. Never be stingy in this matter, buying a power supply “back to back”. You should have 10-20% of the power consumption in stock. That is, if in total your farm consumes 950 watts, then it is better to buy 1100 watt power supply.

If your farm will have more than 3 or 4 video cards, then the whole assembly wouldn’t fit in the usual case. In this case the farm has to be placed either on racks or in specially equipped cabinets.

Farm rack assembling

When assembling the rack, you have to take care of three points:

1. Soundproofing. Your farm will have a whole team of coolers, so its work will be very noisy. Therefore, it is extremely undesirable to set up farms in the living room. If there is no free space at all, separate a small corner for the farm and trim it with a sound-proof material.
2. Closedness. When assembling a rack it is desirable to have as much open space as possible, because in a tightly closed space coolers will simply chase hot air. Such ventilation won’t help much.
3. Distance from the residential area. If the farm needs a frame, it means it will be a large one. And the larger it is, the higher the chance that someone will accidentally kick it, will sprinkle fragrant Americano on it, and so on. So this is another reason why it is better for a farm to allocate it in a separate room.

Step-by-step configuration of equipment and programs, preparation for mining

1. Let’s start with Windows. It is noticed that on the official version of the system the mining passes more stable, therefore it is desirable to buy the Windows and use it. Windows 10 itself finds drivers for all installed devices. Sometimes there are problems with finding drivers for the motherboard, so after installing the recommended ones, check the “Device Manager”, and if necessary, install the driver from the disk or from the manufacturer’s website.
2. Disable automatic sleep mode.
3. Install CCleaner, or a similar program, clean a computer with its help, and remove all unnecessary soft from autorun.
4. Create a wallet for crypto currency.
5. Swap between crypto-currencies and ordinary electronic money is carried out on special exchanges. There are many such exchanges – choose the appropriate one.
6. Now that you have where to collect the crypto currency, you need to select a pool. The most popular pools, currencies they work with and the corresponding capacity are displayed in the image below:7. The last step is to connect to the selected pool and configure the farm. Each pool has all the necessary instructions.

Electricity consumption

Video cards consume a lot of electricity. Prepare yourself for the fact that the accounts will be significantly higher than usual.

The approximate minimum consumption for the weakest farms is 50 watts per hour. Advanced models may absorb from 100 to 600 watts per hour, and higher. And it’s just for graphic cards. The remaining components of the computer can consume an additional 400 watts per hour. Altogether, advanced farms can consume 24 kilowatts of energy per day.

ASIC farms

ASIC is a new, and the most relevant word in the mining. The ASIC mechanism was created specifically for the purpose of extracting crypto currency, therefore, they are much more compact and productive. Assembly of such farms is much easier, but they are much more expensive. Given that the future fate of the Bitcoin rate is unpredictable, it is risky to spend money on such farms. Therefore, most of the miners, despite the innovation and convenience of ASIC, keep producing crypto-currency via GPU.

ASIC Farm or GPU Farm?

Average 6-GPU farm consumes about 1 kilowatt per hour. The computing power of such farm is about 200 Mhash / s., The price is $ 900.

The average ASIC spends twice as much electricity, and costs twice as much. But the computing power is 13000 – 14000 Mhash / s., i.e. it exceeds the capacity of ordinary miners 65-70 times. Therefore, such farms are more profitable and worthwhile.

Mining in 2018. Relevance

The market value of Bitcoin is determined, first of all, by the ratio of the exchange rate to the dollar. In addition, the price of Bitcoin is highly dependent on the prevalence of mining.

Changes in these two indicators can dramatically affect the farms profitability, both in the positive and in the negative senses.

Experts recommend paying attention to another crypto currency – DASH (Darcoin). It is growing steadily, so in 2018 the miner will be able to get from it the most stable return on investment and profitability.