Building a Crypto-Currency Mining Rig (Bitcoin/Litecoin)

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mehmehspazumweh

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Dec 13, 2012
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Hello there.

I have a little project underway but there are many problems I am facing and I hope the good people here at Toms Hardware can point me in the right direction. In order to build a decent Mining Rig with plenty of hashing power I will need to connect multiple AMD Radeon 7850 GPU's to a single motherboard. I am only using 2 GPU's right now on my main PC but I want to mine on a dedicated rig and buy a few more over the course of the year.

Now, I am aware that even the biggest and best high-end gaming motherboards only have 3 or 4 PCIe x16 slots but for what I am doing those sort of motherboards are just way to expensive. I have searched high and low in order to find the answers to the questions I am about to ask but there really isn't anything definitive out there.

Question 1:
If I wanted to connect this many GPU's to one motherboard how is this actually done?! Is there a way of splitting a PCIe slot? Essentially what I want to do is connect as many GPU's as I can to 1 PCIe x16 slot. If this is possible, will I have issues with bottlenecks? I have come across PCIe extenders and risers and I am sure I'll be needing these too but I cant seem to find any PCIe "splitter".

Question 2:
Is there a power supply capable of handling as many as, for example, 8 GPU's? The only devices i will be connecting to the motherboard is a crappy AMD processor, small hard drive, 16GB RAM and the GPU's.

Question 3:
As I will be using multiple GPU's, is there some sort of rack mount specifically for housing GPU's? I don't just want them sitting around with meters of PCIe extension cable getting in the way... its a fire hazard at does not satisfy my OCD! I'd prefer to have them fixed to a mount of some kind in order to keep thing a little tidier and of course help regulate the temperatures and leave room for adding after market coolers etc. From what I have seen from pictures and videos of other Mining Rigs it is just a motherboard attached to a small sheet of MDF (is that even safe?!) with all sorts of cables connecting multiple GPU's which are housed on a rack of some description... none of it is housed with in a tower or case as i would just get too hot.

Question 4:
The GPU's do not need to be cross fired but I have been led to believe that I will need dummy plugs for the GPU's not connected to a monitor. Why?

That's about it for now... i appreciate your time reading!

Peace!
 

Maybe not http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128508&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

There do exist PCIe splitter but they're expensive - expensive enough to make the mobo I linked a better deal - and splitting the lanes of a cheap mobo will leave you bandwidth-limited.

EDIT2: OK now I found this http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2169988 apparently it is not possible to connect multiple GPUs in one slot without an active splitter

Sure, for 8 7850s you'd be looking at a 1kW+ unit or dual PSUs.

It'd probably need to be something custom or something very expensive.

broken quotes :(
 
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