Mining with a Raspberry Pi 3B with GPU's

[scu44]

Hello I was I if its possible now to get 8 GPU's to run on a Raspberry Pi 3 with the tech we have to day like PCI Express 1 to 8 Mining Riser, USB 3.0 PCI-e Express 1X to 16X, and 8 mining GPU's?

 

[vrumor]

No. Not even close.

 

[SchizTech]

That sounds like a clever attempt, but also overthinking things. Unfortunately, even if you could connect the parts the way you imagined you couldn't get the intended performance because the low power CPU on a pi board isn't up to the task of managing that array of GPUs. Even if most of the work is done on the GPUs, a CPU is needed to manage what you could call the data flow. What we're calling this "flow" for now is more or less proportional to the work demanded by the GPU(s).

Look up the phrases "gpu bottleneck" or "cpu bottleneck" on google for more detailed information. The idea though, is that a certain balance is needed to get the parts to work.

If you want to mine, you'll need a high end CPU, on a desktop board.

 

[k1114]

Quite the opposite actually. You can mine with the same hashrate on low end cpus vs a high end i7 or ryzen. Cpu usage is very little and runs just about only the os. You'll see most getting/suggesting low end pentiums for lower power usage. Others are using older hardware (althons, core 2, apus, whatever) they already had but they tend to be higher power usage. Whatever gets them the best value. They get the same hashrates as long as the cpu isn't a potato struggling to run windows. It's just easier to get a pc running gpus than it is to get a rasp pi to do the same.

 

[Alabalcho]

Everything else put aside - The "saving" you would make from replacing an Intel/AMD motherboard with RPI parts is negligible compared to the price of 8 GPUs you're planning to use.

 

[AnonymousAndy]

I'm not sure about controlling GPU's, but I know for a fact that you can control ASIC miners via the raspberry pi as I've done it myself by installing CGminer on the pi. I've seen people control up to 20 ASIC miners with one pi, although most stop at 10 simply for redundancy in case a node goes down. Definitely much cheaper than running a motherboard/cpu/ram etc for a group of ASIC miners.
ASIC miners are much more efficient when it comes to hashrate per watt anyway.

 

[tdallagn]

I'm not sure about controlling GPU's, but I know for a fact that you can control ASIC miners via the raspberry pi as I've done it myself by installing CGminer on the pi. I've seen people control up to 20 ASIC miners with one pi, although most stop at 10 simply for redundancy in case a node goes down. Definitely much cheaper than running a motherboard/cpu/ram etc for a group of ASIC miners.
ASIC miners are much more efficient when it comes to hashrate per watt anyway.

That's right, but I guess the author is willing to mine ASIC-resistant cryptos as it's obvious the ASIC ones work with a Pi.