2 Rigs, 2 Different ways 1080 Ti/1070 and Keeping it Pretty!

New to mining but old to building PC’s. VP of a telecom infrastructure company, but thought I’d play around with this and see what it’s all about. Live in a nice house in Singapore and my wife likes to keep it that way. So whatever I do it needs to look tidy.

Started with 2 x 1080 Ti Xtremes in a mid tower and progressed quickly to the following.

Rig 1 is for show and has a Corsair 780 case with a Gigabyte Gaming 9 MB. I opted for 4 Asus Poseidon 1080 Ti’s. the SLI bridge is installed, but not active while mining. The benchmarks are through the roof on this thing! Back to mining. Getting about 730 Sols per card at about 68-73°C on liquid. Could probably drop a bit more on a parallel layout, but I’m happy with the stability. Drawback here is I had to remove the Fans to fit into the gaming 9’s 4 8xPCIE slots for gaming mode, but at least it’s dual purpose and hashing nicely. On a Corsair AX1500i I’m at 1250w of input power and a 94% efficiency.

RIG 2 I took the 2 original Gigabyte 1080 Ti Aorus Xtremes and married them up with 4xGigabyte 1070 G1’s. 1080 Ti’s consume about 250w and the 1070’s about 150w. Combined these with an Asus Strix Z270f. I knew this would do nicely with another AX1500i and that running 6 1080Ti’s off a single PSU just wasn’t going to happen, unless I laid out some serious cash. It runs at 1350w of input power, again at 94% efficiency. Exactly as expected, 100w more as compared to RIG 1. Math doesn’t lie.

The trick with RIG 2 was to put this into a 4RU server case, make it look good and keep it cool! Initially I was only able to run Ethereum, with the case completely open and a bunch of fans sitting on top pulling the air away, as ZCASH pushed the cards up into the mid 80’s. Working with Data Center customers, taking lots of courses on power, cooling, floor loading, lighting, grounding and bonding etc. I finally had a chance to apply this to something simple at home.

Inside the case I moved the 2 1080 Ti’s to the sides, left and right, as they run hotter. I moved one of the 1070’s directly onto the MB at the back of the case. This put the other 3 1070’s in between the 1080’s. I then put 3xCoolmaster 120 JETFLO 95cfm fans (loud I know) at the front. Man what a difference this made! The temps dropped straight away. I bought 2-2x140 fan mounting brackets and cut 2 rectangles into the top of the case above the cards. This push pull system was putting the air directly into the 5 cards at the front and exhausting it out the top FASTTTTT. ZCASH was now 100% a go! My temps dropped to high 60’s, low 70’s. So I bumped the clocks up a bit to the mid 70’s and I’m happy to report a combined Sol rate of 3220.

The Rig sits on the floor under my desk, reminded that the coldest air is at floor level. Wife is happy, as the investment is paying for itself and all in all looks tidy.

The 2 Rigs are about 10% apart in their hash rates. One is dual purpose, but cost an arm and a leg, the other is for mining only, but proves you don’t have to have an open rig sitting on a bench to squeeze out 6 cards.

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Sweet setup… The updraft fans are the key to keeping things running cool… Hot air wants to rise - the fans just help it get away faster. Thanks for the show and tell!

Thanks Nate, Yeah I think you know what I’m talking about when it comes to keeping it tidy. Wives and clutter are polar opposites.

The card at the back of the case is the hottest, but I was surprised it’s only about 1 degree hotter. I guess it’s sitting in free air and the CPU water cooler is doing it’s job well.

If I build another rig it will be a mirror image of Rig 2.

Are you running any surge protection or battery backup? Running surge protection myself, but hard to find battery backup that can handle the 1300W load for my power supply. I have a rig 6x1070 GTX cards w/ a box fan updraft. Mine is not as pretty as your - same principles - gets the job done!

Great question and yes on the surge protection. The 6 card rig was tripping my white powerboard that’s rated to 2200w, but I bought this in Malaysia, so who knows. I put the 4 card rig on it instead.

The 6 card is now on a better brand with surge protection and running fine. I did buy a cheap meter off eBay. Gives me a running total on cost for one system. Double that in a month and I’ll know just how much the power is really costing.

No on the UPS, but I’m running teamviewer and remote reboot as well. Need to enable wake on LAN next.

Spend less than 10 dollar, get the air-cooled cards 10-15 Celcius lower with OC… build yourself a metal rack…

Go to hardware store, ask for the metal shelving rod, its long and L-shaped, it comes in 10 feet long per rod… and some bolts and nuts…

In my place, 1 unit of 10 feet rod cost around 2.5 dollar, i bought 3 of them,ask them to cut to 2 feet each…
Bring them back home, put them together as cube with some elevated placement for GPU… I can make it smaller, but i want the gpu as far as possible from each other…

Assemble all parts, put GPU as far from each other… Put them in a corner or somewhere with good ventilation, plug them in, jump the power… and connect using Teamviewer, and just forget it ever exist in your house… everything is through Teamviewer…

my 1070 only get as hot as 67 C, fan cooled at 80% OC-ed on hottest day, no air conditioning just ceiling fan… We live in the same freaking hot region… why go high temperature when you can lower them and increase the performance with overclocking…

just my two cents tho…

Wish it was that easy, but I don’t have a room in the house other than my office. Needs to look presentable. If profit is all you’re after then you’re on te right track. Go for it!

Its not really about profit on oc tho as performance per watt really sucks when oc… its just to have better cooling, for better cards longevity … in your case, what ever floats your boats man… im just giving a cheap and easy alternative to a better cooling…

Cards have 3 and 4 year warranties. Temps fine at low 70’s but I will be changing to parallel on the water cooling setup

Very nice. What did you use to cut the metal on the server case?

Sheet metal nippers. Have had them for 27 years.