I’m not certain that it makes much sense to invest into this kind of custom HW. The price of the adapter device is slightly less than what I paid for an Asus ROG RX480 adapter w/ 8 GB memory. You will pay 200+ USD just to have one PCIe lane. If you want to build a rig, you should steer clear of laptops IMHO. Lots of folks here have written about their rigs so it shouldn’t be hard to get started 
Good luck!
Yes I agree that would be a bad way to go. I guess my question is: Can I run a 6gpu rig with one of my old laptops instead of a pi? Or do i just by a mobo kit w/ a pi and find other stuff to run with the laptops? I kind of went over board and have a lot of stuff i need to hook up.
These little pinidea things are really starting to piss me off!
Unless you have a portable workstation (!=laptop) your options are very limited as I wrote before. A rig implies running multiple GPU cards in parallel, an option that is drastically limited on laptops, even those with integrated GPUs. At best with the adapter you’ve shown, you’d be able to run only a single PCIe card.
Now using a Pi won’t solve anything as apparently the code isn’t supported. I have myself an older-gen Pi model B which is 32-bit and I touted using it as a node, however it won’t work. zCash requires 64-bit CPUs and was specifically designed with the x86 instruction set. I recall that someone did a port to arm (you’ll have to search the forums here) but without much success.
You may have luck running zCash on 64-bit, Intel-based (x86) nanocomputers (Intel Atom, for example) but due to the very low compute power all you can truly hope for is to just run it as a node on the network (and that implies that you have enough storage attached to the nanocomputer to store the entire blockchain). A second aspect is whether nanocomputers have PCIe lanes at all, and a third one is whether there is enough juice to power the GPU card.
I’d like to hear from others on the forum, who have more experience than I do. If you’re thinking about building a rig, your main cost will be with purchasing powerful enough GPU cards with a high hash rate. The expense of buying a power supply, some RAM, a motherboard and a CPU is collateral.
I just posted a new mining rig build howto. This one for RX470’s and Ethosdistro running Claymore miner. All the steps, from ordering, to setting up BIOS, to configuring Claymore on EthosDistro:
I would like to say that is a great job you did with wood I would like to start mine you think you could share me the measurements please I would be grateful.
God Bless!
small necro here but I wanted to point out something for some people still landing here
(this page is #1 listed on google for at least 3 searches I did)
You can start with ANYTHING…
My first zcash rig was literally an old PC i pulled out of the garage.
It had a slow double core athlon XP chip and an AMD 5770 GPU.
paired with that I had running an old laptop with a dead battery I just kept plugged in.
Cant remember now what It got, but i do remember i earned a grand total of about 0.01 coins with it.
and it took forever, i actually still have that coin in my wallet (i moved on to ETH since then)
what was worth nothing then, is worth about $2 today LOL
Point is, you should be able to use almost anything to mine;
and everything I know now is based on that foundation.
The laptop was so old, that it wouldnt even run with the OS it had on it,
had to put linux on it, learned about linux too!
Hi,
What particular software you’re using to mine using your laptop?
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Hey, I gave up with laptop mining very early - it already wasn’t profitable in Feb-17. At the time, EWBF for the integrated Nvidia chipset, and nheqminer for CPU. But it’s at best a scientific experiment with the current global hashrate and difficulty.
That post was from 31 October 2016. CPU mining of Zcash became nonviable long ago. Please don’t waste your electricity.
Note this post from 28 August 2017, immediately before yours in July 2022: