4 ms·

Most "professional" miners were actually undervolting to keep the power consumption down so it's really not that bad as long as the price is right. Anecdata bu

by belval 4y ago

Most "professional" miners were actually undervolting to keep the power consumption down so it's really not that bad as long as the price is right. Anecdata but, 3 years ago I got an old mining RX 580 4GB for ~120 CAD (about a $100). That card can run almost everything at 1080p and has been used a lot ever since.

latchkey 4y ago
I've got over 100,000 of those RX470,480,570,580 8gb cards running for 24/7 years. It is a total farce that they go bad over time. Not only were ours undervolted, but also individually tuned for best performance/watt. A very difficult thing to do at my scale since the failure mode is a full machine crash. Only thing that really degrades is the paste on the heatsink and that's fairly easy to fix.
- causi 4y ago
  Also the fan bearings, but again an easy fix.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    We don't have fans on the cards.
    - causi 4y ago
      I would posit the operations that will be selling their used cards to consumers have fans on the cards.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  Sounds like you run a large operation. Would you be comfortable sharing what country you're in?
- belval 4y ago
  I know there is a lot of negativity around mining nowadays, but I'd love to hear more about the challenges of running a large-scale operation.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The largest challenge was tuning the cards for best efficiency. Next up is just tracking inventory, making changes to the system, etc... this is over 8k individual computers in multiple data centers. We also added a different class of hardware which was blade based... which increased the individual computers significantly. Ended up with a very cool iPXE boot solution for that. I also built some pretty cool software to manage it all. It runs on the concept that each machine is an individual worker that knows how to self-heal itself. Even just distributing the software to so many machines reliably, is a challenge. It has been a fun few years.

by belval 4y ago

latchkey 4y ago

I've got over 100,000 of those RX470,480,570,580 8gb cards running for 24/7 years. It is a total farce that they go bad over time. Not only were ours undervolted, but also individually tuned for best performance/watt. A very difficult thing to do at my scale since the failure mode is a full machine crash. Only thing that really degrades is the paste on the heatsink and that's fairly easy to fix.

causi 4y ago
Also the fan bearings, but again an easy fix.
- latchkey 4y ago
  We don't have fans on the cards.
  - causi 4y ago
    I would posit the operations that will be selling their used cards to consumers have fans on the cards.
j0hnyl 4y ago
Sounds like you run a large operation. Would you be comfortable sharing what country you're in?
belval 4y ago
I know there is a lot of negativity around mining nowadays, but I'd love to hear more about the challenges of running a large-scale operation.
- latchkey 4y ago
  The largest challenge was tuning the cards for best efficiency. Next up is just tracking inventory, making changes to the system, etc... this is over 8k individual computers in multiple data centers. We also added a different class of hardware which was blade based... which increased the individual computers significantly. Ended up with a very cool iPXE boot solution for that. I also built some pretty cool software to manage it all. It runs on the concept that each machine is an individual worker that knows how to self-heal itself. Even just distributing the software to so many machines reliably, is a challenge. It has been a fun few years.