The price of Ethereum and other crypto-currencies have gone up a lot recently; so I decided to try to set up a basic ethereum mining rig with some old hardware. I have an old T710 server so I wanted to see what I could do with it on the mining front.
This article assumes that you already know the basics about mining and what Ethereum is; if not then do a Google search; it will give you all of the basic information you need.
Ethereum uses GPUs which stands for something like Graphical Processing Unit and and the power comes from Graphics Cards; serious gamers would all have heard of graphics cards and probably no doubt will have one of the latest ones in their computers. I decided to buy a middle-of-the-range graphics card called Radeon RX570 to test out on the T710.
The first problem I ran into is that in the T710 there is only 1 PCIe x16 slot which is the slot in which the Rx570 graphics card would slot into and because the card is so big and takes up 2 slots of space I could not get it to fit into the box because the RAID card got in the way.
Please see the inside of the DELL T710:-
I then tried to put this bloody card into my colleagues computer and then found that the card needed it’s own power supply that needed to be fed by a x8 power socket; and his power supply only had a x6 output and also because the power unit was only 450W it wasn’t enough to power this card.
After some research I realised that nobody actually plugged the graphics card directly into the servers; what you had to do was get these PCI x1 to x16 risers:-
This is something you will need to if you want to mine seriously.
https://www.ebay.com/p/PCI-Express-X1-to-X16-Slot-Extender-Adapter-With-Usb3-00-60cm-Cable/1129965821
with these risers; you plug the tiny x1 plug into any PCIe socket on the main board, connect up using a USB-like cable and then run the wire outside of your server. You can get any old power supply with x8 supply and then power the graphics card. I was originally hoping that this would be an easy exercise but realised quite quickly that having the risers made things a lot easier.
(…. to be continued..)
For Part 2 click on https://www.mutface.com/dell-t710-setting-up-ethereum-rig-with-old-hardware-part-2/
