Building my first 5.3MH/s litecoin mining rig

Component	Desc	Cost
GPU	5x Sapphire R9 290	$2495
GPU	1x MSI R9 280x	$399
Motherboard	ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer LGA 1150	$125
CPU	Pentium G3220	$59
RAM	G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB	$85
PS	2x Thermaltake Tough Power TP-750P	$160
PS	1x CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750	$109
Case	HDX 24 in. W x 14 in. L x 30 in Rack	$20
Case	8ft aluminum angle piece	$10
Risers	3x PCIE 16x to 16x	$39
Risers	6x PCIE 1x to 1x	$47
	TOTAL	$3548
	Potential KH/s	5300KH/s
	$/KH	$0.669

I did my homework on this and didn't take the decision regarding which motherboard to get lightly. Most of the guides I found suggested staying away from anything over 4 gpu's on a single motherboard but I really wanted to get 6 running on a single motherboard for a number of reasons. It would be cheaper than having two systems, less overall power than two systems and less to manage. Most guides for 5-6 gpu systems suggested only a few motherboards would work but they were really last gen boards and I really wanted to use a Haswell chipset. The ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killerlooked like a perfect match and with a total of 7x PCIE slots left room to expand :) As far as I could find no one else has been using it to mine scrypt currency so I'm taking a risk this motherboard might not work however I think the potential reward of discovering a perfect motherboard is worth the risk.

I decided to go with the R9 290's because I was able to get 5 of the battlefield 4 edition cards  for $499/each from newegg (They had a 48-hour purchase limit of 5 cards or I would have gotten 6). I planned to use my existing R9 280x in the setup as well.

First: I waited before newegg actually shipped the GPU's to make sure they were mine before I bought everything else. Then I put my order in for everything else and got a pretty good deal from newegg(cyber week specials).

Second: Once I got everything I started my build

 

STEP 1: Make a stencil and drill the holes for the standoffs

STEP 2: Screw in the standoffs

STEP 4: Mount the motherboard

STEP 5:Admire it

STEP 6: Install CPU and heat-sync with lots of thermal paste

STEP 6: Add RAM, HDD and PS and use a paperclip to turn it on

STEP 7: Install windows and make sure there are no issues with the motherboard

STEP 8: Add motherboard to the rack and measure for the GPU support bars

STEP 9: Mount GPU support bars and measure to drill holes to mount the cards

STEP 9.5: Grind off an end of the PCIE 1x extenders to fit on the cards

STEP 10: Check the cards are spaced evenly and screw them in

STEP 10.5: Try to avoid looking at the pile of packaging trash building up

STEP 11: Mount everything, run power to the cards (2 cards/ power supply) and start it up

Geting Started with Litecoin

My venture into Litecoin started about two weeks after I bought my first ASICminer Blades. I couldn't stop reading about Bitcoin and trying to think of different ways to make money with it. Since I purchased my first ASICminer blades, the price of them had doubled every other ASIC miner was either sold out or way over inflated. I had three options now:

1. Invest in one of the next generation ASIC miners that are said be released in March/April with the risk that the difficulty would increase exponentially and an indefinite ROI.

2. Try to start a mining pool... a lot of unknowns here and with the abundance of recent "hacks" could take some time to make sure its secure.

3. Buy the currency outright... boring and still a big risk.

4. Build an scrypt miner with the new radeon R9 cards and try to mine profitable altcoins. Possibly less risky since the hardware should still be worth something if shit hits the fan with virtual currencies. Unknowns: how much current it will draw... hopefully less than 20A, noise?? heat?? cost??

After thinking it over for a few days I decided to throw my hat in the scrypt mining ring and bought an MSI R9 280x to test the waters before I invested in a larger setup. After a week of tweaking and playing with the best graphics card I've ever owned I decided to make a bigger investment and buy 5 more Sapphire R9 290s.

Getting started with Bitcoin

I started my venture into Bitcoin about 9 months ago after I stumbled upon silk road ;) I used Bitcoin on a very small scale just to see how it worked but didn't take the time to research and understand why a virtual currency could become extremely valuable. I lost interest in Bitcoin until the end of October when I started seeing news stories on Forbes, Fox News and all the other major news outlets. I finally took the time to research and understand what could make a virtual currency like this so valuable in the future. With this new knowledge and the realization that if I would have invested $1,000 into the currency 8 months ago it would be worth over $10,000 now that I decided it was time to begin my investment into Bitcoin.

After researching how I should invest I came up with two options.
1: Buy the currency outright and be stuck with a finite amount with the risk of loosing it all if Bitcoin one day becomes worthless
2: Buy an ASIC miner that should pay for itself in about a month and I still risk it being worthless if Bitcoin crashes but with the chance that I could use the hardware for something else in the future.

Being a nerd I went with option 2 and bought two ASICminer Blades for $260 each and got them up and mining at a consistent 22GH/s. These things were super easy to set up, sipped power and just required a small fan to keep cool. I made a huge mistake though when choosing which pool to mine with, I started with slush's pool because that was where I mined 9 months ago when I first discovered Bitcoin. After a little more than a day mining and having .02 BTC transfered to my wallet I made the decision to switch both my blades to mine at triplemining with the promise of higher payouts. It seemed great for the first 5 days with an estimate payout over .1 BTC. At this rate I was going to have my hardware payed off in less than a month, however the problem came when another week passed and my estimated payout started declining. I was confused at first but after thinking about it I realized that if my hash rate stayed consistent at 22GH/s but the pool's grew before a block was discovered my shared would get diluted and my payout would start to decline.

At this time I had invested 2weeks of mining power and didn't want it to go to waste. Rather than switching pools I continued to mine with triplemining and this was the biggest mistake I made so far. It has now been over a month and a half of solid mining at trippleming still without a payout because they haven't discovered a block yet. I didn't realize there was such a risk of this happening when I started. This experience has definitely thought me to be extra cautious when mining with a small pool. I definitely should have cut my losses at triplemining earlier and won't make the mistake again.

Who is Zach?

Let me start with a little background on myself, I'm a 21 year old college student studying Business and Information Systems at Drexel University. I've always been interested in technology and successfully pieced together my first custom computer when I was 11 years old using parts from retired PC's my dad had laying around. The only thing I was really concerned about though was the video card since I was planing to connect the computer to my TV and watch music videos on it. This was the first time I remember putting together the concept of how all the different components come together to make a computer function.

Even though my dad helped me out I thought I was some pretty hot stuff because no one I knew had a computer connected to their TV and could watch music videos on demand. This was right after Windows XP came out and I don't believe media center pc's had not gained much traction yet. Anyway by making this machine work the way I wanted it to I felt like I could do anything if I took the time to learn how to do it. I quickly learned the power of the internet, specifically peer-to-peer file sharing and started downloading anything and everything. I started with music and amassed a collection of thousands of songs because I thought it was neat. I then moved onto different software suites because I had fun learning how to use them. I remember downloading  the Macromedia suite and going through a tutorial about making a website with Dreamweaver and Flash. At this time in my life I had a lot of free time to spend on this kind of stuff and thought it was way more interesting than what I was learning at school. 

I continued to download and experiment with different things until about 2006 when I started working on a website idea I had which was for an Auction website similar to eBay. At the time I was using eBay pretty often to sell cars for my neighbor who owned a car lot. I figured I could make more money if I cut out the middle man (feeBay) and didn't have to pay to sell my stuff. This was something I really had to sit down and learn about though, I had very little experience with making websites in general but the more I learned the more I felt like I could do it. This was when I became a master at using Google and utilizing the right keywords and search phrases to find exactly what I wanted to know. I only felt limited by the amount of effort and time I was willing to put into it.

A few months and hundreds of hours later I was blasting my new website GozBay.com on every message board and forum relating to eBay power sellers. To my surprise the site caught on rather quickly and before I knew it I was supporting a community with thousands of users who were posting tens of thousands of auctions. Long story short though I was still very inexperienced at the time and decisions like how to manage a dedicated server and how to load balance a server started becoming very difficult and expensive. Before I knew it the site had fallen victim to a SQL injection which corrupted much of the GozBay's data forcing the site to go offline for two weeks. I relaunched a few weeks later but GozBay never fully recovered after that and I lost a good portion of my users. I still have GozBay up and running because it still receives consistent traffic and users continue to  make daily transactions.

So here we are now going on 6 years after GozBay was attacked, I've strayed away from playing with hardware and spend most of my time learning and specializing in web development. I've made some pretty cool websites for others and am currently working as a software developer at eMoney Advisor.