2013-02-06 – 008-014 – HDR
An AMD Sempron bitcoin miner running four PowerColor Radeon HD 6770. I had no input in the requisition of parts but took Tyrion Lannister’s advice to "make do" without any goats.
To get it out of the way no CrossFire link is needed when running Fedora. A similar setup can be done with Nvidia cards but microarchitacture differences gives current AMD cards a 3-5 times performance advantage.
With no budget left beyond parts three of the video cards are supported by cannibalizing drive cages from older systems and are secured to the chassis with wall mount plates for frames. Those cards are connected using 6" PCIe cable extenders that are incredibly delicate. Again great care must be taken and no differences were seen in build quality between a $2.00 cable and one that cost $12.00, but regardless we got more than what was needed to save time.
The Corsair CX600 power supply has done its job admirably but with the heat from the video cards constantly running full bore as well as environmental issues a 600 watt PSU is very inefficient with no overhead to do relevant overclocking. The PSU was then relocated and inverted for access to cool air. The only component failure experienced so far is a fan hung above the PSU after a maintenance shutdown of several hours. This was probably due to the fan’s grease aged to the point of being effective only at warm temperatures.
Update 2013-09-04: With ASIC and FPGA-based systems coming on line affecting the hash difficulty this miner is no longer effective and has retired from mining.
By vmax137 on 2013-02-06 17:46:35
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