PLEASE NOTE: the guide below was written back when Litecoin mining on GPU’s was profitable. I recommend the AntMiner L3+ Litecoin Miner (ROI in about 100 days, currently) or building an Ethereum mining rig by following my 6 GPU Mining Rig Guide. Happy Mining!
Home-built crypto currency mining rigs are a great way to invest in the new digital currencies, while avoiding some of the risk involved in purchasing the coins outright. This guide will show you how to assemble a fairly easy to build ‘milk crate mining rig’. This rig is capable of mining at over 2,800Kh/s. As of the date this guide was updated (2/20/2014), a 4 GPU Litecoin mining rig like this can generate over $350 USD worth of Litecoins per month or around $500 USD worth of Dogecoin, and will cost you between $2,000-$2,500 to build. If you want to see the live current calculation yourself, click here, for a pre-configured Litecoin calculator or here for a Dogecoin mining calculator. You’ll just have to enter your electricity rate to calculate your net profits. I have built several of these rigs for myself and friends. Build time should be no more than 2 hrs.
Mining Hardware Build List
- Power Supply – $250 – 1300 watt Gold Rated PSU – If you are having a hard time finding these larger power supplies in stock, an alternative is to get two lower powered 750 watt Gold Rated PSU’s and connect them together with this add2psu adapter to power your rig.
- Motherboard – $90 – ASRock MB-970EX4 Socket AM3+/ AMD 970/ AMD (best motherboard for mining at the moment). If it is out of stock, this one or this one are good alternatives.
- CPU – $40 – AMD Sempron 145 Processor – We’ve chosen the cheapest option here, since the CPU doesn’t affect mining efficiency.
- RAM – $50 – 4 GB Corsair DDR3 RAM
- 1x to 16x Powered Riser Cables – $6 x 4 – PCI Express 1X to 16X Powered Riser Cables – These riser cables allow you to suspend the graphics cards abover the motherboard for better airflow/cooling. We recommend powered riser cables which plug directly into the PSU to reduce the wattage required from the motherboard. The 1x male end of the cable plugs into either the 1x or 16x slot on the motherboard, and the 16x end of the cable is where the graphics card gets plugged in.
- Hard Drive – $40 – Small Solid State Drive
- Case – $6 – Plastic Milk Crate (you might be able to pick one of these up at an office supply store for less). Alternatively, for a much more aesthetically pleasing build, check out the custom built cases designed and built by Rich Chomiczewski. I’ve personally used his cases and can recommend the excellent build quality and customer service he provides.
- Extra Cooling – $30 – Box Fan – Best cooling for a mining rig, as it pushes all that hot air away from the rig.
- Operating System – $0-$90 – Windows 8.1 – If you’re familiar with Linux you can of course download it for free (some folks consider Linux to be the best OS for litecoin mining, since it keeps your overall costs down, improving your litecoin mining ROI). If you want to load the OS from a CD you might want to pick up a $29 external USB powered DVD drive. Many laptops in the ‘thin & light’ category are shipping with no internal optical drive, so it will probably come in handy for other uses as well.
- Monitor, Mouse and Keyboard – Most people already have this trio somewhere around the house, but I included it since you’ll need it to set up your rig. Once the rig is setup it can run without these as a ‘headless mining rig’.
If you’d like to trade Litecoins or any other Scrypt based currency to Bitcoin, I would recommend the Cryptsy exchange. Also, I personally use and highly recommend CoinBase for buying and selling your Bitcoin for USD here in the US. If you sign up through that link, they’ll give you $5 worth of Bitcoin to get you started as a reward for buying your first coin through them!
Putting it all Together – Assembling your Litecoin Mining Rig
Here’s a quick Youtube Video Assembly Overview followed by step-by-step instructions:
- Unpackage everything
- Install processor and RAM on motherboard
- Plug in all riser cables
- Place motherboard in plastic crate
- Plug in SATA hard drive
- Connect all GPUs to riser cables and fasten them to plastic crate evenly spaced out for maximum heat dissipation
- Plug in all power supply connections
- Connect mouse, monitor and keyboard and an internet connection (I used a USB WiFi adapter)
- Check all connections once more
- Fire it up! Install the OS if needed. Install Graphics card drivers. Install mining software. Make sure fans are doing their job. Fire up the mining software, tweak for maximum hasrate and let ‘er run!
Sidenote: If mining isn’t your thing, and you are just interested in purchasing some cryptocurrency as part of your investment portfolio, I personally use and recommend Voyager. Trade $100 on the platform, and receive $25 of Bitcoin FREE.
I habe evereything you put in the guide, but when i add the 4 th video card, i get the BSOD. Also it only lets me overclock 2 of them. Any ideas?
Ensure you have the latest driver and SDK versions and check to see if your operating system has all the latest updates as well. Beyond that, I’m not sure what could be causing this.
I was wondering what kind of hashrate I can expect with a 7950?
I have been mining LTC and I am getting around 640khash, but I am thinking about switching to BTC. What kind of hashrates would that give me?
Roughly the same in Mh/s for Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is more profitable at this point.
I just want to make sure if the 1x to 16x Powered Riser Cables dont diminish the hashing rate of the cards connected to them? I suppose they dont but just want to make sure…
Your posts have been really useful.
Thanks.
No, the 1x slots have no effect on hash rates. The full 16x bandwidth is needed if you are using the card for video games.
Nice write-up. Pretty similar to what I recommend in my own guide.
Just FYI, your Coinbase link is incorrect (it’s pointing to Mt. Gox).
The badger himself has visited my humble little website! I’m honored and thanks for pointing out the link error. I’ve fixed it now. Actually when I first discovered your website, I pictured an Australian guy similar to the Mine Foreman, but discovered you are right here in the grand ol’ USA. Great site as well, BTW!
I tried to connect 7970 card to TV. but no signal,
I checked ram, power, fan etc.. still not working..
What’s the problem ?
I’m not sure why you would be connecting a mining rig to a TV? A standard LCD computer monitor should work great.
Are you trying to use HDMI?
You might need to use the DVI cable till you get windows installed, or the drivers at least. I had the same problem, but it works now that the driver is installed.
Fixed, It’s CPU problem ,Thanks )
hey great article! since nobody has the powered 16x risers in stock, i ended up trying all powered 1x risers and it worked just fine going on 2 weeks now! cheaper and the cryptosupply.com website you linked me to had those ones in stock. thought this might help anyone else who can’t find powered 16x risers.
Great information on the hardware! Is there any info on how many LTC can be mined in a day? Is it profitable today? I thought the difficulty increases made it non feasible?
Currently, Bitcoin is more profitable for minging. The folks mining LTC are betting that the value will rise in the future once vendors start adopting it. Bitcoin, being the first crypto-currency enjoys more mass market adoption and a much higher value as well. I’m mining Bitcoin at the moment, but that could change. The great thing about GPU mining is you can switch it at any time to another crypto-currency, unlike the ASIC’s and FPGA’s.
I have a 7950×4 mining rig as well. Using Platimax 1000W PSU now. Mining LTC with GUIminer.
I am having a problem: when I start the four cards together, three of the four cards slow their GPU load to 70% even 50% sometimes, so the total hashrate will be slowed to 7950×3 level, but if I stop one card, the other three cards will return to 99% load and function well.
My mainboard is 790fx-gd70 with 8gb ram.
What causes such problem?
I’d recommend trial and error to troubleshoot this issue. Try the command-line cgminer (instead of GUIminer) to eliminate that possibility. Also check your voltage at the wall with a kill-a-watt meter. A 1,000 watt PSU is bare minimum for 4x 7950s, unless you have them significantly under-volted. Hope this helps.
Hi Josh,
I bought exactly this configuration. But I have some questions:
1. Static electricity, do you ground your rig? If so, how did you do it?
2. I saw at a different blog that 68 ohm 1/2 watt resistors are needed for dummy plugs to keep the GPU’s alive, without them going into sleep mode. Is that still necessary?
3. What software do you use to mine? Each one of them when I launch, they stop themselves, like I’m missing some software but there is no error. Cgminer as an example, I make a .bat file, launch it, it will execute Cgminer, but than it quits instantly. I’m using windows 7, btw.
Looking forward to get this rig going so thanks for this list and for the help!
1. Static electricity shouldn’t be an issue. Your rig is grounded through the power supply unit and as long as your household wiring is good, should work just fine.
2. In my experience, don’t need dummy plugs. Only once for me, a card wasn’t showing up and I just had to plug in the monitor briefly to ‘activate’ it on the system.
3. I use cgminer. See my mining software guide for more specific info.
I have Win7 on my rigs as well. Happy to have helped you along your way. All the best! -Josh
Great, although I know its smarter to sell mining equipment than to try to make a profit out of it with mining. Mining is more fun. Thanks for your advice! I’m waiting for the riser cables to come in and than I’ll boot it up.
In your shopping list, why not choose 3 16x to 16x cables, and 1 1x to 16x cables, cause you could fill the tree pci-e slots? Is that pure for gpu placement? The slots speed don’t impact the hash rate? Maybe ill hook more gpu’s into this board, with an additional psu.
Hi Josh,
what a great and useful website !
I will try to build 25 rigs like this, with 7950s, to reach 56’000 KH/s on LTC.
If you have any advise for a such project, please let me know 😉
I guess I can mine solo, and don’t need any pool ?
Have a nice day !
25 rigs! Wow, I hope you have a commercial source of electricity as the power requirements for such an enterprise would be massive. If you do set one up, I’d love to feature your setup in an upcoming article showcasing great mining rig setups.
Hi Josh,
Any idea about the power consumption for 1 rig? I will host the machines at home.
First of all I will test with one and see if it is stable. I yes, I will buy more.
No problem to feature my setup in your article 😉
I have an identical rig, and I just had to replace my 1300W PSU. I replaced it with a EVGA 1500W that has a USB based kill-o-watt built in. I’m drawing 1400W from the wall, for one rig.
Good luck with 25. That’s 35000W of power. Or, a better way to put it would be about 12A of power draw on a 120V circuit. A typical household 120V circuit is generally on a 20A breaker.
In other words, you’d need twenty five separate household circuits, assuming your power company can even supply you with that much power. I very highly doubt it though.
The system is rated “@0.10/kw”
I am guessing that is per card? As that does seem very low, unless my understanding of kwh is very wrong.
This is the cost-per-kilowatt-hour used for calculating the potential profit of this rig. Sorry if that wasn’t immediately apparent.
Hi. A little bit curious. You mentioned you could expand on one of the rigs with 2 additional cards using another PSU, won’t that risk ruining the motherboard / GPUs? I mean one voltage and ground from 1 PSU to PCI-e power and one other from mother board (another PSU).
You’d need to connect them together using this adapter. I’ve added the link to this guide. Thanks for bringing it up!
hello I’ve found this guide a few days ago and I actually built a rig using it, so far I’ve only gotten one 7970 and just ordering the others when my financials permit but i trouble i’m having is suspending the card in the middle of the create. I am not a welder nor do I have access to any welding machines or anything I was wondering if you could give some advice on what i can use to go accross the milk crate to keep the cards suspended and evenly spaced, right now i’m using to small sticks that i got from my fence but i have a feeling this will not do when i get more cards put inside. The pictures of DobZombie’s milk crate computer are nice but i can’t figure out what he’s using as the video card suspenders with the pics he has nor has he responded to any of my emails so now i turn to you
Thank you
Hi Nef, check out this video I made a few days ago. It shows how I chose to suspend the cards. There are fancier options, but I’m cheap and if it works, why fix it? 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwKar38-6LE
Just as information, i have seen a couple of bad reviews about the OC giga 7970 lately, most concerning was
Good Points+
Its a 7970, therefore it is rather powerful, and the cooler is not bad, however it can get loud, and is especially annoying with oc guru 2, and its ridiculous fan graph, which can make the card jump the fan speed.
Bad Points−
Voltage locked, and oh my, how they played the reviewers. look at any review and it will probably say great for overclocking, and after it had been reviewed, bam!, voltage lock.
My card isn’t actually fully stable at stock, which is the main reason I dislike it so much, its just a bad product, and i encourage you to buy a better one.
It was recommended by another builder, but after reading this and other similar comments elsewhere online, I’ve decided to not recommend it. Thanks for the detailed description!
Hey Josh,
Great blog by the way, So I’m in the process of getting a mining rig setup going, preferably 5×7970 using a ASRock X79-EXTREME9 Motherboard and backing it up with a 1600w power supply (Lepa 1600W 80+ Gold Full Range Power Supply) and making a custom frame so i can use powered pci-e risers and space out all the gpu to allow better cooling.
so the questions i would like to ask is:
which 7970 would you recommend? (i’ve chosen Gigabyte Radeon HD7970 Overclocked 3GB)
would 8gb ram be enough?
and setting wise would be any different what you’ve provided on your blog?
any help or suggestions would be great! thanks
The Sapphire’s are great, however at the current price point, I’d pick a Gigabyte as well. I’ve seen this one (only $399) pushed to 750Kh/s pretty easily: