You will need:
1 – Hardware – a rig
2 – An operating system
3 – A wallet to receive coins
1 – Hardware
You can build your own rig, or buy a rig from someone, or buy an ASIC miner.
I would suggest something really simple.
- Look for a mining motherboard with around 6 PCI slots. For some instances riser-less motherboards are better. Go for the simple motherboard and PCIe risers at first, until you get comfortable with your cards temperatures and temperaments.
- A very low spec CPU that works with your motherboard
- Find a few RX580 8GB or Nvidia 1060/1070/1080(ti) cards
- RX580s are cheaper than Nvidia – grab what you can afford and get going.
- It is a good idea to buy the same cards for one rig, i.e. 6 x RX580 or 4 x 1070ti, for uniformity and ease of management (as a noob).
- Read up on power supplies, and buy a proper 1600Watt power supply, according to your cards requirements. Search for “mining PSU”, you’ll find many suitables.
- Buy PCIe risers for your cards (if you didn’t go riser-less)
- Wait for all of your stuff to arrive, and hope you have everything, and put it together. Search for your motherboard number, like “GA-H110-D3A” to find a tutorial to assemble your rig
2 – Operating System
Most people like to use windows, because they know how it works.
Windows has pro’s and con’s.
Pro’s:
- “easy” to manage, we’re used to it
- lots of overclocking software and other helpful software available
Con’s
- Reboot time is long – every 5 minutes count when you are mining
- the mountain of extras supplied by Microsoft interfere in your mining and rig stability, like patches and crashes, information gathering, downloading stuff that you didn’t want, etc. (there are quite a few articles and how to’s available to disable these windows functions).
- Bluescreens and crashes….
We suggest mmpOS (https://app.minegate.eu), which is a magnificent, mining specific, lightweight, Ubuntu based system, which runs from a USB flash stick.
You can find it here – it includes, management, remote access and monitoring, your first 8 GPUs are free, and you pay for the rest. It works out very cheap. We can help you with it, and take you through the basics.
3 – Wallet
You will need a wallet to receive your coins and gainz.
You will have to put your wallets receive string into your miner so it knows where to send your payouts.
Which wallet to choose?
You could have hardware wallets – which are safer than app wallets, but cost money, or you could choose an app wallet, or a web wallet.
We prefer Jaxx, because it houses and receives quite a few different coins, you can exchange coins in it with shapeshift (i.e. ETH > BTC), and it lives on your device (smartphone).
Uber important! Each wallet has a specific encryption key and backup sequence. Please make sure that you keep your keys and recovery instructions and information in a safe place. If you lose this info, and your wallet crashes, you lose it all and nobody can recover it for you, ever again.
For each coin that you decide to mine, you will probably need a wallet address (unless you mine on a pool that converts coins for you – in which case you will need a wallet address anyway). A wallet address is the long “receive” string which you will find in your wallet.
About DragonCrypto
I am definitely not an expert – I am a very passionate miner though! Mirelle Dismenol and myself strive to make mining more accessible, fun and profitable for all, even for the environment. We truly believe in the future of blockchain, and we hope our efforts contribute to the future success of blockchain and it’s technologies.