Building My First Mining Rig - An Epic Newb Adventure, Part 2

See part 1 here.

Well, this is kind of an anti-climax, but in a good way. I finished putting all the pieces together. I plugged it in. I made sure everything was correct. I pushed the on button on the little on/off switch I had bought and plugged in to two pins on the motherboard.

It worked.

I splurged and bought windows 10 because the cheap Windows 7 keys online seemed shady and possibly illegal, and I didn't want to waste time getting Linux going.

I installed Windows on the machine. I downloaded some drivers for the GPUs, super easy. I tweaked some Windows settings, like not letting the computer sleep, and I downloaded the Claymore Miner software. I set up the mine.bat file with some copy/paste from a tutorial, and I put my wallet address in.

It worked. I started getting shares right away. And only a few minutes later, I saw my balance go up on my pool account!

And so now it's just humming away. It's only 3 GPUs at the moment, though I have a fourth I intend to add, and it's not very hot or loud.

And now that it's done, I'm a total addict. I want more action. More mining. ASIC mining. More GPU rigs. MORE!! I'm daydreaming about renting industrial space and figuring out how to cool a ton of rigs, where am I going to get all the GPUS...

I've learned a lot of interesting things along the way which I'll share in my next post. I just want to say that if you have ever had the itch to build a little GPU miner but are intimidated - don't be. It's not as hard as you think.