Search

[inneedofadvice]

Hi everyone,
never mined before but been tempted to dip my toes for a while so thought might as well ask and mine some wow.

Say I have about $1300 to get all the hardware - it's just a fun project but I might as well try and get the most bang for the buck. Would you be able to give me some suggestions for the actual HW that I could get to be most efficient? I'm thinking just CPU based prob with around AMD Ryzen 9 5900X which I could get for about $400, would that be a good one to begin with?

Also what kind of motherboard and memory would you guys recommend to go along with it? Might be a stupid question but I am thinking no case so open air - do I need a cooler for that?
One last thing - I read that I could use a debian preseed to avoid having to use a GPU, is that possible at all and how difficult would that be for a noobie to get going?

I scoured the net for some of these topics but it's a bit overwhelming at the start. If you guys want you can give me a tip for a specific set up that would be hugely appreciated, thank you!

[bardoyama]

Not financial advice but I have found that the best hash/$ (without deep bargain hunting on craigslist or ebay or knowing a guy) is refurb office desktops (dells, HPs, etc) on Newegg with i3s-i7s. String a bunch of them badboys together, the only annoying thing is making sure they all stay mining, but thats part of the hobby right. Do the math on a calculator before you buy. You can find XMR hashrates online, WOW stuff should be similar.

I think in a few years we'll have some decent smaller form factor devices that people can possibly leave plugged in to open electrical sockets without much effort to hide the device, but devices in that form factor right now are not good hash per dollar spent on the hardware compared to refurb office boxes that no one wants because no one uses desktops in offices now.

(Edit: I did all the math just to make sure I wasnt giving totally bunk advice. If your budget is 1300, you'd get just about 10 of the cheapest first refurb on that link putting your hash around 20k for all 10 boxes, versus the 1 Ryzen you mentioned hashing 17k. But there's power considerations and upkeep considerations so yeah, if you're not stealing electricity and if you can't write some scripts to ensure uptime on all machines, probs just do what you were originally planning )