Quote from: rhyker on December 22, 2017, 10:03:53 AM

Ah great to see there are more people who got the idea and worked it out into the details. Great read!

I have a question though: any particular reason why you are using a Z400? They don't come cheap here in NL: 200+ EUR. Why not use its predecessor: XW4600 (http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/MWP_Z400_vs_xw4600_architecture_3-17-2009.pdf) ? And/or even older versions of it like the XW4400 / XW4550? Or the XW predecessors of the Z600/Z800 = XW6xx0 / XW8xx0 / XW9xx0? As they all come with the same 3x PCIe setup (and one extra for XWx6x0 or higher range) with upto 150W power. As those XW models can be held for about 40-100EUR per workstation. And the money we save with that could go to a Corsair / EVGA / Coolermaster PSU (can't find Rosewill here in NL) to power the GPUs with minimal modding. I did study http://www.hp.com/canada/products/landing/workstations/files/hp_choosing_right_workstation.pdf ... however not seeing anything why it wouldn't work. What am I overlooking? Would appreciate your thoughts.

And been a while I did any mining; last time is years ago with GridSeed / GAW / Zeusminer ASICs. What OS do you recommend / use? I was looking into this from a Hackintosh perspective, but a Linux flavor is better? Or just Windows 10?

I prefer Windows 10 simply for ease of use -- and the Z400s all come with Win10 Pro pre-installed.

I do have ethos on my single HP DL580 server system and I find it annoying to use (I have no real Linux experience).

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As for choosing the Z400... at least here they are plentiful, cheap, and after I did some reading about how reliable they are I made the call -- I've yet to have one fail on me so I think it was a good call.

The xw4600 does look like it could work out for mining as it does have four PCI-X slots like the Z400.

Although, I do mine on all my CPUs and the older boards don't support CPUs that are as good as the Z400. My bank of Xeon X5660 CPUs (six core) bring in quite a bit of revenue.

If you aren't using the CPUs and they are cheaper I don't see why the xw4600 wouldn't work out for you.