It is indeed a mining rig, the alt forum is just too much of a shitstorm of clonecoins and worthlesscoins to have a meaningful discussion of hardware there.

When I started getting hardware errors and posted in this subforum about it my thread got moved and had an argument with a mod via PM and he ended up telling me to repost it in this forum with mhs listed instead of khs...

Just starting to prep an old case for a shortly arriving 280X and found an intact dust bunny, he looks pretty evil.

Took the arctic freezer pro off of my BE in order to make it look like a mini blade!


It sits on top of this, (old pic, more fans and closed case now)


The back of one of my GPUs looked like this after a capacitor randomly fired a stream of sparks at me and burst into flames.

I wouldn't know what value cap to replace it with, what would you suggest? It's a HIS HD5830 if that makes any difference.

From touching the heatsink the one directly on top of the ASIC is completely cool, so is the end of the heatspreader.

Would anyone be interested in a set of the ASIC sink, a little VRM sink with thermal tape applied and a pre cut piece of 3M thermal tape to attach the other side of the stick to any heatsink.

I admit the fan really is overkill but Arctic F8's are silent at 5v, also an insulated bolt on one corner plugs perfectly into the pi headphone socket and a cushion on the opposite corner resting on the heatsink works well. I had already made the GPIO fan breakout for when the back was just covered in little ramsinks, they are now on the flat face of the mains adapter which was getting very warm. Found a piece of aluminium stock I've had for years and hot glue gunned the heatsink to it so it wouldn't wobble and to correct the height difference.

Got my raspberry pi and block erupter mining without a hub. I know it's never gonna ROI but I'm selling my 7970 and I feel like I just need SOMETHING mining away! Plus it's a good use for the pi I've had sitting around for a over a year doing nothing.


So to do this I had to do a few things:

Drilled a 3.5mm hole in my pi case (smallest drill bit I could find) and bolted the Arctic F8 fan on with a 3M bolt with two nuts as spacers and one inside the pi case holding it on.

Made a breakout board to convert the non adjacent 5v and GND pins on the GPIO into a 3 pin fan header.

Soldered the Vin and GND directly to the USB ports and bypassed the main polyfuse.

Plastered the BE in cheap ram heatsinks (these are £1.50 for 8!)


Fan Mount:




GPIO 5v to fan header:






Direct USB power:



Finished and mining:





Future plans:


Get washers for fan mount.

Make fan shroud.

Cut ridiculously long VRM heatsink on the pi in half and put one piece on the block erupter VRM (see pic 2)

Overclock block erupter.

Was going through some boxes earlier and found a Freezer 64 that used to be on at Athlon 3700+ years ago, thought 'it's a shame that'll never be used again'. I had been thinking recently of replacing the ramsinks that I'd had on the back of my BE...

Noooo, these; http://www.maplin.co.uk/motherboard-screwnut-standoff-x-50-37594

This is amazing, I did wonder in the first pic if those were plastics cups. Are they being used or just a safety measure?

Power draw?

I guess it's easier to bolt them on the non fan end and expensive heavy hardware is best not left hanging.

Keep on mining till it would be cheaper to buy coins.

My 280X Tri-X is running DRK, 1160/1800 @ 2300RPM and 70 degrees!

Haha yeah it's upside down so the fan intake is completely blocked! You may not even need the fan in scrypt only mode, removing it saves another 2w!

The board slots are good, but you won't get 6 to fit. With AMD cards you won't have any performance drop on 1x-16x risers, the USB ones are less than a tenner now on ebay and have bolt holes for easy mounting, this card is light enough to be supported by just the PCI-E slot.

Risers are mostly to keep the card cool, but I have one of those exact cards sat in the PCI-E slot of a BTC Pro with a suspended 280X on either side of it and it mines away at 425Khash at 2500RPM at 74 degrees. Can do up to 480Khash but mine gets crashy at those speeds. The sapphire toxics can reportedly do 560!

And ebuyer have the Gigabyte card for a fiver less!

Really no, you want the best efficiency at UK power prices of £0.15-£0.20kwh

What about the 1000BTC bet about power efficiency that was supposed to go to charity that Josh conveniently forgot about after the BTC value spiked last year.

You can't spit electrons into empty air no, but the terminal should still sit at a 12v potential, voltage is not power. Cheap PSU's output often oscillate dangerously when underloaded.

6x750Ti or 6x R9 270OC are the best bet unless you want to loose money by the end of the year at latest because of power consumption. UK electric prices are much higher.

That homeland security run the armoury?