You've probably seen videos on YouTube of people who have these fancy cryptocoin mining rigs that are using multiple video cards to "mine" altcoins like Ethereum.
You might think that is something you'd never be able to figure out how to do on your own.
I'm here to let you know you're wrong. It is ridiculously easy to do.
That's right. With any old computer and a video card that costs anywhere from $180-$250, you could be earning around $10 per day per video card, day and night even while you sleep.
What Hardware Do I Need?
Just about any computer with 1 or more PCI-Express x 16 slots in it will work for our purposes. You'll need 1 PCI-Express x 16 slot per video card that you intend to use in this mining rig.
Almost any computer bought/built within the last 2-3 years is going to have at least 1 of these slots, so chances are good the computer you are reading this article on right now is good enough to use for mining.
Once you have the computer itself, you'll need to start shopping for the video card that will do the heavy lifting of mining. AMD RX series cards are highly recommended and affordable. Here are several models that will work for you:
- AMD RX 470
- AMD RX 480
- AMD RX 570
- AMD RX 580
You can of course use other video cards from AMD and even Nvidia, but these cards listed will give you the most bang for your buck. Prices on these cards will range anywhere from $179-$259 at most online stores like Newegg.com and Amazon.com
Once you get the video(s) card delivered, simply install them into your computer's PCI-Express x 16 slots. You will want to download the most recent video card drivers from the manufacturer's website.
Once that's done then it's time to find a mining pool so that you can take advantage of your newfound GPU processing power.
What's A Mining Pool?
A mining pool is simply a website where lots of users with mining rigs "pool" or combine their mining power in order to mine "blocks" which in turn reward them with coins.
Combining mining power between multiple members makes it more likely that the pool as a whole will "find" blocks, get rewards and then distribute the rewards to its members proportionate to the amount of "Shares" each member found. The other alternative is to mine "solo" but unless you have dozens of video cards you're much better off to join a group of miners and share the load and rewards with each other.
I could go into more detail, but really that's all you need to know about how mining pools work under the hood.
There are tons of different mining pools available today. Some are small-time operations, and some are huge. Some offer daily payouts, some offer hourly payouts, etc.
I have tried many of them myself over the years, and I have found that the mining pools which support multi-coin algorithms are the best. These pools automatically mine the most profitable coin at the time. So it might mine Ethereum for a few hours and then switch over to SiaCoin for a bit, and then later may switch over to Digibyte.
You may be asking yourself "But isn't this post about mining Ethereum? Why are you recommending a mining pool that is liable to mine any number of coins?"
The answer is that this particular mining pool does indeed mine the most profitable coin at any given time, but it also has an automatic exchange feature so that no matter what coins you are mining you can have them exchanged into your coin of choice.
Here is the mining pool I highly recommend: MiningPoolHub
Go to their page and click the "Sign Up" link from the menu on the upper-left of their page. You'll need to provide a username, password, email address and a PIN number.
Configuring The Mining Pool
Once you've activated your new mining pool account, you can now configure it for mining Ethereum. So you will need to click the "Auto Exchange" link in the upper-left of the page. Here you will choose Ethereum as your crypto currency of choice.
Any and all coins which you mine will automatically be converted into Ethereum for you. No work needed on your part. Isn't that awesome?
Next you will need to click the "Ethereum" link under the Pools section of the page. This will take you to the Ethereum pool's page.
From there you will click the "Wallet" link on the left.
This will take you to the Ethereum Pool's wallet section. We only need to do one thing here - Add your personal Ethereum address. So type in your personal Ethereum address under the "Pool Account Details" section, in the box labeled "PAYMENT ADDRESS".
Also in this section you can indiciate the "AUTOMATIC PAYMENT THRESHOLD" (minimum amount of Ethereum to accumulate before it will automatically transfer those coins to your personal wallet). This is optional. If you prefer, you can just let it accumulate Ethereum forever and perform manual transfers whenever you feel like it.
I personally set my payment threshold to 0.0205 and here is why:
My particular video card will mine around 0.04 Ethereum per day, and the fee to automatically transfer Ethereum to my personal wallet is 0.0005. I like to get a couple payouts in my wallet each day, so 0.04 / 2 = 0.02 plus the 0.0005 fee = 0.0205
Once you've typed in your Ethereum address and the optional payment threshold, just click "Update Account" to save the settings.
At the time of this writing, I am receiving 2 payouts of around 0.02+ twice a day. That's around $5 per payout or $10 per day. And it happens whether I'm home or away, awake or asleep. Sweet, right?
Ok, So How Do I Actually Start Mining?
Now that you've got the hardware and the mining pool setup, the last piece of the puzzle is to get some mining software which actually controls the video cards and makes them do the actual mining.
MiningPoolHub has you covered here too. Click the following link, download the most recent version of their software and then come back here for further instructions: MultiPoolMiner Software
You have the mining software file, now all you need to do is unzip/extract it to your computer. You can extract it anywhere on your computer. I just put mine on my desktop in a folder called Mining.
Once extracted there will be a lot of files in the new folder it created. The only file you need to worry about is called "MultiPoolMiner.ps1". This is a Windows Powershell script file. If you have Windows 7, 8 or 10, you probably already have Windows Powershell installed. If you are on Windows XP or earlier you may have to download Windows Powershell and install it. Just google "Windows Powershell Download" to find a link to install it for your particular version of Windows.
So now to start mining here is all you need to do:
- Right-click the "MultiPoolMiner.ps1" file and choose "Run With Powershell"
- It will ask for your account name. Type in the same account name you chose when you configured your mining pool account
- Press Enter and watch the magic begin
Profit!
At this point a Windows Powershell box should have opened up and already begun mining coins. It will mine each type of supported coin algorithm to find out what rates your particular video card(s) can handle for each algorithm. This process can take several minutes to an hour or more. Just be patient.
Once it has figured out your mining speed for each algorithm it will immediately start mining the coins that will be most profitable considering your video card(s)' hardware. It will also continually monitor coin exchange rates and when another coin becomes more profitable it will automatically switch to that coin's algorithm and start mining. All of this it will do without any input from you.
All you need to do from here on out is periodically check your computer to make sure that the miner software is still running (from time to time a miner may freeze up and stop, to fix this just close the specific miner that froze and it will open up a new one soon enough). Just make sure you don't accidentally close the Windows Powershell window. This is the window that controls all the miners. It will always have "cmd.exe" in the title bar of the window. So don't close that one!
You'll also want to login to the mining pool and check on its progress periodically. You will be able to see what coins it has mined and how much of each coin.
You will also be able to manually transfer your coins to your personal wallet, or if you setup the automatic exchange feature then that will be done for you automatically.
Enjoy your new mining rig. If Ethereum prices continue to rise it should keep earning profit for you 24 hours a day even while you sleep!
I'm not sure how often I'll be posting articles on here, but why not follow me just in case? Who knows, I might have another few ideas to help you out down the road a ways. Good luck and have fun!!