How I mine on my old PC hardware.

in #mining7 years ago (edited)

I'm an old time flight sim fan who hasn't gamed in a while. When I used to upgraded my old hardware for the next and greatest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, I would hold onto the old hardware. Fast forward 10 years and that old hardware is now mining Ethereum.

Strangely enough I wasn't planning on mining at all, I just wanted to get back into gaming, so I went out and bought what I needed, put it together and was chuffed with the results. I could play all the games I had bought on Steam over the years as they went on sale. Then I stumbled across a YouTube video explaining how to mine with an AMD graphics card. However, I didn't have one. Instead I had decided to go for a GTX 1060, but I thought whatever, let me have a go and see what happens. I ended up getting an average hash rate of 18MH/s which apparently isn't too shabby, so I bought another GTX 1060 and installed it in my games machine which doubled my hash rate.

That was as far as I could go with the games machine as it only has 2 PCI-E slots but then I thought "I wonder if some of this old hardware would be able to mine"? That lead to a lot of work configuring and testing and buying the odd part here and there to get everything up and running. To make a long story short, the old hardware works perfectly for mining and I now have 4 additional machines, besides my gaming machine, mining away quite happily. In case you are interested, here are some of the specs:

New gaming machine:
ASUS B250M-PLUS with Intel i5-7400
24GB DDR4-2400 (I was going to play X-Plane so needed loads or RAM, oops)
2 x GTX 1060

Old machine 1:
Intel D975XBX2 with Core 2 Quad Q6700
8BG DDR2-800 (as much as this motherboard can take)
1 x GTX 1060 (tried more than one but I think the motherboard runs out of PCI-E lanes and can't enable the 2nd card even though it has 3 PCI-E slots)

Old machine 2:
Intel D946GZIS with Core 2 Duo E7300 (had a D925 which uses way too much power)
4GB DDR2
1 x GTX 1060 (only has one PCI-E slot)

Old machine 3:
Gigabyte 945GCM-S2L with Core 2 Duo E7500
4GB DDR2 (but because of the chipset only sees 3.75GB)
1 x GTX1060 (also only has one PCI-E slot)

Old machine 4:
Intel D975XBX with Core 2 Quad Q6600
8BG DDR2-800
1 x GTX 1050 (because I had bought the 1050 thinking my old motherboards surely wouldn't work with a 1060)

So the moral of the story, at least for me, is never throw out old computer parts, because you just never know when you can put them to good use.

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what really matters is your GPUs power for mining, unless your CPU or motherboard are bottleneck your GPUs, to know if your getting the full hashes of your GPUs compare your mining hash rates to the ones on this website http://www.zpool.ca/bench . look for your GPU in the list and see others hashrates to compare.

if you are getting low hashrates then its time to upgrade your systems like rams cpu or motherboard.

last note regarding the GTX 1060, im using EVGA 6gb one and its a BEAST for the price.

happy mining :)

I'm using the EVGA GTX 1060 6GB too :)

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