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Building a Cryptocurrency Mining Rig - Part 2

tags: +blockchain +diy +hardware

This is Part 2 in a series on building a cryptocurrency mining rig.

In Part 1, I designed and built a custom miner chassis. In Part 2, I’ll discuss how I resolved some BIOS-related issues that I encountered.

Problem: Motherboard Failed to Detect More than 4 GPUs

The miner would initially detect a maximum of 4 of the 6 GPUs. After ruling out hardware failures, I turned to Google to see if others had encountered the same problem.

They had. The solution was simple:

  1. Flash a new motherboard BIOS (v7998v1B)
  2. Boot into the BIOS config
  3. Navigate to Settings\Advanced\PCI Subsystem Settings
  4. Set Above 4G memory/Crypto Currency Mining to [Enabled]

I rebooted the miner after making the above changes. The video output had become corrupted, and would “blank” after POST.

I ssh-ed into the miner to determine if it was booting successfully. It was. Additionally, nvidia-smi now detected all 6 GPUs.

So, progress had been made, but one problem had been traded for another.

Problem: Corrupted Video Output

I once again turned to Google, but this time found no useful results, and was forced to resolve the problem by myself.

I hypothesized that the prior BIOS change had - somehow - interfered with the GPUs' ability to perform “graphics” tasks. As a workaround, I decided to reconfigure my BIOS to use the processor’s “integrated graphics” to drive the video output.

I booted into BIOS config and did the following:

  1. Navigated to Settings\Advanced\Integrated Graphics Configuration
  2. Set Initiate Graphic Adapter to [IGD]

I rebooted the system. Video output was now fine while booting, but became “fuzzy” after the X server started. I had one final problem to solve.

Problem: Fuzzy Video Output in X Server

At a glance, it looked as though the monitor had been configured at the wrong refresh rate. I popped open xorg.conf to view the display configuration. It had two issues:

  1. It was still configured against an “NVIDIA” device, rather than IGP.
  2. It was configured to output in 1080i, rather than 1080p.

I simply deleted xorg.conf, rebooted the machine, and restarted X. Finally, the video output became crytal clear, and nvidia-smi (and claymore) could detect all 6 GPUs.

With that, I moved on to more interesting work. In Part 3, I’ll discuss tuning the system for performance.

Proceed to Part 3 ยป