It's been a few days since I posted the epic tale of my mining experiences on Publish0x. I was pretty amazed to see it soar to the front page and hear from a lot of really interesting people on the forum. Thanks everybody for taking the time to read, and for clicking the link once more. My crypto addiction has only gotten worse, and I find myself constantly researching new currencies to invest in and ways to power up my mining pool and add compute or lower power consumption.
Terran Colony on the SAFEMOON
I managed to scrape together about $30 from my mining escapades and sent it on an awful, terribly informed journey through a few exchanges. My end goal was to invest in SAFEMOON, an up and coming token with promising growth, what look like staking features, and some good inflation protection built in. I won't bore you with the details of my bad decision making, long story short I sent stellar lumens to coinbase, realized I couldn't buy BNB there, sent them to binance, transferred them to BNB, realized I DID NOT MEET THE SEND LIMIT, transferred back to lumens, sent to kucoin, transferred to BTC then to BNB, then paid another 6 dollars to send it to my trust wallet. From there I paid another arm and a leg, but ended up with 11 million glorious SAFEMOON tokens:
If you want to join me in setting up a terran colony on the SAFEty of the MOON, I'd recommend the following steps:
- Research a good exchange that can get you to BNB and send BNB for minimal costs. In hindsight, fixedfloat probably would have been a good option, but instead I spent 6 dollars just to send it from KuCoin. Fixedfloat appears to cost nothing to withdraw your cash, and appears to have no minimum send amount.
- Set up a wallet that can handle SAFEMOON. unfortunately I wasnt able to use my hardware LEDGER and went with the trust wallet app.
- Send BNB to your trust wallet.
- Use pancakeswap to transform the BNB into SAFEMOON.
More about Safemoon here
On to mining escapades!
The Mining Tale Continues
Since my last post I indulged in a treat for myself. It had been years since I upgraded my gaming rig, and since it's now profitable just to hold working silicon I purchased a new laptop with a mobile 3070. I decided to call it the first real unit in my Terran mining colony, to try to 'overtake' and overpower the Zerg. I decided to call it the banshee:
The Banshee
It being very difficult to get your hands on good desktop rendering hardware, and my need for something a bit more compact and mobile as a day to day computing rig, I went with the ASUS Dash F15, which was a nice price/performance agreement at $2000 CAD. It also has a 240Hz monitor should I ever decide to take some mining downtime to actually... game on it at some point, and also get some usability from it as a nice mobile personal computer. It probably isn't the best price/hashpower agreement but I am happy with my purchase. I got to work testing different miners on it.
Terran 1 - Zerg 0 (But Barely)
The first thing I noticed was... a lack of good compute drivers for the 3070 variant that TUF puts into this notebook. I'm pretty sure at some point I might find a set of dev drivers that significantly increase the hashrate, but for now it is definitely mining a little inefficiently. I installed ubuntu linux and noticed... it was even a little bit less reliable to mine with. The big glaring annoyance was the fact that the screen involuntarily turns on and off while mining, and you can't make it stay on or off. I suspect its some quirk of the firmware, bloatware, or card, and hope to have it eventually ironed out in a future update.
Initially I was pretty disappointed as the first results were about 34MH/s, which is barely better than my R9 390 running at 30MH/s on the custom version of linux and amd compute drivers from my pervious post. Between these 2 and my CPU miners, I was definitely double my old rate at close to $10/day, but I knew I would be able to squeeze out more. The banshee barely was able to overtake the zerg mining PC, and it seemed like I wasn't yet looking at a quick return on my buck.
The Return of The Zerg
I decided to start where I left off last time as I knew there was likely some room for a good overclock on the R9 390. I had previously used the ROC-SMI program to set my fan speed to max, and learned how to set the voltage and clock speed up. The following 3 commands were added to my start miner script:
/home/chorel/ROC-smi-rocm-3.9.0/rocm-smi --setfan 255;
/home/chorel/ROC-smi-rocm-3.9.0/rocm-smi --setoverdrive 10;
/home/chorel/ROC-smi-rocm-3.9.0/rocm-smi --setmemoverdrive 3;
After a bit of testing, the desktop rig chugged up to 35MH/s, matching the laptop, and making my purchase seem even a little bit sillier. The Zerg were not starting to overpower the Terran with their fancy funding and specialized equipment. It was time to start tinkering with the laptop...
Regaining Terran Supremacy
I had to tackle a very important problem, that of cooling. The terran banshee was exuding so much heat it was slowing itself down. I took a look at my mining computer, the fans on top, and realized I had a golden opportunity to do something horrible. Something that would truly mean a solution to my cooling problem, and a prolonged era of Terran supremacy over the Zerg:
As ugly as this whole situation looks, it does a fantastic job of keeping both the card and the laptop cool. The card needs some serious cooling to stay under 70 and the 2 mini fans do a good job of forcing air away quickly. The top case fans push a great volume of air up and toward the laptop, cooling it from the underside. Both devices remain hovering around 70C at 100% load, with a 10% overclock. Right, I forgot to mention that I overclocked the laptop.
After a bit of encouragement from afterburner, I managed to increase the power draw to nearly 90W and get the hashrate of the laptop up to 45MH/s. My overall setup now is at or above $10 a day very consistently. Sometimes it climbs much higher and does sink below 10 occasionally, but I anticipate pulling in at the least $300/month and paying the laptop off relatively soon, between the mining and investing:
Conclusion: Terran Victory - For Now
You can tell I really need to get a GPU windfall. I'm watching the stores, I have alerts set up, and I'm combing marketplaces. I'm waiting for the protoss to step into my life. For now I have my colony on the safemoon, and the Zerg/Terran miners locked in their eternal struggle for heat domination.
