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I finally got this old thing up and running again the other night. It's a 10 year old tower that I retired about 4 years ago. I've pulled it apart, blasted it with air, and added every old hard drive with at least 100GB of storage I could find in anticipation of mining XCH and joining the pools that are supposed to go live later this summer. Its an absolute mess and I know it! It has an old AMD fx6300 chip, 2 Sapphire HD 7770's, 16gb of RAM, and now has a little over 4 TB of HDD capacity. I will likely add more over time but as I had all the hardware hanging around doing nothing so I figured what the heck I might as well go for it. I am fully aware that the thing looks a mess and the cable management is a disaster. I'll pretty it up and reassemble it properly once I have tested it and made sure everything is stable.
The tower has been sat gathering dust in my garage since we moved into the house and I haven't really had a desire or need to fix it up. I retired it in the first place because it was consistently overheating at both the CPU and GPU. Turns out the original GPU was bad so I've replaced it with these two HD7770's. The CPU needed reseating and probably will still run hot as it just has the stock heatsink and the old Vishera chipsets typically needed an upgraded cooling solution to really get optimal temperatures. You can see in the pics that I've added a couple of unconventionally placed fans to help for now while I tinker with it. Once I close it back up into the case it shouldn't be much of a problem with the amount of airflow I can achieve with the case fans. The GPU's don't really matter for farming XCH but I am going to be running a THETA edge node on this machine as well. XCH won't take much CPU or GPU power once it has a full set of plots so the THETA node will be able to make use of the CPU and GPU's for video encoding, caching, and folding@home jobs to earn me TFUEL! This way I'll be supporting 2 chains with one machine and earning from both- probably not much to be honest but it should earn me a little something ??????
I have to admit that my measly 4TB of HDD capacity isn't likely to get me a block anytime soon. It will once the XCH mining pools are available though, and you never know... maybe I'll get lucky and get a block with it before the pools come online. I can always add more drives over time as well or replace the old ones with higher capacity drives. Right now it has 2 1TB drives from old laptops, 2 1 TB drives from old desktops, and a 256GB SSD. It hasn't finished plotting yet but my Chia node estimates it will take around 4 Years to win a block with about 1 TB of the drives plotted. For a free build that is as much about me enjoying tinkering with it as it is about generating returns it provided a few hours of enjoyment. The theta node has already earned me a couple of TFUEL so even if I have to wait for the chia pools to go live that counts for something and I'm supporting the chains this way.
What do you think of this frankenbuild? Let me know!
JD
