My mining hobby started with the intention of becoming familiar with the Linux operating system. I thought I was pretty hot stuff with my cool milk crate and way bad 7870s humming in the background, tearing it up at almost 800k hash for the pair.
How times change. The R9 Series GPUs were released and moving to BAMT killed any opportunity for me to become familiar with Linux.
So one Saturday I was doing my morning ritual of checking my rigs, coin prices, and performing due diligence for my regular job and had like 8 windows and 30 internet tabs open. Now this lap top has seen better days and wouldn't stand a chance against even the slowest turtle. Then the daily blue screen of death popped and got me to thinking.
I have a spare motherboard that is in great shape except for one PCIE slot that was wrecked trying to put in a presence wire. Throw in one of those 7870s that was just decommissioned the other day, spare power supply and that’s halfway to a new computer!
Off to the electronics store again to scoop a case, RAM, CPU and hard drive. It was interesting that many cases didn't have fans, but the friendly associate pointed me towards one that already had the fans installed, a little more expensive, but hey, it was $70 and made it easier on me. Being this was a work computer the CPU and RAM was upgraded over what was in my mining rigs, and of course this rig would not be running on a USB stick, so a 1 TB hard drive was added along with a DVD Burner just because it was cheap ($17).
All together (including my spare stuff) this computer ended up under $800, and after getting mining rigs working putting this together was a relative piece of cake. It did take a little more time due to all the case wiring, but by the late afternoon I was up and running on my new Linux (Ubuntu) system.
Overall it is pretty cool looking with several fans that glow blue, and more USB ports than the average person could ever dream of using.
Most importantly Ubuntu provides a nice stable platform and plenty of speed to handle all the windows and tabs that would kill my laptop in no time.
One would think this would be the end of story, but ARR Matey we be miners, and miners cannot just leave GPUs laying around not mining! The second de-commissioned 7870 was calling my name that next morning, so with a riser cable, a little farm boy engineering (ie: tie wraps), and a download of Cgminer we were off and running. After dropping the intensity down to 17 on GPU 0 the computer responded as it had before, nice and fast. Now granted any gaming would probably require a mining shut down, but I guess there won't be any game playing on this computer!
So now I have my Linux system that can handle about anything I can throw at it and it puts out a steady 775k hash. What more could you ask for!
Be safe, find MoAr blocks!
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