Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Mining rigs

As difficulty increased over time for mining Ether, mining rigs with multiple GPUs were starting to be built by the miners. A mining rig usually contains around five GPU cards with all of them working in parallel for mining, thus improving the chances of finding valid nonces for mining.

Mining rigs can be built with some effort and are also available commercially from various vendors. A typical mining rig configuration includes the components discussed here:

• Motherboard: A specialized motherboard with multiple PCI-E x1 or x16 slots, for example, BIOSTAR Hi-Fi or ASRock H81, is required.
• SSD hard drive: An SSD hard drive is required. The SSD drive is recommended because of its much faster performance over the analog equivalent. ...