Bitcoin mining 101: How to build a cryptomining rig

Cryptocurrency has been — and continues to be — a wild ride. 

I’m old enough to remember being given a couple of bitcoins when they were worth next to nothing. Needless to say, I don’t have them anymore. Now, with bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices skyrocketing again, there’s renewed interest in cryptomining, which is a way to accumulate cryptocurrency without having to pay for it.

Let’s take a look at what makes a good cryptomining rig, and what hardware it takes if you want to be serious about mining.

What is cryptomining?

In the most basic terms, you are using a computer (or computers) to solve cryptographic equations and record that data to a blockchain. Taking this a bit deeper, miners verify the hashes of unconfirmed blocks and receive a reward for every hash that is verified. The process is computationally intensive, requiring state-of-the-art hardware if you are planning on making much headway with mining. Mining, as it was back in the days of the gold rush, is not for the faint of heart. 

And as with all high-end systems, it’s less a case of how much do you want to spend, and more a case of how fast do you want to spend. So, what hardware do you need to mine cryptocurrency?

What is a cryptomining rig?

OK, the “rig” is essentially a customized PC. It has all the common elements of a PC: CPU, motherboard, RAM, and storage. Where things deviate from the norm is when it comes to the graphics cards. It’s the GPU that’s doing that hard work when it comes to mining cryptocurrency, and not the CPU. You’re going to need quite a powerful GPU for mining, and likely you are going to be buying more than one. A lot more.

In fact, you can think of a mining rig as a relatively cheap PC with one or more high-performance GPUs attached. You need to connect multiple graphics cards to a single system, which means you also need a motherboard to handle that. You’ll also be looking at more than one power supply unit (PSU) if you’re planning to push things to the extremes.

There are also some other mining-specific items you’ll need to make the mining rig ready for mining.

Mining rig considerations

Here are a few considerations to bear in mind when building a mining rig:

• It’s not going to be cheap! 
• You need to factor power consumption in your mining equation because that can eat into your earnings.
• You’re not building a regular PC, and getting everything to work can become a game of trial and error and a lot of fiddling with drivers. Be patient!