30 JAN

Bitcoin Mining - We can help

Published by Richard Parry on 30th Jan 2014


You’ve all heard about Bitcoin – The new electronic trading currency that has taken the world by storm in 2013. At present the currency is relatively unknown, and there’s a lot of controversy regarding its security, but for the few people who are mining Bitcoins this can be an incredibly profitable business.

We have supplied various high-end servers for customers recently that are in effect traditional hardware, but include high-end modified GPU based mining cards. Currently our customers are using GPU’s from NVidia, however there are now newcomers to the market with purpose engineered cards, from the likes of Butterflylabs. Their current flagship model provides up to 600 GigaHash’s per second, which is almost double of what the high-end GPU’s can offer.

We recently assembled a small farm of these systems for a customer (22x of these machines), each of which has 4x of the Butterflylabs 600GH Mining Cards installed. These cards are loosely bards on the NVidia Tesla cards, but internally modified with their own coding to be purpose built for Bitcoin Mining.

Each of these systems was based on a Supermicro based chassis, and Asus internals.

We don’t have any photographs of video of these builds unfortunately as we had a tight 3 week timescale to fully assemble, stress test and dispatch these systems.

The components used for each machine were as follows;

Supermicro SuperChassis 747TG-R1400B-SQ



This chassis has a 1400W Dual Redundant 94% Platinum Efficiency PSU. The high wattage was required to sufficiently drive the 4x Butterflylabs cards, which at peak draw up to 300W each.

Whilst this chassis is a Supermicro model, it is fully compatible with a standard ATX motherboard, accepting sizes from Micro ATX through to full size EATX. It will also accept the special Supermicro extended quad CPU boards if required.

The main reason for choosing this chassis is the 8 slot PCI backplane, allowing 4 cards to be installed, plus the improved cooling internally, designed for GPU rendering systems.

Internally within the chassis is an 8-bay hot-swap SATA/SAS area. This wasn’t used for this specific customer.


Asus P9X79E-WS Intel X79 Motherboard



This motherboard was chosen for its 4x PCIe 16x slots, allowing 4x of the Butterflylabs cards to be used.

The board was coupled with an Intel Core i7-4820K. For Bitcoin mining the system doesn’t need a particularly powerful CPU, as all of the processing is done on the specialist add-on cards. The customer however did want to re-purpose the systems at a later date if required, so the Intel i7 CPU would allow them to do this without major upgrades.


There are various other components that went into this system, such as good quality 16GB Kingston RAM kits, but the basic components are listed above.

The above system is a quick example of a Bitcoin mining server. We have supplied other systems that are GPU free, and use the CPU only for processing. This is a much slower process, but it means cheaper components can be used initially.

If you would like to discuss your requirements or would like to talk to a member of our sales team about Bitcoin mining, please contact us or give us a call on 0800 652 1649. We would be happy to help.

Bitcoin Mining - We can help

Would you like to know more about this article and how Server Case can help your organisation? Please complete the form below and one of our team will get back to you right away.

I want to receive the latest offers and updates about new technology releases for Server Case via email.
Submit

Weekly Updates

We update our Product Reviews every week with new content. Please subscribe to our news feed for information about new products, review, case studies and happenings at Server Case.

Recent Posts

What's the Best 1U CPU Cooler
What's the Best 1U CPU Cooler
Published by Richard Parry on 11th Oct 2023
YouTube Full Build Review from Cameron Gray for Logic Case SC-23400-2 2U Rackmount Chassis
Full build video review of our short depth Logic Case SC-43400-8HS chassis.
PC Pro - PowerNAS Rackmount 2U
PC Pro - PowerNAS Rackmount 2U
Published by Richard Parry on 13th Oct 2016

LinkedIn

Instagram

Call us today on 01283 576162 to talk directly to one of our server specialists

  • Secured by Sage Pay
  • PayPal