As we all know that a miner is usually assembled with 6-8 medium and high-end graphics cards. Recently, BIOSTAR launched the TB250BTC PRO mainboard supporting 12-card mining. However, the miner assembled with 6 cards has already made some newbies feel headache, not to mention the 12-card miner.

We once introduced the general assembly method of some GPU miners (please refer to: How to Assemble Your Own Mining Rigs with Eight Graphics Cards). This article will briefly introduce the assembly of 12-card miner.

 

Hardware Assembling

There are 11 PCI-E 3.0 X1 slots and +1 PCI-E 3.0 X1 slots on the mainboard.

So make sure to purchase the PCI-E X1 to PCI-E X16 extension cable.

First, make one row of interfaces plugged.

Dual power supplies are needed for mining with 12 graphics cards on one mainboard platform, which will bring certain risk of card damages, because different power supplies will have different designs with various voltages and currents. Dual power suppliers may damage the mainboard, graphics cards or the power supply itself. For the sake of zero risks, please choose the same brand of power supplies. In this article, the Segotep KL-1080W is adopted.

Short-circuit a power supply to provide power for other graphics cards. (Short-circuit method: put 24pin clip upward and short-circuit the fourth and fifth ports from the left side of the upper layer to realize power supply without platform. Please refer to our tutorial: Setting up Your Bitcoin Mining Power Supply)

Start with the memory first. The memory for 12 cards should be necessary, basically, at least 32G, otherwise the miner will be extremely slow.

As for the graphics cards, no matter AMD or Nvidia, their drivers can only support mining with 8 cards. Therefore, the 12-card mining combination can only be 6N+6A, 8N+4A (8A+4N) and 7N+5A (7A+5N). Of course, through the expansion card, the 8N+8A combination can also be implemented.

This article introduces the 12-card with A+N combination; however, it’s recommended to connect 6 AMD graphics cards and the monitor first, and conduct test by connecting to the display interface of AMD graphics card.

However, the USB cable can only connect to these AMD graphics cards then.

Switch on the miner, first enter the BIOS settings to set Mining Mode on Chipset, select Above 6x VGA (UEFI).

After setting Chipset, jump to BOOT, set Video to UEFI and press F10 to save.

Enter BIOS again, select Boot and set CSM Support as Disable, then press F10 to save.

After installing OS and AMD driver, continue to connect Nvidia graphics cards, then switch on the miner again to install driver.

 

Start Mining

First, about mining with Nvidia graphics card. For Nvidia graphics card, choose Sparkpool Zcash mining software 0.3.3 version or ZEC mining Nvidia 1.1 The latter is a very easy tool for Nvidia mining beginners.

Then set virtual memory, I get used to setting both the C and D drives.

Then, fill in your ZEC wallet address to start mining.

The aforesaid is the tutorial for Nvidia newbies, now we’d like to teach how to mine with AMD graphics cards or batch mining with Nvidia graphics cards.

To mine ZEC with AMD graphics cards, select Sparkpool Claymore Zcash AMD mining software version 12.0, to mine with Nvidia graphics card, select Sparkpool Zcash mining software version 0.3.3.

Enter corresponding folders and right click the file “double-click-for-mining. Bat”, then click Edit.

Then edit your wallet, the parts selected blue as shown below is the wallet you need to edit. After wallet editing, save it as bat file and close to exit. Then double click to open for mining.

After the aforesaid steps, start mining after installing the driver. Here, I adopt dual-mining for the same cryptocurrency ZEC. The following is the hashrate screenshot of 6 RX580+GTX1060 graphics cards.

The 24-hour mining status in the pool is shown as follows. It’s weird that one miner is unexpectedly identified as two miners.

 

Postscript

This is the ZEC mined 24 hours, about 0.08 coins in total.

At present, the price of one ZEC is 2,329 yuan. To mine 0.08 coins per day, that is, 2329X0.08 = 186.32 yuan.

The power consumption of the miner is 1961.5 watts, that is, 1.96 kWh per hour in total. The price of commercial electricity is 1.2 yuan per kWh, that is, 1.96X1.2 = 2.35 yuan, 2.35X24 = 56.44 yuan. 186.32-56.44=129.88 yuan, which is the pure profit per day.

 

Appendix

Relevant articles on GPU mining and GPU miner at EastShore

• Intro to Mining: What You Need to Know about Graphics Cards | EastShore Mining Devices
• Most Suitable Nvidia Graphics Cards for Mining in 2019 | EastShore Mining Devices
• How to Assemble Your Own Mining Rigs with Eight Graphics Cards | EastShore Mining Devices
• Most Incredible Mining in History, Assemble Single Miner with 12 Graphics Cards | EastShore Mining Devices