As most of you unfamiliar with Bit Coins, I first approached Bit Coins with a realm of hesitation. It was April 2011, and someone just posted a link to Bit Coins on one of the forums I frequent. This was the first time hearing about such an idea and I was very skeptical that there was anyway to actually monetize such an idea. At the time, I had an AMD Radeon 4870 which was always on anyways so I really had nothing to lose.
When I realised I made 1-2 BTC, that were supposed to be valued at $2-3 each, doing nothing in a 24 hour period; I decided to take the plunge. As I was just completing my Corporate Finance course in university, I decided to do some valuations of a potential operation to see if I would end up with a positive NPV. No matter how aggressive my depreciation expenses or my outlook was (all set for worse case scenario), I was still ending up with a positive NPV. Anyone who has taken a Finance course before knows the golden rule is you always pursue anything that gives you a positive NPV.
I started my operation on a relatively small scale. I decided to maximize my limited funds by purchasing the golden grail, at that time, 58XX video series. What made this series particularly well suited for BTC mining was that they had a significant number of shader cores, moreso than even the 69XX series that succeeded it. The increased number of cores made it particularly well suited to performing more complex calculations. As BTC mining was still far from everyone’s radar, I purchased 3 5850s (then considered a generation behind card) for $130/each. As I have an LGA 1366 motherboard that has 3 PCI-E slots, I was able to accomodate all 3 cards in a tri-fire setup.
All nice and cozy with three Sapphire 5850s Xtreme
Although I quickly realised that such a setup posed significant heat issues, I also realised how easy it was to make money with BTC! The first 2 days I was mining, I already made 70 BTCs (at the current rates then, I already paid for more than 2/3s of the video cards!). As the video cards ran for longer time durations though, the heat issue became so extreme that the GPUs were touching 95-100C even with the fans at 100%!
I had to intervene by removing the side panel and by deploying a household fan in front of the video cards to keep them sufficiently cooled (well, below 90C…).
It wasn’t a matter of time before I would have my first casualty, something I became familiar with later on.
I woke up not even a week later, after having my video cards running 24/7 BTC mining, to the sound of something like a piece of paper in between the wheel spokes on a bike. I originally thought it was something clipping a case fan but it was not the case. It was the GPU fan on the video card dying. The fan was seized and refused to move on its own accord. As my first foray into BTC mining, I felt the risk of a dead video card and sent the card for repair. Little did I know that returning that video card cost me potentially $1000-1500 in potential profits.
THe 5850s opened up the door to buying 5 5870s and 6 5830s. I still had no physical money from mining but it became more like an addiction than anything. I needed to be in the top 10 category for mining power and it seemed like other people had a similar addiction. BTC Mining also seemed to explode at the same point, sending the value of BTC sky rocketing and the availability of the 58XX series dwindling. Difficulty was still laggard and I knew my window of opportunity was limited. I turned every possible PC I had to a miner and began purchasing old Intel mobos that had PCI-E slots. As bandwidth is not important for BTC mining, I took advantage of how cheap these mobos costed and how many PCI-E 1X slots they has. I hacked the ends of the PCI-E 1X slots to accommodate the 16X cards and had my operation in full swing.
Main PC: 3 5870s (2 watercooled, and one on air) @ 450 Mh/s each (1350Mh/s total)
File Server: 3 5850s (on air), @ 340 Mh/s each (1020 Mh/s total)
Farmer Rig 1: 2 5870s (on air), @ 390 Mh each (780 Mh/s total)
Farmer Rig 2: 2 5850s (on air) @ 323 Mh/s each (646 Mh/s total)
Farmer Rig 3: 2 5850s (on air) @ 323 Mh/s each (646 Mh/s total)
Farmer Rig 4: 2 5850s (on air) @ 323 Mh/s each (646 Mh/s total)
Total mining power: 5.1 Gh/s
Although I had no physical money from BTC mining, I would frequently trade BTC to USD on MtGox in order to avoid the volatility of the exchange rate.