Restoring old r270 mining rig
#1
Bug 
Hi,

I have an old mining rig based on coupld of R9 r270 GPUs. It's stable and working fine on ubuntu 14.04 and ancient radeon drivers - everything boots from my custom ubuntu14.04 livecd flashdrive (+ single HD for wordlists). I'm happy with the performance for my humble needs (pentest related - mostly NTLM cracking jobs), but hashcat keeps complaining about ancient driver. Here are a couple of questions:
  • I'm tempted to install fresh linux on new hdd with ROCm drivers (for sake of some improvement). Will they even work with R9 (I mean without crashing constantly etc)? Is it worth spending time to toy with them with those ancient GPUs or should I better roll with what I've got? 
  • I'm planning to invest in some HDDs to expand wordlist storage. I'm on a budget so I'd go for 4 consumer magnetic drives instead of SSD. Now I'm wondering whether it is worth to make zfs or other raid0 setup to speed up the I/O. My bet is that hashcat will hardly benefit from faster io (only when loading wordlist into gpu ram, right?) and I will only get some slight improvement when processing wordlists. Or am I wrong?
  • The rig is based on hacky tape-based risers for GPUs. They work fine - any benefit from the ones based on usb3? apart from looking nicer and costing more Big Grin perhaps not having fire in house? Wink
In distant future perhaps I'd build a new rig - is there any guide how to build one in rack compatible case? I'd love to shove the rig into my server rack, but I'm worried I will not be able to give the GPUs enough air for proper cooling in tight 2U/4U case.
Reply


Messages In This Thread
Restoring old r270 mining rig - by 2d40 - 04-04-2020, 09:15 AM
RE: Restoring old r270 mining rig - by rarecoil - 04-05-2020, 05:32 AM
RE: Restoring old r270 mining rig - by powermi - 04-05-2020, 08:52 AM
RE: Restoring old r270 mining rig - by 2d40 - 04-05-2020, 10:42 AM
RE: Restoring old r270 mining rig - by 2d40 - 04-05-2020, 10:43 AM
RE: Restoring old r270 mining rig - by rarecoil - 04-05-2020, 11:56 PM