So I’ve done it. As of this morning, I made my purchase of the components to build a mining rig. I haven’t built a PC of any sort in over 15 years, having lost all interest in such things, and relying solely on my laptops for development and entertainment.
The last time I built anything, it was a MythTV box for time shifting television (IE, a homemade TiVo). This used two video capture/tv tuner cards, a smallish mini PC enclosure, and a modest CPU and ram, and large at the time harddrive. It worked well until it didn’t. I only just recently got rid of it when I moved (it sat around for years).
This time around, I wanted two things. I wanted to mine crypto currency, but I also just needed a nice server for running development environments (probably mostly docker containers). Needing a server was enough to justify the expense. Crypto came essentially free (for one gfx card anyway).
Unfortunately, I waited just a tad bit too long. There’s another gold rush right now, and the prices and availability of the components went nuts just as I was trying to buy. I was lucky to get the one GFX card and the mining motherboard (specially designed with 13 PCI slots) for a few hundred more than I had planned. Afterwards I am seeing the mobo selling for 3x what it was last week!
So now, I wait for the delivery.