How I Made A Mining Rig Under $300

The void was a quiet place… Then boom, a bright light called “Ethereum” exploded, creating the galaxy, and many others, we all know and love(Ubiq, Stratum, etc).

Ever since I noticed light had finally re-shined down onto cryptocurrency(very late), I knew I had to build myself a rig. With a dream, and lot’s of “whattomine.com” refreshes, the $300 mining rig had appeared. Here’s how I did it.

Everybody, and their friend has an old machine sitting in their garage, basement or attic. With a low price cap, taking advantage of this is a must.

Obtaining The Rig

The conversation went something like…

“Hey, you saving that machine in the garage?”

“No, I should trash it actually…”

“I’ll take it off your hands.”

Boom. You have everything you need to mine! Right?

Unless you want to be bringing in under $1.00 USD a day, no.

Making It Hash Ready

In order to make the machine capable of bringing in some decent change, we need to pick up some new(extremely old) graphics cards.

I found the best way to do this, is to use the power of “Ebay“. It’s the best place to look for used cards, and decent deals.

After a few days of bidding, and contemplating, I picked up one “Stock HD 7970“, and  one “280X Saphire Toxic Edition“.

I had also invested in two “powered risers“, I found on Ebay. I decided these would be a good idea, as I want them to be outside of the case to reduce the risk of having my room explode.

After sketchily mounting the two cards outside the case, using a piece of wood zip-tied to the frame… I knew it was ready.

Hammer Hash Time

These cards are old, extremely old. This means their power consumption is bad(complete shit), and they have a very low hashing power(15 mh/s per card on ETH at the time).

I figured my best bet would be to find a non-mainstream coin with a low difficulty(so we can utilize our low hashpower). In my case, Ubiq. It looked solid, to me. It has a good development team, small community, and seems like a good idea to invest in.

Mining Ubiq, my little franken-rig pulled a stable 50+ mh/s after overclocking.

Over the course of a month and a half of running 24/7, I’ve picked up a little over 100 UBQ. Not bad.

Last week, the price of 1 UBQ, jumped up to $3.01(with 100 coins, this is just over $300 USD).

It took a month and a half for our crazy machine to reach the point in which we had gotten our full investment back.

In conclusion…

Obviously the price of 1 UBQ, had dropped back down around $2.50 USD. We could have gotten our full investment back(technically), however I believe it will be more profitable to hold my coins even longer. What if the price jumps up to $8.00 USD in the next year? Who know’s how much we could be missing out on.

Anyway, building a rig on a budget, is do-able. You don’t need to spend two grand on a ton of cards, and fancy motherboards.