Chia GPU Plotting Farming Budget z420 Hardware, Benchmarks, Budget, Analysis and SHEET!

today we're going to be running through the HP z420 workstation this is a great way to get up and running with cheap ECC DDR3 RAM at large capacities it also has an integrated six pin which can handle an 8-pin connection for a GPU and it can do all this at a really low base price so we're going to set this up we're going to look at what the performance is like on it with a 1070 this is going to be an ultra budget build and we've got it stocked up right now with three 20 terabyte drives and you can always find great deals on drives at shop.digitalspaceport.com so let's dive in see what kind of performance we can get this is going to be in Windows that we're doing this but the plotting performance keep in mind is on a 1070 very cheap card but also it's surprisingly really good so let's get started okay so the first thing that I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and plug in our six pin to eight pin connector links to all of this stuff in the description below as well check out digitalspaceport.com forward slash Chia for build guides for each one of these workstations as well as complete lists of everything you need to get up and running and so one of the nice things about using 256 gigs of RAM which you could use 128 but DDR3 and ECC is cheap now there are fan shrouds that go over the ram however we're not going to put the fan shrouds on we're actually going to point a auxiliary fan at it while we're plotting this is supposedly going to keep things significantly better and the plots coming off significantly faster okay so there we go we've got our RAM sticks in there let's check and make sure that they are secured yep they look like they are also you want to make sure when you get one that you get the 600 watt power supply in here that'll have enough juice to run that full GPU at about 155 Watts or so without any sort of a problem so if you don't know on a particular seller on eBay don't be afraid to ask them to take a picture of the PSU so that you can get the exact wattage next let's go ahead and put in the graphics card here and this is a pretty big graphics card but it does fit and these are really cheap if you don't have one locally you can get one for about a hundred and ten dollars on eBay it looks like and that's a good brand one if you want to go with a lower quality brand one you can get one for even cheaper than that or you possibly even just have one of these laying around this one I had laying around so it made sense to actually go ahead and try out in this scenario well I have the DVD drive up here currently you could take the DVD drive out you have more drives stacked in here if you wanted to so we'll just pull out these little snappers [Applause] so we're going to be putting in three 20 terabyte SATA drives here and in the future you have pretty much unlimited expansion capabilities with something like an LSI SAS HBA this can connect to multiple of the NetApp ds4246s or other jbods out there at various densities what you want to factor in when you're looking at disks is the density that you can get that is a very important part of being a Chia farmer the lower the density the worse off you are the higher the density the better off you are so looking at a scenario where you have quite a few hard drives is going to be more watts that's going to be multiplied out essentially by whatever your price per kilowatt hour is where you're located and that can add up to be not as insignificant amount of money and you want this to be as efficient as possible so that you don't end up paying extra on your electric bill and certainly you can check out shop.digitalspaceport.com to get a great deal on things like 2018 and 16 terabyte drives got a bunch of 18s in it amazing prices and 16s in it really really good prices and a few 20s and at some decent prices but those are hard to come by to be honest with you those don't last for very long so stand up in the comments below and let me know if you're new to Chia or if you are just getting started in crypto in general and this is your first time with a crypto or whether or not you've been around the crypto Sphere for a little while and you've decided that it's time to get involved with Chia and so I'm just taking the windows 11 Pro SSD that I had in the z440 video you do need Windows 11 Pro to be able to hit 256 gigs of RAM it also allows you to do things like dual socket processors which again we have a single socket here but from the standpoint of important for Ram yes you do want to have this installed for Ram so we'll plug that in just run this up here now we're going to be installing a SSD drive so that we have a temp buffer for our plots to reside on this is uh definitely not a amazing or even expensive this is a 512 gigabyte SSD that we've got here and I'm just going to pull the plug that I've got in the disk drive up there and we're also going to use this power connector down here and it looks like I do need to actually go ahead and [Applause] loosen up some of the wires from another cable management spot where they're kind of Trapped up right now there we go now I can get these installed and so it looks like we have seven eight uh status here so I'm not sure if they're all going to be running at full speed but for Chia that doesn't matter really aside from when you're writing the plot to the disc the first time so with the eight satisin here you would be able to hit 120 terabytes of space if you had an nvme card that you were using to boot from which you may be able to actually find in some of these older HP systems coming with that now we're going to get our card installed all right and that should be it I think we've got everything in place here we look like we're good to go so let's go ahead set this up so if you do run into this red blinking light problem that we've got here you need to swap in a E5 2600 series CPU into here this is an LGA 2011 compatible socket gonna go ahead and clean this off yeah and as we can see here we've got a 1607 V2s so I just happened to have laying around a 2690 V2 this is way more horsepower than you need unless you were planning on using it for something other than a GF arming node uh this here could run a whole House's worth of VMS and everything you would ever need if you're interested in that check out some of the other content on this channel as well I'm just going to go ahead and put a dab of uh goo on here and make sure you line up your PIN with the Gold Dot that is on one of the corners here and if you're buying a z420 just go ahead and at the same time buy one of the cheap chips that I'll list in the description with this I'm going to clean this off here also all right here we go now we got that blue light up there everything's looking good should see the monitor kick on here in a second yeah all right so this right here is because we don't have the memory fan detected this is annoying so there's some pins there I don't know if there's some sort of a trick where you could short them out maybe but if you do sound off in the comments below uh this one here is something we would expect actually this is the memory size changing we've got our fan ready to go here also oh that's a lot of air that should be really cool so you just hit the Escape key to get there and we're gonna go to the computer setup and just hit F1 if it appears stuck that'll get you to move past the screen there that took me a forever to figure out okay so you can see our system information here don't go screwing around with your bios unless you are ready for bad things to happen alright so let's check a couple of settings while we're in here in device configuration so we've got our hard drive that's our boot drive here can be set as we only want I Achi mode for our drive we don't want raid any of that uh it's fine to leave boot removable boot media though that's fine we'll hit F10 to accept that and we're gonna go to our PCI performance mode and change that to enabled and in our secure boot configuration here we want to have Legacy boot support and disabled the secure boot save changes and exit and we should be able to get into our Windows 11 installation app and we're going to check the amount of ram that we've got reported in there but it should show as 256. okay so now that we're in go ahead type in terminal here and we're going to go ahead and run ipconfig and we can see that we've got our IP address as 1.1.98 and we're going to go ahead and use this for our remote desktop and if you go to remote desktop settings you can see that we've got remote desktop checked on all right so let's take a look at what we're going to be able to do for our plotting speeds here so I did go ahead and download updated versions of the Cuda plot k32 this is the gigahorse platform package that we're going to be doing some benchmarking on I also grabbed the bladebit Cuda Windows Alpha 3 plotter so we're going to be able to get some plots off of that also and see what kind of time we got there and I grabbed the proof of space tool so that we can run a few benchmarks on some plots to see what kind of size you might expect to be able to get to with a C7 and a C8 size on a 1070 because this might not be information that's out there yet so one thing really quick to keep in mind if you are plotting and trying to farm at the same time on something like an eight gigabyte card especially a 1070 you're not going to be able to do that you have to have more than eight gigabytes of vram to be able to do that and a 3060 has 12 12 gigabytes of vram and is able to do that so keep that in mind if you are looking for a card that is able to do both at the same time on the same machine you would want to probably look at a 30 60 12 gigabyte card or some other high gigabyte card again a C8 is going to take about right under three gigabytes of vram and plotting is right around eight gigabytes of vram okay so let's take a look at first off the proof of space tool that we've got here so you can see I've been doing a couple of plots here already and one thing you need to do is have a plot on an SSD actually you know what I don't have a plot on the plot temp SSD here so we're going to go ahead fire one off on the Cuda plot k32 here and if we do a history let's see now it doesn't work like that in Windows does it of course not okay so we're gonna do a C8 here and this structure that I've got here would be I've got three right directories and one SSD that one SSD was easily able to handle these three right directories and these are again the 20 terabyte drives that you can find on digitalspaceport.com also 18s and 16s and as you can see these formatted down 20 terabyte drives have about 18.1 terabytes of effective space on them and I've been doing some plotting on them here's our one simple SSD that is definitely not a Powerhouse SSD but the cool news is this is actually well paired with this GPU the write speed and three drives to not hit a bottleneck so it's not going to slow down with three drives as a matter of fact I think even with two drives you would be okay um with OneDrive you definitely would have a backlog of plots but even with two or three drives one of these ssds would be more than enough to get you going so we're gonna look at the price of all this stuff here really quick another thing to keep in mind M being zero here is important this will allow you to utilize your RAM and windows plotting and not run into a bottleneck now I'm going to go ahead and just remove these directories and I'm going to set the number of plots to one let's go and run this Cuda plot really quick and so there you go you can see that we've got about 5.7 minutes on this that is 342 seconds not bad considering this is a incredibly low end SSD and our Ram is clocking in here at I believe 1333 a whopping 1333 megahertz so that actually is a really decent time for sc8 now let's go ahead and cook off a C7 and then we're going to run both of those through the proof of space tool and we'll be able to tell what the size would be farmable off of this GPU for each of those at different filters like 512 where we're currently at 256 where we should be sometime next year and 128 all right and the C7 plot time is in and you can see that we are looking at right around 8.75 minutes or 525 seconds for the C7 again a little bit different as far as how much data is being actually stored inside there so you definitely see there's a trade-off here that on a 1070 becomes pretty apparent now let's use the proof of space and time tool and this will allow us to measure effectively what kind of size we would be able to farm and so I'm going to go ahead and change this from any plot to a specific plot all right and now let's run the command and you need to run this off of an SSD you shouldn't run this off of a mechanical hard drive or else you could taint the results that you're getting and then be not accurate but you can see it is really working at the farming aspect or the simulated farming aspect of the GPU here as it runs through this as well and so you can see that at 512 a 1070 can Farm a 3.63 piggy bytes at 256 which is what the next filter reduction size will be 1.81 and even after that at the next filter reduction after that at 128.908 hippie bytes so the 1070 not really a slouch if you have a smaller or farm that is subpivy byte it's actually a really good Contender so that is of course at the C7 level now let's check the C8 level and so you can see that reduction in size there at 512 right now you would be able to farm roughly 1.89 piggy bytes on a 1070 about 0.949 after the 256 filter reduction and some years after that about 0.474 pivy bytes at a 128 filter size so 1070 is still not a horrible idea if your sub 500 or so Tibi bites that might be I have several year multi-year farmable capable capability that you would have in that card all right so next let's take a look at what we can do as far as plots and the speed that we can get out of them for bladebit Cuda plotter and so we're going to use compression level seven here and we're going to create the Cuda plot and we're just going to toss that onto the e Drive let's see how much space we've got left on the E drive here 330 so I think I'm gonna go ahead and clear these out of here really quick and so again creating something like a C7 plot here is a CPU decompressible plot this is not necessarily needing to have a GPU this is chia's technology versus mad Max's technology again the difference there are both k32s but if we're looking at the feed that's associated with mad Max's at a GPU decompression level and a CPU decompression level versus chia's technology which is just free then there are trade-offs to be considered so let's go ahead and run this plot now and there we go we can see that we've got the blade bit Chia plot out in 536 seconds that's about 8.9 minutes at a C7 level and let's take a look at the size of that one here also and we can see that is about 81.7 gigabytes of space right there if you're looking at just the SATA ports in the z420 alone you probably are going to be okay with any one of these combinations and so you might try to max out the space I personally am going for C8 because I think space maximization makes sense for me however if you wanted to plot and CPU farm at the same time then either of the lower compression levels on the gigahorse platform or just going with the Chia platform would probably make the best sense and so let's go on a little shopping trip and see what it would cost to put together this system and also some storage now your biggest cost when you're doing a Chia setup is going to usually be in your storage so optimizing for the lowest price that you can find per terabyte on places like shop.digitalspaceport.com is a great idea where members actually get a three percent or a five percent discount on their entire purchase price based upon a 199 or a 7.99 monthly mem membership so if we're looking at the HP z420 workstation here these are available for roughly sixty dollars plus 28.50 shipping so I've put that over here on our sheet as 88.50 and I've got a 256 gigabyte of ram bundle for 110. now this is a really decent price usually 125 seems to be what they're around but I did toss that in there at 110. next we have our 1070 which honestly every piece you've got of something that can work is saving so maybe you got one laying around uh maybe you can find one somewhere locally but these are going to be around 105 to 120 dollars and just kind of toss this one in here and so if you look here we've got our 120 dollar 10.70. also don't forget you're going to need that incredibly not expensive 2650 V2 processor so you can use the 250 six gigs of RAM and that's whopping 6.95 there those things have come down in price a lot uh so 6.95 also I thought that I would throw in two ssds here these are actually brand new on uh Amazon so you can just go to Amazon at the links below and you can find those but these are a 240 and a 480. that would be your boot and also your temp like I had set up very close to what I had set up of course like I mentioned 20 terabyte hard drives again those will be coming in I've got another shipment on the way uh four satas pretty soon but if you were looking at what I have in stock currently actually at a slightly lower price per terabyte 18 terabyte and 16 terabyte drives are at a lower price per actual terabyte and optimizing for your price per terabyte is important do note the difference between SAS and SATA and so you would need to have SAS for the drives that I have currently in stock but SATA drives are on the way so be sure to check back back on Friday or Monday this next week okay so we can see that our total cost if we actually tossed six drives in here had the two drives again there's eight SATA ports in there 1679.21 that would give you a 120 terabytes of raw capacity and I did some calculations for you here that comes out to about 109.139 Tibby bytes of space now the farming wattage that you'd be looking at on this machine is around 105 Watts that's not great but it's also not insanely horrible that is at a kilowatt cost and so you can fill in all these numbers literally I'm going to make this sheet available so all you got to do is go to file make a copy punch in your own numbers here and you can check this out and change this around and that will allow you to see for your instance like I'm at around 10 cents per kilowatt hour here and I pay a one percent pool fee those come out here in the electric cost and the pool fee so you can get the breakdown so this is what I was talking about when I was saying I'm at a C8 and I don't see C7 being a substantially better value or proposition for me than just going with a Chia C7 or just going with a gigahertz C6 and the reason why is because when you look at the actual breakdown here at the end of the it's really neck and neck between of course the Giga horse and the Chia but if you look at the C7 size that is not a huge step up but it is actually a pretty big step up to a C8 and now this is 120 terabytes and like I have a lot more space than that so I mean we're looking at three six zero zero here when I finally get it all plotted up so that's not a little bit per day that I will be making there and if you look at the adjustments on the daily weekly monthly and yearly that you see there that's a big difference and so just putting it back here really quick at 120 you can see that yearly you're at like 732 now this is assuming something that is impossible you will never see the price stay static for anything uh so seeing the price of chia stay static at where it is right now would yield the same value per Tibi byte farmed that we have right now and literally that is not going to happen uh it will vary around none of this is financial advice of course do your own research and if you are checking things out remember the easiest way to get wrecked in crypto is to overspend on Hardware been there done that myself and I anything I can do to help people not go there themselves I would love to do that so working on spreadsheets using spreadsheets those things really are helpful and so do punch in your own information I've pre-filled this for the z420 I'll be doing this through all the builds that we've done so the z440 the Epic build I've got some desktop builds that are just normal computers and I've got a couple of other servers and towers that we're going to try that are interesting combinations and also some low power boards that I think are actually really attractive possibly especially if you look at high kilowatt hour costs so links to all of this at digitalspaceport.com forward slash Chia and you can find the z420 guide there in the description below you can also find the guide there also don't forget to check out shop.digital spaceport.com that five percent discount on your entire order is pretty sweet and that really knocks down the price per terabyte on your hard drives and that can be a good way to to get a lot of space for cheaper than you might be able to get elsewhere do take the time do the math look at it and when you're doing your analysis I hope this kind of shows why my leanings towards the gigahorse C8 just are based on like it makes the most sense and it just makes the most sense and the other cool thing is plotting is pretty darn fast now so like if I need to replot or anything like that then I can replot pretty quickly but seeing the gigahorse ca uh working at again essentially 42 percent extra space effective in that space that is something that's really nice so sound off in the comments below let me know what you guys are thinking uh this is something that I think is pretty interesting and I hope that you guys are having a good rest of your day we will check you guys out next time

Channel: Digital Spaceport

Views: 14,074

Keywords: chia, chia plotting, chia gpu plotting, chia mining, chia gpu mining, gpu mining, gpu crypto, chia farming, chia farm, how to bladebit, chia bladebit gpu plotter, gpu plotter, gpu, chia coin, chia price, xch, chia compressed plots, plotting chia

Id: HkwDnhhfye4

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023