Mining Rig with QuickMiner in one hour
You have just finished hardware assembly of your mining rig and you have 4, 8, 12 or any number of NVIDIA video cards installed. You wish to start mining reliably as soon as possible with as little as possible problems and doing this the most efficient way. You do not want to lose days tuning your mining rig, you want it done as soon as possible.
Here we are representing all the steps needed after hardware assembly. It should take you less than one hour and your rig will be running optimized and fully reliable. We made this guide after having numerous experiences with various hardware, we are covering all the quirks and specialities that need to be considered when establishing software part of mining rig. This is an alternative to any mining OS solution.
First step is to install Windows 10 x64. It can be Home or Pro version, it does not matter, but it must be x64 and not x86. Before installation, we recommend you to unplug all but one GPU - troubleshooting and diagnosing issues is much easier and simpler when there is only one GPU. It does not matter what kind of BIOS settings you use at this point, as long as you can boot installation drive and successfully install Windows 10.
This is very important step - you should install non-DCH version of drivers. These drivers you can find using Advanced Driver Search as visible on the following picture:
Recent DCH drivers have massive issues with memory leaks thus are not recommended for mining. Perhaps NVIDIA will improve this one day, but currently we do not recommend installing DCH drivers.
After installation of NVIDIA drivers is complete, you should verify whether installation was successful. It is best to use GPU-Z for this purpose. You should see following picture:
GPU-Z has special features listed for each GPU at the bottom. Usually, when installation of drivers fails, some checkboxes are going to be missing. When you see (almost) all checkboxes, you know that drivers are installed successfully. GPU-Z can also tell you driver version and whether driver is DCH or non-DCH. In the above example, we have installed 465.89 non-DCH drivers.
Download latest release and install it. Windows Defender may give you some issues here. You need to allow NiceHashQuickMiner.exe and excavator.exe. Then:
- configure your Mining address to link rig with your account,
- give your rig a name,
- set error handling mechanism to reboot rig,
- but do not enable start with Windows at this point yet.
Now, we just want to verify whether Rig is visible in Rig Manager and that we can control it. To test, start/stop it or change OPTIMIZE. If everything is working, then great, we can move onto next step - reboot your Rig into BIOS.
In BIOS, if you are using more than 3 GPUs and/or at least one is connected using USB-risers, you have to configure following:
- Set Above 4G decoding to Enabled. Some motherboards also offer number of bits - set this to 40 or 41. Do not set more than 41, because some devices may have issues then.
- Find settings for PCIe link. Every slot that uses USB-riser needs to have this configured to either PCIe Gen1 or PCIe Gen2. Higher Gen (Generation, or version) means higher speed. USB risers are not designed with high speeds in mind - rarely can work with Gen3 (forget about Gen4), so we suggest you to set it to Gen2. Gen1 could be even better, but some devices can have compatibility issues with Gen1. With our experiences so far, Gen2 is most likely to work good.
- Set BIOS to UEFI boot only (disable CSM or legacy) - this will give you the least amount of issues with GPU detection.
- Set appropriate primary GPU. If your motherboard/CPU have integrated GPU, we suggest you to enable it and set it as primary GPU, then plug monitor cable (HDMI/DP) to the motherboard. Rendering display reduces hashrate so it is best to use dedicated GPU for rendering display if possible.
With the above settings, your Rig should support up to 13 GPUs without any issues.
After you save BIOS settings from previous step, shut everything off and plug all GPUs back in. Make sure that power is properly distributed, especially if using two or more PSUs.
After Windows is booted with all GPUs connected, you need to give it some time to properly install all newly detected GPUs. This may take quite some time (up to 15-20 minutes, depending on the amount of GPUs). Your screen may flicker several times during this procedure.
Right after booting into Windows, it is recommended to check Device Manager and inspect how many display adapters have been detected (note that some may not have appropriate name yet, because drivers are not installed at this point). The total amount of display adapters should be the amount of GPUs you have (plus integrated GPU, if you use one).
Once installation of drivers is finished, you can use GPU-Z again to verify whether it has been completed successfully. GPU-Z will also show driver version. Here, it may happen, that Windows install old drivers instead of new ones. In that case, run NVIDIA driver installer as you did in step 2 and keep doing it until you have latest drivers installed and all devices have all features enabled (checkboxes are ticked). Then perform final reboot and once you get back into Windows, GPU-Z should display appropriate driver version with all checkboxes ticked for all cards. At this point you know that driver installation was fully successful.
Start QuickMiner and go to Rig Manager. Set all devices to use Lite Optimization. Leave it for 10 minutes and observe Excavator console window. If you do not see Excavator crashing and restarting, and you don't see any hardware errors, set all devices to Medium or Efficient (or any other Optimize profile you prefer). If you notice Excavator crashing or hardware errors appearing, set one less profile (eg, if High, set Medium, if Medium, set Lite) and reboot the Rig.
When you find stable combination of Optimization profiles for all GPUs, enable option to start QuickMiner with Windows.