My plan is to have one pc for plotting and gaming when Im not plotting and one pc for farming. After a HD is full I will transfer it from PC A (plotting) to PC B (farming).
This PC is my old gaming PC, that I want to use after upgrading it.
Plotting PC, specs:
Motherboard: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XII HERO (WI-FI) Motherboard - Intel Z490 - Intel LGA1200 socket - DDR4 RAM - ATX
CPU: Intel Core i7-11700K Rocket Lake Prosessor - 8 cores 3.6 GHz - Intel LGA1200 - Intel Boxed without heatsink/fan
Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3200 C16 DC - Black - 64GB
SSD OS: Samsung 980 SSD PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 - 1TB
SSD Plotting: Intel Solid-State Drive DC P4510 Series - solid state drive - 2 TB - PCI Express 3.1 x4 (NVMe)
And ofcourse the plottings harddisks.
So my questions:
Do the setup looks ok?
Is it a hassel to switch the harddrives from PC1 to PC2 after plotting? Dont want to use the most expensive hardware on the farming PC after the plotting phase are done, so figured id put in in my new gaming PC.
What do people think about Chias future? Feel like I am in here for the long run.
The farmer PC I already have, so my plan was to use it as the plotting PC would be a better one :). My plan was to use the new plotting pc as plotting and gaming when not plotting.
Plotting PC, if you’re buying this now, why are you sticking with PCI-e 3.0 when even cheap PCI-e 4.0 systems are avail? A plotter is all about efficiency and speed. Use the latest tech cheaply avail, e.g., any Ryzen from the last several years has PCI-e 4.0. Then you can use and take advantage of faster nvme drives for faster plotting. Bonus: gaming will be better too.
if you use Madmax as the plotter, which is likely your best choice, memory could be pared down without losing any capabilities. That is: 32GB vs 64GB is way plenty. It will use maybe as much as 16GB typically. Swapping HDs between systems is a pain, best option is USB drives, plus there is limited HD space in any case. USB allows for (nearly) unlimited expansion, for all intents and purposes short of PB farms and without a shut down of your farm.
If I understand correctly you are going to upgrade your gaming PC anyway (for gaming)
So you can do 1 of two things imho.
sell your old gaming pc, and get a cheap/low power comp as farmer
use both the old and the new gaming rig for plotting, for more plots/day
I don’t agree with the need for going for gen 4 PCIe, no nvme will ever reach that speed anyway while plotting. The max speed of gen 4 is only used for a very short time and then the cache is full and the write speed drops to well below gen 3 speeds. (I use 2x WD black1TB gen 3.0 and get 30 minute plots with it)
I do agree that swapping hdd’s is a bit of a pain (unless both systems hotswap bays) You have to shutdown both systrems, open up the case etc etc. I did it like that myself, it’s perfectly fine but annoying.
General note, be sure to only buy SSD’s for potting that have been confirmed by others to be good in real life for plotting , specs can be misleading
Wow, Im glad i asked on this forum! Thanks for taking the time helping me.
@Fuzeguy I didnt even know that PCIe- 4.0 was a thing. Should I change the motherboard to get the PCIe-4.0? Do you have any links as an example?
Ive hear that Madmax need 128 GB memory, aint that correct? If yeah, could you help me out with some examples here aswell?
@Mugen0815 My plan was at first to get a Full Tower that could take 14/16 HDD (18 TB each). Ill might just buy 4-6 of em first, aint that loaded ;p.
@Voodoo Thanks, would you buy the gen 4 PCIe if the computer whould be used as a gaming PC aswell?
My plan is to start mining Chia to be able to mix and trix with hardware and the plotting, so 1 plotting PC would be more enough for me :). Kinda like the process of always getting better, want it to be fast, but not to fast ;p
No, MM needs little memory. I haven’t tried the new GUI version, but likely similar. My system flirts with 16GB total system use during plotting. That is, running MM takes very little compared to the OG plotter that can use up to 128GB depending on parameters.
Also if you want a RAMdisk, 128GB (or more on a Threadripper) can give you a little extra.
My advice: In your case, get one nice plotter/gaming PC. Make a full node out of it. Then learn to use it plotting/farming AIO and in your games, perfect it until you are ready to implement another PC as a farmer. Step by step.
I dont wanna give u advice in setting up ur gaming-rig, but keep in mind, ull need a good nvme additionally to ur bootdisk.
U dont wanna kill ur system by plotting.
My board cuts pcie to x8, If more than 1 nvme is used.
I was in a similar situation as you at the time. New gaming PC and old gaming PC.
I did it like this: I plotted the maximum on the new gaming PC and continued to play on the old gaming PC. On the old gaming PC I ran the Farmer and 2 plots in parallel. Ok, Star Citizen may not be able to play with it, but most games run that way.
To get the plots from one PC to the other, I used rsync, aka copied over network. Don’t set the network drive as a target in the plotter, that takes too long. First set the target to a fast internal drive, then copy from the internal drive over network. Meanwhile the plotter is already plotting again. Alternatively, you can switch the hard drives.
In the meantime, I gave the old gaming PC to my son and bought a more power-efficient Farmer.
P.S. The plotter ran with linux, because it was faster. No idea if that is still the case today. I wrote this script to get the data to the network drive with rsync.
#!/bin/bash
FILE="/mnt/temp/*.plot"
BASE_DIR="/mnt/temp"
NEW_BASE_DIR="/mnt/farmer/8TB_1"
date +%c
echo "waiting..."
while :
do
if ls ${FILE} &>/dev/null; then
echo ""
date +%c
rsync --progress --remove-source-files ${BASE_DIR}/*.plot ${NEW_BASE_DIR}/
echo "waiting..."
fi
sleep 30
done
Got a thought when you guys mentioned I should get a cheaper farmer machine.
How would the gaming PC I have today work as a plotter if I increase the ram to 64 GB and get a new harddrive for plotting?
My plan was to use a
“Intel Solid-State Drive DC P4510 Series - solid state drive - 1 TB - PCI Express 3.1 x4 (NVMe)” for as the plotting HD and a 18TB as the storage HD?
Would that be a solution? If yes, any tips on what motherbord and such I should order to keep the costs down and still getting a good farming computer? And what kind of cabinet will store most harddrives?
Mind you that drive has a U.2 15mm connector (mini-sas)
Best just go with either Samsung 980 pro, wd Black SN750 or some other confirmed good plotting consumer ssd.
Thing to look for is good sustained write speeds (this is not listed in specsheets, only in reviews)
Will work absolutely fine, I would actually recommend doing this. Don’t even need 64GB. 16 is maybe a bit on the small side, but 32GB is enough for plotting. Try your hand at plotting with this setup first and see how it goes. From there you can make better decisions for upgrading.
I am an owner of a Samsung 980 512GB. In m experience, this is an exceptionally bad NVMe drive because after just a few minutes of sustained writes it will begin throttling due to overheating and/or due to the lack of a DRAM cache and will begin showing extremely high access latencies. While 980 Pro SSDs are very fast (by today’s standards), the 980 512GB non-Pro is in my opinion not suitable for use as an OS drive.
Samsung 980 1TB might be different than 512GB because in most cases 1TB SSDs have significantly better performance than 512GB models.
Can you please test whether the Samsung 980 1TB is also showing major issues after just a few minutes of sustained writes?
I and many others use the Samsung NVMe drives. I have the Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus. Many in the forums are using the 1TB or 2TB Samsung 970 and 980 Plus’s and Pro’s. I have not heard much about the 512GB Samsung’s.
As reported by myself and others here the 1TB and 2TB Samsung’s are an excellent choice for Chia plotting.
It’s not a bad thing, actually you could call it great in many ways.
That is, if you have a mainboard or SAS controller with U.2 connectors
Typically you will find that only on newer server hardware, just not worth it to go that way unless you already have a system that can connect it
