 For months now, graphics card supply has been completely tapped out thanks to every gamer's worst enemy. Miners. And no, not young people who screech into the microphone, but they're awful too. I'm talking about the kind of miners who are using hardware, both PC components and more specialized equipment, to calculate what are called hashes for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in exchange for a reward. Effectively mining for money. But how do you get in on the action? Can you just fire up your old PC and start making money? Let's investigate. Massdrop is now featuring their custom configured AKG K7XX audio file headphones. Check them and other drops out at the link in the video description. Let's get this out of the way first. To make a gold rush analogy, the days of walking onto a random plot of land, you know, sticking your pickaxe, scissors or whatever, into the nearest mountainside and sailing home in a golden ship are basically over. But just because mining the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is no longer practical for the average person with an extra graphics card or two, that doesn't mean that you can't mine for something. So as always around here, we started our adventure with some overkill hardware, bringing our 10 GPU server out of the mothballs up from 8 gamers 1 CPU. Theoretically, 1080p is the most profitable, but we have to ignore cost to buy. What do you mean to ignore cost to buy? What do you think I'm like made of graphics cards? Can we use these? So then what we ended up with is five GTX 1070s, four GTX 1080s, and then a single 1080 Ti. It's not going to be like the highest earning rig, but we can use this to run some important benchmarks and determine whether our plan will be profitable. I guess we have to take it upstairs. One trip? Yeah, sure. I was about to say the same thing. Oh, gosh. Come on. It's just like complete disregard. It's fine. Who cares? It's like a $5,000. I care. It's just it's fine. Like we're just not going to drop it. So it doesn't matter, right? You got because you never drop anything. Okay, here. Okay. Technically not the way it's meant to be rolled. I don't think. Yolo. You left it any higher. It's like at my ankles. Okay. Thank you. Oh, don't shift it like that. Oh, you know, I think we actually could have fit 11 in here if we used the katana. I think it throttles a little bit. I think mining on the katana would be a terrible, terrible idea. I'm just saying I think we could have. While I do this, Jake's going to work on installing the whopping two sticks of memory out of the 24 slots on our board here. Cryptocurrency mining doesn't really benefit from a ton of RAM. That said, though, it may benefit from a large virtual memory space on your storage drive. And then he's also going to throw in two of our 22 core Xeon processors. Wait, I guess I know that's really stupid. They're just the only two CPUs that we had lying around that were compatible with this board. And we actually have to populate both of the sockets for this because otherwise we won't have enough PCI Express lanes for all of these freaking GPUs. Are you struggling? Yeah, a little bit. I don't have enough. Do you have any more? Does this take us less than four hours? Aha. F**k you, Brandon. I was right. Well, it's because he's here, not because... I had no confidence in you doing this by yourself in that time. Ouch. Holy f**k. You're going to drive up all of our insurance premiums when he has to go to the f**k emergency and get that burn sorted out. And there we have it. We are now ready to boot up our system. Actually, almost. Cooling is sort of a concern in a system like this. So we're going to go ahead and throw our fans back in here. And then, Jake, are you ready with that shroud? Just got to get this gaff tape unstuck. Wouldn't want to be wasteful, you know. Are you really reusing tape? Yeah, this tape is still sticky. How cheap do you think I am? Is this an Yvonne initiative? I mean, this chassis clearly isn't designed to have graphics cards. Yeah, I don't know how we're going to fit this in here. I think you kind of have to just cram the tip in between two of them. Okay, it's like it was made to fit. See, look at that. I got my reused tape. Yeah, dog. Look, it's still sticky. I told you, gaff tape is amazing. You didn't tell me that. You've never told me that. Okay, well, gaff tape is amazing. So now we just need some power. Okay. I need four, right? Oh, right, yeah. Don't worry, I planned for this. We could have easily done this experiment with just a normal motherboard or a 4G. Yeah, but that would have been so lame. It's like, power me, please. Look, I'm working on it, okay? Please give me power, I'm failing. Come on. Okay, we're in, we're in. All good. Yes. Slightly less annoying. Where are all the 632 screws from? Right here. I have a thing. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Where do they come from? That was terminally unimpressive. Okay, there we go. That's more like it. That's how you know it's working. Okay, so while we're waiting to fire up windows and install the Nvidia driver, which, by the way, takes a long ass time on a system with 10 GPUs, let's have a look at power consumption. We're looking at 400 watts right now. 400 watts. At idle. At idle. So, basically, no matter what kind of hardware you're using, mining is going to add a lot to your electrical bill. So, it's this real cost that's associated with it that prevents casuals from just using old hardware to mine these days. It is all about efficiency. So, our Pascal-based cards consume a similar amount of power compared to previous generations. But, they run the algorithms needed for mining much more quickly than previous generations. And the more calculations that you can perform per watt of power consumed, the more profitable you'll be. The other key is to mine smarter. Almost no one is mining for Bitcoin directly these days, because over time, the difficulty of generating a reward by mining goes up a lot. So, people are opting instead to mine for an altcoin, like Litecoin, Ethereum, Zcash, or even Dogecoin. Yes, for the uninitiated, that was and is a real thing. Okay, without scratching the table. Oh my god, that got a lot heavier. I'm so happy I'm not carrying that side. That's fine, I'll be on the bottom this time. Oh wait, I'm going backwards again. What the hell? No, you go backwards. Also, I just locked this door. Wait, my elbow needs to unlock it. There we go. Oh man, this thing's heavy. Wait, why are we standing like this? This is not a good strategy. Can you slide that way and I'll slide this way? Yeah. Hold on, I got it. Hey, if we drop it, it's not that big of a deal. Hold on, hold on, don't push. Hold it. Ow. Sort of counterintuitive. Other side is in? It is? Yeah. Really? Are you serious? Yeah. Holy sh**, that was painless. So now that it's installed, the plan is to use a marketplace called NiceHash that pairs buyers who want to rent hashing power with sellers who have hashing power like us. So what's cool about that is that after you run the included benchmark, which can actually take a few hours with this much gear, and had trouble with the 88 threads worth of CPU that we're rocking in this version of the software anyway, it determines which algorithm is most profitable for which piece of your hardware at any given moment and runs that, giving you a real-time readout of how much you're earning before electricity costs and then paying you out daily as long as your balance is at least.001 of a Bitcoin. That is, after taking their cut. It's booting, right? I think so. Okay, so over the weekend, Jake, I didn't really help, spent a bunch of time babying this thing through crashes and blue screens, and we have finally got it mining stably. TM, we initially thought that the issues might be related to thermals, because let's face it, the cards are really close together. By the way, your ducting seems to be falling off if you want to go have a look at that. Get this ladder in here. But with Afterburner up on screen, it's actually pretty clear that our climate-controlled server room has that under control. We're hitting 82 degrees top. Some of them are a lot lower, like 70 even. Actually, that reminds me, we haven't factored the cost of air conditioning into our profitability equation, but that's something that we can really look into during part two of our investigation. So getting back to this machine, you might have noticed that there are actually only eight GPUs in the system now. See that? We pulled out the middle, too. That's actually due to an NVIDIA driver limitation that specifies a maximum of eight GPUs per operating system. So shout out to Gary over at ASUS for that tip. So that means our final power usage is a cool 2,000 watts. No biggie then for our, remember, four power supplies. Let's talk about the return on our investment. To buy, that configuration would run you nearly $18,000 US dollars. At an average of $11 a day in profit, again, not accounting for air conditioning, it would take around four and a half years to recoup that. And that is assuming stability in the cryptocurrency market. Stability! What? Stability in the cryptocurrency market, right? What a joke. So obviously, this would be a really stupid mining setup to go out and buy. However, if you were a little more, how you say, not a complete idiot about your part selection, assuming that your power costs are similar to ours at around 10 US cents per kilowatt, you could actually get your upfront investment back a lot sooner. So we're going to investigate a more optimized config in a follow-up video. But this config for about $5,000 that you're looking at right now is kind of what we're planning. Let us know if you have any suggestions in the comments. First, let's get back to the original question. Does what we're doing make any sense? Well, if you have a bunch of spare modern hardware lying around collecting dust, actually, yes. So we're planning to leave that system running until phase two, when we'll report on our results and then compare it to our second system. But if you have to go out and actually buy hardware to do it, your return is likely going to take so long that you'd be better off doing what many people are doing and trying to buy and sell cryptocurrencies more directly as they rise and fall, though there are certainly risks associated with that as well. So why did everyone run out and buy all the video cards and high wattage power supplies driving up prices for gamers? Well, while the profit isn't anything earth-shattering, many miners actually resell their hardware when it's no longer profitable, recovering much of the upfront cost and then keeping all the money that was made while the systems were in service. So let us know in the comments what you guys want to see in future follow-ups here, because we have hardly begun to explore this rabbit hole. We're planning a future build with 19 GPUs in one system, so that's going to be a thing, and we'd love to talk about ASICs as well. Those are pretty interesting, but we definitely want feedback from you guys. And we want to tell you about our sponsor today, Crunchyroll! is the site created by anime fans for anime fans, offering the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan, like Knights and Magic and My Hero Academia Season 2. All the content on the site is professionally subtitled, and our link down below gives you a whole month of free anime, completely ad-free. Coming out in October is Foodmore Season 3 and Black Clover. Then if you enjoy the many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream anywhere, anytime from a variety of devices, like your phone, tablet, or game console, you can continue your premium membership to Crunchyroll for just $6.95 a month. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus, right down there, and sign up today. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Video cards, sure, but maybe not the server. Also links down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.