There are as many farming setups and opinions on farming setups as there are farms, and this is true in traditional farming as well as Chia farming. Most people seem to be gravitating to one of two paradigms, high powered systems with lots of compute, ram and NVME storage for plotting as fast as possible trying to outpace the netspace growth. Or those trying to plot with existing hardware and using something extremely low powered like a Raspberry Pi4 to handle the farming.
Each of these approaches has its pros and cons, with cost and possible reward being the main ones. The fast plotting machine will get more plots out there quicker, with a greater chance of pulling early coins from their setup. However, this comes at the cost of initial investment and relatively higher long term power usage. The low power minimal farmer has the advantage of extremely low cost outlay so it will not take much to get profitable but they are unlikely to do so right away.
My approach was closer to the former, with my goal of getting all my plots completed in 3 weeks. I was a little behind schedule due to my math not accounting for the high lead time to get back to max plotting speed when you do maintenance. But I have completed all my plots and currently sit at 475 plots – 473 K32 and 2 K33.
My system specs are as follows, and I will discuss my thoughts on my choices shortly.
Intel i5 11400 6/12 Rocket Lake CPU
Corsair 240mm All in one liquid cooler
2x Western Digital SN750 1TB NVME drives
2x Intel 120GB sata SSD for boot
Adata 500GB Sata SSD for scratch
Asus XG-C100 AQ107 10GB Ethernet card
2x Western Digital 8tb External HDD
My main bottleneck is memory, but RAM is expensive right now and 32GB would only have helped the plotting process which is going ahead as fast as I would like. The system generates between 24 and 28 plots per day which will be fine as I get back into portable plots, however not if I am running my fork virtual machines. Therefore RAM is going to be the next upgrade.
I chose Rocket Lake because due to the nature of the workload I assumed at some point AVX512 would make a difference. I could be wrong, but for the price it was a great deal for plotting. This was all before the Mad Max plotter and before I really knew what I was doing. Would I make the same choices now? Maybe. But probably not.
I didn’t want to spend too much on storage without having any idea about the price volatility and I think I was correct. My goal was to accumulate 50 XCH over 5 years. I no longer think that is even close to realistic, but I do think that I will completely recoup the investment and that the farm will be profitable, depending of course on netspace growth or slowdown.
Thanks for all your work here. I really enjoy your posts. Here’s a picture of my current setup. Currently at 1600 plots but almost out of space. I’m adding one more 3u rack next week which should allow for an additional 2k plots.
https://imgur.com/a/ltcKnqp
holy crap, that’s a hell of a compact setup for 1600 plots. What do you have in there?
I have 4 optiplex 7070’s and 2 optiplex 7050’s for plotting. But I’m using synology NAS’s for farming each fully loaded with 18TB drives. What i like is that the synology’s can host vm’s so i can completely do the farming for each chia fork on separate vm’s all running on the synology itself.
Yeah that’s the way to do it. Nice setup! One of the cleanest I’ve seen. How are you finding the desktop systems for plotting, seems you’ve gone the exact opposite route of the big setups with threadrippers.
Yeah, I had these micro computer’s lying around so that’s what i used. I’m still able to get about 140 plot’s a day out of these using madmax. I’ve seen all along the the biggest issue will always be storage so it didnt’ focus too much on speed of plotting as it would always be a hurry up and wait. Once I’m done plotting I can just turn the servers off or use them for something else. It’s a completely separate case so it’s easy enough to just move that to another project. Unfortunately i got in a bit too late for chia as i still haven’t won any yet and my time current time to win is around 1 month. Currently this setup is hovering around 500 watts when fully plotting, but when it’s just farming it’s about 60-70 watts.
I think as people start trashing their farms to replot for pools your big setup will start catching fish. But I’m a big fan, I really like it.
Why would there big fish to be caught? Not a new XCH, not a new block-chain, just a minor change in plots, mostly in the config parameter’s. The EB will still be there, you think that under the new CHIA & CHIA-OG that at the begin the new CHIA will have a space of zero, and then boom to 30EB, then the CHIA-OG will gradually wither? Same XCH to contend for most of the easy stuff is already mined; Sure there is no limit on XCH so it can go to the moon in terms of total number of XCH.
But I don’t see how making new plots is going to be a new ‘gold rush’,
Its the same old narrative all along “Wait for approved pool”, and then when approved pool works, make new plots which is easy to demand, but lots of easy work arounds to get the new versus old pools to accept new vs old plots. If it were true that “CHIA” will at first crack out more XCH, then ppl will flock there with their plots,
In the meantime the whales with their 30EB and 15EB on HPOOL will stick to what they’re doing, even the scam pools like core still don’t have even 1EB; In pooling the entire deal is to be on the pool where there are the most wins to share.
So given the PUSH for “Authorized Pools” that tells u right there that solo-mining is DEAD, and CHIA-NET knows it, so ppl pool, well its still the same deal as HPOOL, they’ll too support CHIA&CHIA-OG; Given that whales will not re-plot, then the HP ( raw EB horsepower ) will always stay on HPOOL with CHIA-OG.
All the pools are already running CHIA & CHIA-OG, and everybody is on OG.
I really hate “OG” I would have preferred “Chia Classic” & “Chia Portable Porn”, pLots aka GC, and CPP; The CPPP has a ring cuz the CPP in China loves porn just so much. Not.
Hey Chris, Just came across this post, and realized you don’t specify the case in your build. It looks similar to the Thermaltake Core V21 but may be wider as it has two rear fans.
Nice build though. I have one of the Aquantia cards around somewhere… and now that I have my 10GBase-T switch unboxed and my Synology on 10G too, it may be time to deploy it. 🙂
Hey thats a super good point! I’m actually not sure what case it is, i got it in a package deal with a bunch of other components and never even thought to look! It’s definitely a corsair case.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll have to dig around, as it doesn’t seem to show up on their sff cases… will dig some more.
Just noticed… it looks like the network switch is a MS510TXPP or the non-POE version. That’s the one I just deployed myself to drive a Wifi6 AP and a B550 STEEL MASTER based system. 🙂
Yeo that’s the switch. The case isn’t an sff one its an matx cube. I can’t find the exact model either.
Looks like it’s the Carbide Air 240, aligned sideways.
Thats exactly what it is, although I have no idea why it’s on its side. I like it better this wat