Fancy mining rigs to get your hands on cryptocurrency appear to be the flavor of the month, and here’s another impressive custom-build. Or at least, it looks impressive, but in terms of practicality, maybe less so.
Also, let's not forget that crypto-miners are far from popular with gamers right now, considering that the massive crypto boom and mining GPUs being bought for mining are interfering further with poor stock levels of graphics cards.
So, depending on your viewpoint, this mining rig from Vietnamese outfit Gland Computers (as spotted by I Leak VN on Twitter, via Wccftech) is either a cool achievement (literally), or simply a GPU vacuum which has snaffled 10 Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards away from their rightful places in high-end gaming PCs.
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Those ten RTX 3090s run with custom loop liquid cooling, which is more about looking cool, than it is about the efficiency of the cooling system, and any financial gains you might make on that front. But in fairness, it certainly does look the part, particularly compared to the average mining setup, which are often rather crude bolted-together monstrosities (of course, this solution will be much quieter, too).
As Wccftech points out, the rig uses Bitspower components (a Taiwan-based producer of high-end cooling parts) in the custom loop, and hardline tubing for a very sharp and tidy overall appearance.
Power is served by a trio of Super Flower Leadex Titanium 1600W PSUs, and given the fancy liquid cooling, there’s obviously the potential to overclock the RTX 3090 GPUs and get even better mining performance that way.
Super looper blooper?
The cost of the build, however, doesn’t really add up in terms of allowing a bit more oomph and extra mining power with the overclocking. Broadly speaking, rather than spending a load of extra money on liquid cooling – particularly fancy, high-end parts as seen here – that outlay would be more wisely spent on more GPUs to beef up mining power that way.
Furthermore, in practical terms, there’s more to go wrong here with the rig, and potential maintenance work, with all those pipes and cooling components.
In other words, this build is more for show than anything, although showing it to gamers who can’t buy a high-end Nvidia GPU thanks to stock woes is likely to provoke some interesting reactions, to put it mildly.
The hash rate of the rig works out at around 1000 MH/s by default, and could be pushed higher as mentioned with that overclocking.
For more along these lines, but even more extreme, we recently saw a crypto-mining rig that’s completely submerged in mineral oil. Or for the maximum in annoyance factor, how about the crypto miner who built an RTX 3080 mining farm in the trunk of a BMW.
