FAQ

How do I turn my computer on without a case/power switch?!

So you didn’t opt to purchase a power switch, and now you’re sitting there staring at a bunch of assembled hardware, and wondering how the heck to turn the thing on for the first time. Don’t worry, you have a couple options.

First, check to see if there is a power button built right onto the motherboard. This is somewhat common nowadays, although many boards still don’t include them.

If you don’t have a power button on your motherboard, grab a flathead screwdriver. Now use the head of your screwdriver to temporarily short the two pins on the motherboard that the power switch would be connected to (if you had a power switch). Just touch the head of the screwdriver so that it makes contact with both pins for a brief moment. Your system should immediately power on (if it doesn’t, make sure that your PSU is plugged in, and the PSU power switch is in the “on” position”).

The first thing you should do at this point is enter the BIOS and change the power options to set your computer to automatically power on whenever power is restored. That way, you can use the switch on your power supply to turn it on and off going forward.

Why the Radeon RX 470 GPU? Why not a RX 480/570/580, or another video card entirely?

The Radeon RX 470 GPU is currently gives the best hashrate/watt ratio, and also has an excellent hashrate/purchase price ratio. It’s really the ideal GPU for mining, at least for now.

That said, the RX 470/480/570/580 are all very close performance-wise when properly clocked and undervolted via BIOS mods. In fact, the difference is so close that purchase price should probably be your primary consideration—buy whichever RX 4xx/5xx GPU you can get for the least money, as long as you plan to flash your GPU BIOS (I show you how in part 4 of my guide).

I generally don’t mention nVidia GPUs because they cost so much more than AMD cards. The GTX 1070 is a fine card for mining, with hashrate and power consumption numbers comparable to RX 4xx/5xx cards when properly configured. I don’t recommend it simply because it costs 2-3 times as much as an RX 470, and that has a tremendous negative impact, ROI-wise.

Can I mix different brands and/or models of GPUs in the same rig?

You can always mix different brands of the same model GPU in the same rig (for example, RX 470 GPUs made by MSI, Sapphire, and Asus).

You can additionally mix different models of cards together as long as whatever video driver you’ve installed in your OS supports all of them.

In Windows, you can mix RX 470 and RX 480 cards together with no issues, and you can also mix RX 570 and RX 580 cards. You’ll run into issues if you try to mix RX 4xx cards with RX 5xx cards, because they use different video drivers (it’s possible to make it work, but involves jumping through some extra hoops).

In Linux, I believe that all of the RX 4xx and RX 5xx cards share the same driver, so they should all coexist together without problems.

My own Linux rig runs a mix of different RX 470 and RX 480 cards, all different brands. I have an RX 570 GPU card running in another desktop that I haven’t tried dropping into the rig yet.