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Mining rig as Rendering farm?!

Mining rig, as rendering Farm

 

I am an artist, and I've done a little bit of research. And something has me extremely curious.

 

A mining rig, repurposing the slots, and instead of using graphics card for computation on a mining rig, why not use them for what they are intended?

 

I have not quite figured out all the logistics to the point where I would be willing to purchase a mining rig in order to attempt this myself, however I am intrigued in this concept.

 

I also used to be a cyber security consultant, so I know there are limitations caused by Hardware, however I have not seen any reason other than the firmware that would be the issue and stand in the way.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do a lot of my rendering on my MacBook itself, I also have a few Graphics processing servers just to take a little bit of the workload off if need be, so it's kind of just a "Hacker's Mentality" of "Can I Do This?"

 

Basically a is it possible not is it necessary question!

 

However if it was possible it would actually be cheaper to run a mining rig then it would be to run any of my 72u(I also have an ESXi/MaaS for storage and home lab) rack for rendering...

 

Why not turn a mining rig into a makeshift rendering farm so that way you don't have to rent space at rendering Farm, or fire up part of a rack?

 

I know it's random, but I still don't see a hardware reason why it won't work, so far I'm only running into firmware issue as far as my research goes, I don't know if anyone has practical working experience though and I figured I would ask?

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render me an GPU man, jk.

 

Not quite sure what you are asking for, is it something like selling computer power or rather it's performance for rendering tasks by others?

Like instead of folding at home, you do rendering with the rig? Or was there something else that you wanted?

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13 minutes ago, lynnrpope said:

A mining rig, repurposing the slots, and instead of using graphics card for computation on a mining rig, why not use them for what they are intended?

They're intended to compute, which entails everything from mining to gaming to rendering.

13 minutes ago, lynnrpope said:

Why not turn a mining rig into a makeshift rendering farm so that way you don't have to rent space at rendering Farm, or fire up part of a rack?

 

I know it's random, but I still don't see a hardware reason why it won't work, so far I'm only running into firmware issue as far as my research goes, I don't know if anyone has practical working experience though and I figured I would ask?

I have no experience setting one up, but I don't see what's random or weird about this. You would literally, as you say, be making a render farm at home. The rental costs from using someone else's or a company's farm will be replaced with your electricity bill and your time maintaining and troubleshooting it, that's it.

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7 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

render me an GPU man, jk.

 

Not quite sure what you are asking for, is it something like selling computer power or rather it's performance for rendering tasks by others?

Like instead of folding at home, you do rendering with the rig? Or was there something else that you wanted?

Yeah, like use a mining rig in order to do Graphics rendering. If we could do it would be a lot more cost-effective and cost-efficient then using like a navigate to network server rack loaded with Graphics processing servers. Also there's a lot of E-Waste out there oh, and that would cut down on the e-waste that is caused by all these old mining cards and Mining rigs when people or either just done with them or they upgrade or update. Repurposing it and being a lot more cost efficient to even run let alone purchase. Don't even get me started on how much it cost to like rent space at a rendering Farm,

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18 minutes ago, lynnrpope said:

I still don't see a hardware reason why it won't work

if your work is okay with pcie 1.1 x1, then sure

-sigh- feeling like I'm being too negative lately

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3 minutes ago, tikker said:

They're intended to compute, which entails everything from mining to gaming to rendering.

I have no experience setting one up, but I don't see what's random or weird about this. You would literally, as you say, be making a render farm at home. The rental costs from using someone else's or a company's farm will be replaced with your electricity bill and your time maintaining and troubleshooting it, that's it.

Yes, better handling time and maintenance and troubleshooting, but I mean I already maintain a in home network anyways, including a scalable personal cloud and a test lab being set up. So it would definitely be the same amount of time and effort, it was just basically lower my electric bill substantially and also it would be a lot less expensive to upgrade Hardware. And in Theory like I said the hardware should be capable, the firmware would be the only issue I could think of. Like I know they have set up lockouts to wear a mining rig will not read a video card as a video processing unit, which just requires packing the firmware and modifying the sea moss I mean that's not a big deal. I just didn't know if anybody's tried it yet, and if there was any that I have not accounted for , that I should have a heads-up about before attempting it

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1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

if your work is okay with pcie 1.1 x1, then sure

yep, this will be the biggest factor. mining doesn't require a lot of PCI bandwith, but rendering usually does afaik.

 

also, you might want to swap the CPU/motherboard of the mining rig with something with a bit more PCI lanes and CPU power to feed all those GPU's.

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