My latest toy: One box, eight Xeon Phi 7220 PCI cards, and a total (sustained!) hash rate of about 24kH/s for monero/sumo/etn/etc … Yeehaw!

This box is actually already up and running for over a week, but since I realized that a lot of people might actually like hearing about this I decided to finally share this build … after all, I think this is the highest-performing single-box build (for cryptonight/monero) out there right now….

Okay, where did this start? When I started writing lukMiner earlier this (wait – now “last”) year Intel had just announced some PCI version of the x200 Xeon Phis, the 7220 cards. While googling around on where to get one I found a page from Exxact Corp, which offered a system with 8 such cards for around $20k or so. Got me curious ;-).

Unfortunately, when I tried to place an order I was told that those cards had been un-announced, and would not be released after all…. However; I could never forget this setup, and eventually found some cards on ebay. So after eventually scrounging some of those cards together (and initially having quite some trouble finding some motherboards that they would actually run in#@!!@), I finally got Exxact to sell me a no-cards-included version of that box they had listed earlier this summer. Once it arrived I popped in the cards, installed the matching software stack, and here we are – eight 7220 cards, each doing 2800-2850 H/s (running at about 80-85 degrees C), plus two low-end Xeons in the host …. a bit of linux magic to start it all automatically upon boot, and la-voila – we have a machine that DwarfPool and NiceHash say makes an average of 24kH/s, at a power draw of only about 2.4kW… (And all in all, I paid less than $12k for the parts!).

The pic above is from when I assembled it in my basement… had to actually pull power cords from two different rooms to not pop my circuit breakers, and had to eventually move it to a co-hosting data center due to “somewhat excessive noise” (think “jet engine”) … but still, that was one heck of a fun project!

Happy Mining!