Building a new Ryzen 7 rig

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I got myself a good deal on a CPU and motherboard during Cyber Monday, its a Ryzen 7 5000X on an Asus B550-Plus board. This machine will just be used for mining at the moment. I had two Nvidia 1080s running on a core 2 quad rig, its hashrate was under 1000 for the CPU so I figured it would be a good time to retire it. Just about everything besides the old hard drive and memory was used. I moved over the two video cards, power supply and reused the old case.

Previously this rig had a 2.5" laptop hard drive for its operating system storage. The boot times were terrible, taking a few minutes. But now with this SSD the machine is up in 30 seconds or less.

The processor is quite powerful, I was in the market for a Ryzen a few years back. And now its great to buy a higher end one at a good price. Got it from Amazon.

Finding the marking on the processor I place it into the socket carefully. Making sure it is completely seated before bringing down the retention bar.

With the CPU installed I got to replacing the heatsink mounting hardware. My CPU did not come with a fan, so I bought one and its pretty nice. Though I had to replace the back plate and needed to refer to the manual to figure out what position to mount it in.

After seeming like 10 minutes staring at the manual I take a break.

I just went ahead and removed the mounting brackets for the stock cooler.

Going back to the manual I wrap my head around these images the best I can. Probably should have watched a video on how to mount this cooler before trying to build it.

Thinking I got it, I went to install and it seemed to all fit. Depending on if the CPU is an Intel or AMD it can differ how you set up the back plate.

With the back plate installed we were ready to mount the cooler.

I ditched the thermal paste it came with and used my tried and true Artic Silver paste. I will always use this over some OEM paste.

Adding a dab of the paste its ready to be mounted.

I almost forgot to install the SSD, it mounts directly to the motherboard. Known as NVMe m.2 drive.

Going with a 512GB drive, they are pretty cheap these days. I have had the 128GB drives but I find myself running out of space after a few projects are on the drive so I just went ahead with a bigger one this time.

All mounted I swivel the plate back into place, it covers the drive.

Placing the cooler in its spot I check the mounting holes to make sure it all lines up.

With the heatsink screwed down I mount the fan, had to take it off as a couple of the screws are right below the blades. Making it impossible to screw in without removing the fan first.

Once the heatsink and fan are mounted I check out the back plate, all looks good.

Now I pull out my old rig and we start taking it all apart.

Removing the motherboard screws I can then remove the old CPU by the heatsink. Its going to be completely broken down for its metals so I dont really care about being gentle with the old rig.

The case is nice, so I was happy to reuse it. Though for mining I will leave the case wide open without the door on it.

I place the new motherboard in the case and check the screw holes to make sure it all lines up.

Connecting the power cables is a good idea before mounting it, sometimes you need to move it to the side to reach it with my big fingers.

Once the power cables are connected I route the video card power cables so it does not block the airflow too much.

First card is mounted, one more to go. It barely fits in this case, haha.

Second card is in, and there is no more room in this case. It comes with experience knowing how to build this computer in layers, as trying to do it out of a certain order can be quite the pain in the ass. But besides the cooler all went well once I figured out the back plate.

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13 comments
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What I find reassuringly comforting is that after probably 20+ years and despite the huge advances in computing power and raw speed that the de facto, go to heat sink compound is still Artic Silver! It must be the oldest thing in the PC!

I'll look forward to seeing your numbers when you get it up and running .

Happy new year :-)

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Hah right? I have been using the stuff for almost 20 years. Something I always stuck with and seems to pay off. You just never know whats in the compounds that they ship you with the heatsink.

Hehe yeah my Artic Silver is at least 10 years old, but seems to be just fine and works great. I have also used to artic silver epoxy to attaching copper RAM sinks. Works great too.

Its hashrate clocked in at 9.13 KH/s making it my most powerful rig.

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Nice little rig! That is the one thing I do miss is getting to play with the hardware and then watch it just earn me money. But... I choose van life and fine running nodes, staking, defi, and of course HIVE

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Hehe yeah mining is awesome, I have been doing it for almost 10 years and always a good feeling to make those GPUs/CPUs earn you money.

Nice, I stake too and its quite a nice income source.

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I have tried to come up with different ways to mine in the van, but it wouldn’t really be worth it, lol. Especially where I live… Not exactly the best sun exposure to use solar power. I used to have GPU rigs and ASICS. Sold everything back in the summer except for some older GPUs and 10x’d my original investment, easily. Took the kids for a cross country road trip vacation, it was awesome!

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Yeah trying to mine on solar you really need a stationary setup with dozens of panels and batteries.

Oh thats cool you owned ASICS, I never got into them. I almost bought one back in 2015ish from Avalon but they raised the price so much after the first rig I was turned off. Glad you came out ahead and could take your family out on a trip with the money.

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I've finally getting ready to build a new PC. The GPU of course has been the biggest hold up but I recently acquired a GTX 3060. Almost any modern PC has more computing power than I actually "need" but one of the things I like to do with them is run BOINC projects (and in the process mine Gridcoin though it isn't actually profitable or anything). I haven't pulled the trigger on the CPU yet but I am thinking of buying the 5700G instead of an X model. My thought process being that I'll get more total work done with the built in GPU than I will lose by having a slightly slower CPU. Plus it is cheaper.

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Oh nice, I bet that RTX 3060 will be pretty sweet. I have a 3090 and it does everything and more that I need. Machine learning projects push it the furthest, but I also mine and game with.

Oh cool, I used to put computing power towards SETI@home, rosetta@home, and folding@home. I tried out gridcoin but found it hard to earn any coins with their whitelisted projects. Seems half the time it would not mine me coins, just compute on BOINC. That was years ago though, maybe their interface works better now.

Best of luck, heres what you can expect mining XMR with that CPU:

https://www.betterhash.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5700G-with-Radeon-Graphics-mining-profitability-63129008.html

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(Edited)

I don't have any problem mining Gridcoin, it's just that it isn't worth very much. But I started using seti@home way back before BOINC existed when my best computer was a 300 MHz Pentium II so I'm not really doing it for the money, it's just a nice bonus (and I can always hope Gridcoin skyrockets in value one day). Projects I use these days include einstein@home, rosetta@home, world community grid and milkyway@home. Sadly, seti@home was retired (or put into hibernation but I don't really expect it to come back).

Looking at that profitability website you linked I see that the 5800X can do 6542.7 H/s and the 5700G can do 4055.66 H/s. The 5800X usually benchmarks 5-10% faster than the 5700G so those numbers are questionable to me as it works out to nearly a 50% difference. Maybe XMR mining is able to take advantage of the extra cache? I can't think of anything else that would account for such a large difference. In any case, mining XMR doesn't appear to take great advantage of GPUs (hash rates seem pretty close for CPUs and GPUs). While the XMR numbers are pretty lousy, other things take better advantage of the built in Vega 8 graphics of the 5700G:

mvega8.png

How profitable is mining with AMD Radeon(TM) Vega 8 Graphics?

AMD Radeon(TM) Vega 8 Graphics can generate more than 9.72 USD monthly income with a 3.43 MH/s hashrate on the RVN - KawPow (NBMiner) algorithm.
Algorithm Hashrate Monthly Income Monthly BTC Income Monthly USD Income
RVN - KawPow (NBMiner) ≈3.43 MH/s ≈90.19479902 RVN ≈0.00020835 BTC ≈9.72 USD
ETH - Ethash (Phoenix) 2.18 MH/s 0.00099030 ETH 0.00007992 BTC 3.73 USD
ETC - Ethash (Phoenix) 1.77 MH/s 0.04866885 ETC 0.00003636 BTC 1.70 USD
BTG - ZHash (LOL) 2.84 H/s 0.03414872 BTG 0.00003043 BTC 1.42 USD
XMR - RandomX (XMRig AMD) 102.98 H/s 0.00054273 XMR 0.00000265 BTC 0.13 USD

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Yeah Monero implimented Randomx a few years back to combat ASICS. They went with a Cryptonight heavy algo first but then went to a more CPU exclusive algo called randomX which only CPUs are going to mine well.

I mine RVN (halving coming up) with my GPUs and then XMR with my CPUs.

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Great post. I have been wanting to build one from scratch. I have rebuilt many over the years. I will bookmark this post and read it again when I get ready to build one.

I missed the upvote window. So I sent a couple Hive instead.

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Ah cool, well best of luck building one. They have not really changed much in how to build them, but I am sure one or two things may be new like m.2 drives.

No worries man, well thanks for the tip :-)

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