Creating a mining rig for Monero’s lightweight little brother Aeon

All running and happily hashing

Getting into cryptocurrency is like a small drug. You put in the hard work creating a machine to do the mining. You tweak spend far too long tweaking it to maximize the hash you get while keeping power consumption low. Each time you check your hash rate or your pending balance of coins you get a little endorphin boost. Just like anything else in life if it is fun and makes you smile you’re doing to want to do more!

In my previous post on creating a rig to mine Monero I spoke about getting in too late. Well I’m glad I got in then because it’s only been growing since. With that in mind I’ve taken to this idea, 1 hash per second today is worth 2 hash per second tomorrow. Thus I started into a plan of creating a slightly different style mining machine. This one would focus on the CPU focused algorithm of Aeon called CryptoNight-Lite. I’ve looked at in a very basic way as an analogy of what Litecoin is to Bitcoin.

For this build I started with another first; I was going to buy a top end processor to get the highest hash rate possible. The AMD Ryzen processors are highly recommended for folks getting into Aeon but I set my sights higher still. I wanted to get the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x which is at the time of this writing AMD’s flagship end user desktop processor. It features a new TR4 socket architecture with a total of 16 cores at a base clock speed of 3.4GHz. You’ll find the MSRP of this beast is $999 but with patience and careful shopping you can get it as low as $699.

I leaned on members of the Aeon community to help me with this build and this is the component list.

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
• Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 premium-grade 140mm CPU cooler for AMD TR4/SP3
• ASRock X399 TAICHI TR4 motherboard
• Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4 DRAM 2133MHz C13
• Corsair AX Series, AX860, 860 Watt (860W), Fully Modular Power Supply, 80+ Platinum Certified
• 120GB PNY CS900 2.5-inch Solid State Drive
• Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case (CC-9011096-WW)
• 2 x Cooler Master R4-S2S-124K-GP 120mm Sleeve Bearing Case Fan with 3 Pin Connector 4-IN-1 Value PK
• Gigabyte Radeon RX VEGA 56 8G Graphic Cards GV-RXVEGA56-8GD-B

The video card would be hard to get right now but I had already bought it prior to putting this system together. The system cost ended up being about $1600 excluding the video card. Now this machine gets about 4kH/s from just the CPU. At the current difficulty of mining Aeon it will take just over a year for it to pay itself off.

Here you can see the AMD Threadripper’s Torx Screwdriver in action.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpFEvaZ61Ww[/embedyt]

I took pictures during the unboxing and build process.