Monero mining rig? What? Yeah, we’re going to be build a Monero CPU mining rig. When we started mining crypto years ago, we decided to learn how to build a GPU mining rig first. We were hooked. Next thing you know, we had dozens of miners hashing away, mostly at Ethereum, but also at other coins. Later we bought some ASICs and mined a bit of Litecoin. But, for the most part, we were GPU mining.

Why build a Monero mining rig?

There’s a few reason we want to build a Monero mining rig. And, before we go any further, it may reach break even as fast as a video card based mining rig, but even at that point it won’t be making a ton of money. With the Monero mining rig hardware we went with we’re anticipating $30 a month at today’s prices. So, why then?

Our reasons for building a Monero miner

• To support Monero which was one of the first cryptocurrencies with a heavy focus on privacy and anonymity.*
• We have never built an AMD-based rig for anything – not for gaming and not for mining or anything else.
• The hardware we buy can be repurposed as a good gaming rig for games and intensive flight sims.
• GPU prices for mining rigs are sky high.
• We can’t find a GPU to save our lives anyway. And, we’re pretty bored.

* While thought to be secure and anonymous from inception, a firm called CipherTrace says they can trace Monero transactions.

How do you mine Monero?

Currently, Monero uses the RandomX algorithm. RandomX is mineable with a good CPU, more specifically, a good AMD CPU. And, CPU mining really relies on the RAM, too. Building up the miner is pretty straightforward. Once it is built, you need an operating system and a mining program, just like for GPU mining.

If you’re hoping for a guide on how to build a CPU mining rig, we’ll have one up in the next week or so. We’ll walk through all the steps of building the CPU miner, installing an operating system and the mining software, connecting to a pool and mining. We will also touch on optimization, too.

Does Monero mining require a high end GPU?

No. In fact, you can mine Monero without any GPU at all. That’s one of the biggest differences between CPU and GPU mining.

While mining Monero (CPU mining), the processor is doing the heavy lifting and the amount, type and configuration of RAM is also a critical factor. In contrast, GPU mining is obviously GPU intensive, but the CPU does very little and you just need enough RAM for the rig to function. What both mining methods have in common are expensive components, the challenges of heat dissipation, mining software and internet connectivity.

Monero mining rig parts list

Here’s what we’re running with for our miner. Some things will change over time, but this is the initial list of parts we’ll be using:

Monero Mining CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU

CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4

Motherboard: GIGABYTE X570 AORUS Master

Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 3200

PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2, 80+ PLATINUM

Other parts for the Monero mining rig

There’s a few more things that are needed. First, we’ll need a case of some sort. We just spent too much money on one we really like, but you can go with anything that is open air. We’ll also need an OS, of course. We’re going to shoot for Ubuntu on this build, which is free, as is the mining software we’ll be running.

What’s next?

We’re waiting on a part or two, then we’ll get the Monero miner built. As we mentioned, we’ll document everything we do step-by-step. While we think we’re good on our parts, we’re not 100% sure if our CPU cooler will clear the RAM. We are thinking it will be fine, but If anything changes, we’ll update this list and the rig building tutorial.