My mining rig is useless now

Introduction

I can no longer mine ETH but I was profitable for some time... some time ago I decided to try build my own mining rig, this is what I've learned:

Hardware compatibilites are a thing on their own

I bought a couple of Nvidia Cards and I thought it would work right away on my main motherboard ( it had 2 PCIe x16 slots ) but it didn't right away I had to configure the motherboard in some specific way, that got me to the usual spiral of youtube videos and reddit posts, but after a couple of days I had the gpus working. so next step was the miner software. I was lucky that my motherboard supported multiple PCIe channels for gpus, that is not the case for all the motherboards, so if you want to mine with multiple gpus, make sure that your motherboard supports it.

I found this [T-rex]https://github.com/trexminer/t-rex/releases miner and it was easy to install on ubuntu, but again didn't work right away, I had to configure it to use the correct gpu drivers, and then it worked.

I've found this guy that had a tons of good videos about mining:

Good! so for now I had 1 mining rig ( a normal pc with 2gpus) finally working and making a couple of dollars a day.

watching all those videos made me understand that you can tweak/overclock your gpus to be more profitable:

so I try it and it worked! but after a couple of hours the computer was off and I had to restart it. then again back to the tweaking and googling and youtube.... and after some time I found a perfect configuration that was improving the mining hash rate witout crashing the computer.

Now the serious quest begin

I bought more gpus another motherboard and an aluminum set of bars and screws to mount the gpus on... a real mining rig! Mounted it all right away, it had 3 power supplies for all the gpus, but at this point I already knew all the stuff related to PCIE Risers and custom Motherboards configs so with correct set of cables all the GPUs where powered correcly, and beign found by the motherboard. Added a hard disk, installed Ubuntu and the mining software, and after a couple of hours everithing was working fine.

But.....

after a while, the miner software was disconnecting from the pool, and after a while it was disconnecting again, and again, and again, had to restart the miner everytime... I found out that the best to keep the connection stable was connecting to the internet thru cable, wifi sometimes fails or has latency and that messes up the miner connection.

Switching from Ubuntu to proper OS

Every couple of days, Ubuntu was crashing, don't know why... and also every time I needed to see something about the miner I had to either connect thru SSH console, or phisicaly plug a monitor ( with HDMI cable ) to the miner... so I found that there was specific OS for mining, researched it a bit and installed HiveOS on a USB stick.

HiveOS

cuoted: "The ultimate mining platform which allows users to setup, mine and control processes more effectively and hassle-free across thousands of rigs all from a single place. Everything you and your team need to keep your farm at peak efficiency"

really nice platform, the community version was really good and only took small commision of the mining profits if you connect to their pool, it had all the monitors in real time, access to stats, temperature, uptime and all the good things you want to see in a dashboard, by this point I had already 2 mining rigs so having all in one dashboard was really nice.

And now we can not do ETH mining anymore

The miner was profitable and all was running smoothly but on September 2022 Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake, so the miners are not needed anymore, I've tested other coins but none of them are worth the electricity consumption, so I've decided to shutdown the miners, and called it a good experiment that made me some money along the way.... will see what I will do with the hardware, maybe I will use it for something else.