Building your 6 GPU GTX 1070 rig step-by-step with photos

Okay,  so all the parts have arrived and now it's time to start building!

1. Case:

I have to say that I'm very impressed with this open air case! It arrived well packed and in two pieces that needed to be snapped together. Everything about it says quality... The standoffs were placed perfectly, the tapped holes for the risers and GPU's were tapped well and placed well. This case lived up to everything I had hoped for. It's very sturdy and one of the best aspects, portable. I actually brought this rig to work to test some configurations and had it on it's side, back, etc.. and nothing budged. Can't recommend Parallelminer and their Barebone Aluminum 6.1 GPU Open Air Mining Case enough!


2. Motherboard

The motherboard gets mounted on the 6 brass standoff's using the hardware. Place the back of the motherboard towards the back of the case (high side).


3. CPU and CPU heatsink/fan:

 *** Please note that there is thermal grease on the underside of the CPU fan. Don't touch it when you take it out of the box as it wipes off fairly easily! This grease helps the heat transfer from the CPU to the heatsink.

You're going to push the lever down and gently away from the CPU socket . Once it's removed from the clip, lift it up and insert the CPU. Please note the marks on the motherboard and CPU to make sure you line up the processor correctly (see photo). Bent pins are not fun. Once the CPU is installed, gently lower the and lock the lever to secure the CPU.

Once you have the CPU installed, place the CPU fan on top with enough slack to install the fan power connector to the mother board. Once in place, push down on each of the plastic inserts. They will snap into place and secure the CPU fan on top of the CPU.

Insert the CPU fan power lead into the CPU fan plug on the motherboard.


4. Memory:

There is a tab in the middle of the memory slot that is off center. You'll have a cutout in your DIMM as well. Make sure you line these up when installing the memory. Push the tabs on both ends out (away from the slot), put one corner of the DIMM in the slot and gently push the DIMM down. Watch as you push it down to make sure it's lined up correctly. Once it is, push firmly and the DIMM will snap down and the two tabs on each end will snap back in place and secure the DIMM.


5. Power supply

 
 The first you're going to do is mount the motherboard to the case using the screws supplied with the power supply as shown in the photo above. You will only be using two screws.

The next step will be using the 24/28 pin cable to connect the power supply to the motherboard.
 

CPU power cable:

The next step is to connect the CPU power cable to the power supply.

And then connect the other end of the CPU power cable to the PSU power connector on the motherboard.


6: Hard drive: 

There are no screws for the hard drive. The case is configured for two power supplies if needed, since only one is used, you can place the hard drive on the front left corner. I'll eventually tie wrap it down, but for now it's just laying in place; the sata and power cables are stiff enough that it doesn't move around.

First, connect the SSD hard drive to the sata one connector on the motherboard using the supplied sata cable. You can use any sata port, I preferred to use 1.

Then connect the hard drive to the to power supply using a power supply cabled marked SATA.


7: Power switch:

Connect the power switch to the two power pins on the motherboard as shown in the photo. It doesn't matter which way it goes length wise. Red or black can be on the first pin.


8: Riser

So now we have to mount the riser. I do want to point out the the risers come with a nice thick foam type backing to prevent them from shorting out. And the holes in the risers were a little tight for the screws, so I used a 9/64th drill bit to ream the holes out and to make a hole in the foam backing for the screw to pass through.

Once you have the riser mounted to the case, you can connect the power cable and the riser connector (blue wire).

 Now you can do this two ways, you can insert the adapter card into the PCI-E slot and then connect the blue riser cable. After the first one, I ended up connecting the adapter card to the riser cable first and then inserting it into the PCI-E slot.

The next step is to connect a SATA cable to the power supply and one end to the power connector running off the riser board.

***One thing to note. Typically, the PCI-E slot closest to the CPU is slot 1, which is where I began. I connected the HDMI cable to this card to monitor the boot process, which was fine. But once I installed the second in the PCI-E x16 slot (the long yellow slot), EthOS yelled at me and said that the monitor needed to be installed on the video card in the first slot. So I'm assuming on this board, the PCI-E x16 is slot one, so you may want to start there or you will need to move your HDMI cable as I did. Not a big deal, just pointing it out.



9: GPU:

*** This may sound silly, but please remove the protective plastic from BOTH sides of the video card. Again, silly... but trying to be thorough :)

The next step to connect the video card to the power supply using one of the power supply cables marked GPU. Sorry, but the picture with one video card was blurry, so this will have to suffice :)

***Please note - When ethOS loads, it will show you the IP address it obtained from your router. Please write this down as you will need it later to configure ethOS. This will be done from a Windows machine on the same network.

At this point, you can connect your monitor via an HDMI cable to the video card, a network cable to the RJ-45 connector and USB keyboard to a USB port in the back of the computer. 

So now that you have your first video card completely connected, you can turn on your rig! I did take pictures of the ethOS screen showing 1 video card connected, but they were too blurry... so using this one as an example.

Now that you have it up and running and your first video card is detected, you will repeat the process for the remaining video cards! You can install the remaining video cards and then power on your system to see if they are all recognized, but I shut down and powered on my rig after each card to make sure each one was recognized before moving on to the next. Makes any needed troubleshooting easier.


2 GPU's

3 GPU's

4 GPU's

5 GPU's

And finally, 6 GPU's!

The first time I brought the rig up, all 6 video cards were recognized and when it started mining, they were averaging 27-27.8 Mh's.

190 hash rate:

After configuring EthOS properly, you can see I'm now running at over 31Mh's per video card and a total of190 plus Mh's.

I'll go over setting up and the optimal settings for the GTX 1070's using EthOS in the next section!