Purchasing hardware
It’s important to note - you can buy a completely built PC.
Or you can purchase parts separately using a website’s PC builder feature. Something like newegg
has
a
complete walk through and you can participate in their shuffle program to get hard to find
chips.
The third option is to completely build it yourself and find the best deal you can on individual
parts.
This
tutorial will illustrate this path.
The biggest thing you’ll want to consider is - what do I want to do with this machine?
Will this be used for more than mining? Do I require a lot of storage? - do I have a lot of
photos
or
videos? Will I be downloading a lot of blockchain data? What about write/read speeds? Should I
go
for a
newer hard drive or an older model? Memory, processors, power supplies, etc. will all be covered
in
this
tutorial. Indeed, this process starts with the following questionnaire which assists in hardware
selections
and basic understanding of a computing system.
Storage
Memory
GPU
CPU
Motherboard
Cooling
Power
Your Case
Software
Puting All Together
Storage
The first question you need to answer is: how much storage do you need? These days, it's
possible to have over a hundred 5 terabyte+ drives controlled by the same computer. So feel
free to think big if you can afford it! For crypto purposes, I can tell you the Ergo
blockchain required to run the Ergo wallet is currently at about 15 gigabytes.
The second question to ask is: how fast do I need this storage to be? When you ask this
question, keep this in mind - your system is only as fast as your worst bottleneck across
all components. In other words, if you had the world's fastest hard drive, it doesn’t matter
if the system’s processor can’t keep up. When it comes to hard drive speed, a general rule
of thumb is that a magnetic drive is slower than a solid state drive. And a solid state
drive is slower than an m2 solid state drive.
Presently, blockchain and blockchain wallet software require good read/write speed in order
to download and sync a fresh copy of the blockchain, or else you spend weeks trying to sync.
Once the chain is synced however, magnetic drives are sufficient to download new blocks and
run the chain.