Building a Chia plotting computer
I embarked on a journey to build my own Chia plotter just for the fun of it. I still purchase plots online since that's the cheapest option I know, but I wanted to get a grip on how to build a fast and performant Chia plotter so I gave it a try. Here's my story...
Chia plotting wears SSD drives really fast! Fast as in you can completely destroy your drive in weeks after you start plotting. The SSD drive was the highest priority for me. The deciding factor is DWPD or TBW.
DWPD / TBW / What?
At first it was daunting to understand what all these acronyms mean. So here's a breakdown for you 😊
- DWPD - Data written per day
- TBW - Terabytes written
Both refer to how much data an SSD disk can reliably store before it is expected to break. DWPD refers to the total amount of data written per day during the warranty of the disk. TBW refers to the total amount of data written to a disk before it breaks regardless of the warranty period.
Both numbers basically mean the same - how quickly your drive wears out.
The disk
I wanted to start with this beast!
It's Intel® Optane™ SSD P5800X with a very large DWPD and sequential write speeds of 7.4GB/sec. While ordinary SSD drives can handle 600-2000 TBW, this disk can handle a whopping 73,000 TBW. Well, that's a difference.
The downside? Super expensive and super-hard to get.
I actually could not find a single shop which would be selling these.
Nevertheless, I settled with Samsung PM983 hard drives as they were much more affordable and easier to get. The PM983 has a DWPD of only 1.3 but that translates to 2,300 TBW which should be fine for me.
The CPU
The most important thing with the current plotters is the single-thread performance of a CPU. There are no doubts today the king here is AMD.
There are two options for a CPU:
- Get a CPU designed for servers
- Get a desktop version
The downside of the desktop version is you usually cannot have more than 128GB of memory. This was ok for me so I settled for a Ryzen 5900x which is both affordable and provides great performance.
The final build
I wanted to run the Madmax plotter since it provides better performance than Chia's built in plotter. The server I built was as follows:
- X570 motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 5900x
- 2x Samsung PM983 960GB SSD drives
- 1x Samsung 240GB drive as a boot drive
- 4x 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz memory
With this setup I could run Madmax with a memory tmp drive and achieve a great time of 24 minutes per plot.
What about performance?
The machine can create about 58 plots per day, or 5.8TB of plots per day.
In order to transfer this to my farming setup, all I needed was a 1gbit network and connect it all together.
Costs, costs, costs
I'm super happy about this setup. The final cost was close to 2200 EUR.
If you compare it to buying the plots online, I can get close to 4,000 plots for this amount with www.chia-planet.com. With my setup it will take more than 2 months to plot 4,000 plots but at least it was fun to build, right? 😉
My current farming setup allows me to download close to 400 plots / day and this plotter just increased it to 460 plots / day. A nice addition to my server farm 👌
How do you operate a Ryzen 5900x at 100% utilization
The Ryzen 5900x is a 12 core, 24 thread CPU. With 100% utilization it generates 105W of heat. That's quite a lot to be honest...
I run the server in my basement. Before this setup the AC was scheduled to run only twice a day for about an hour to cool down the air. Now I need to keep the AC running at 20% throughout the day to make sure the server has enough cold air to cool itself down. Otherwise I was getting random shutdowns and performance slowdowns due to the CPU (or maybe the SSDs?) overheating.
Final words
I enjoyed every single bit of the journey to build a Chia plotting machine. In case the SSD disks wear out, I believe I could sell the 5900X machine pretty easily since it's a beast for any workload, including web servers and databases. Let me know if you're interested 😉
But that's a story for another time.
Read about how I buy Chia plots in my previous article.
The hero image by awesome Maya Nguyen
