Hi, I’m a Crypto noob. I recently found your youtube and really liked it. You go into a lot of great detail on each video. You motivated me to build a mining rig/ PC. This is the first PC i’ve built in years. I would like to ask you which videos you recommend for system startup after assembly? Parts should all be here by Friday. Hope to be up and running that day. Thanks in advance for your time. Keep up the good work.
If you want ease of use, Windows, unless you like linux, then you build the miner your self. If your not comfortable building the miner, then I say go windows
Cool part about mining OS’s is that you can use Windows for your main PC build. Once you get to the point where everything is set up properly, you can test your GPU overclocking/under-volting in MSI Afterburner or similar to get an idea of the card’s technical specs and core clock and memory clock ranges (the points on either high or low end where it becomes unstable).
Once you have Windows and the machine stable, you can download something like Awesome Miner to use on Windows. Awesome Miner is more of a control suite than an individual miner - you install the program in typical “next, next, done” installer in Windows, then you pick which miner to use out of a large list of those available. It is much easier than installing individual miners. (2Miners did a good review of the fastest miner programs, so I would look at their blog post and then pick the miner software inside Awesome miner that you want to use. (Side Note: If possible, create a dedicated user with minimal permissions on the machine so you can run the mining software in their session. You will have to exclude Awesome Miner from your anti-virus, which should be okay, but in case any malware is injected into the mining software (be sure to only download from their official site, there are a ton of scam/impersonation sites around crypto right now), you want them to only compromise a low-privilege account if possible. Your main admin account should be signed off when you are mining.
After you have played around with Windows mining, you can further enhance security by flashing the latest HiveOS to a USB drive (or NVME SSD mounted in a USB to SSD plug-in adapter for better longevity). Just download Balena Etcher from their official site, get the latest version of HiveOS from HiveOS.farm installation page, and the flash the USB drive with etcher (you will pick the disk image you downloaded as the one to flash). After that, change your boot order in bios so that the USB drive boots first. You will then have the option when booting to pick HiveOS on the USB drive or Windows on your main drive. This is more secure in my opinion because you are not excluding anything in Windows - they run on their separate drives, with a dedicated “drive” (USB) for your miner/mining OS.
Vosk and others also have very good videos on the topic, but I don’t see anything by Vosk specifically on HiveOS for a while. I’m not sure if he would be super happy if I posted other YouTubers’ names here, so I decided to write out the basics above. Hope this helps!
~Orph3us~