In this section, I’m going to guide you to build your GPU mining chassis with a shoe rack. Building a GPU mining chassis of shoe rack is a very common because of:
1. A shoe rack is relatively cheap, usually below ~$50 for a 4-tier show rack, also it is easy to purchase and order.
2. Easily can be assembled and later customized.
3. The dimensions are very close to a perfect fit for a GPU mining chassis.
First let’s talk about dimensions. Well, in a normal shoe rack, the distance between each tier is about ~20 cm = ~6” or bigger to accommodate shoes, or sometimes people place flowers, plants and vases on them.
This ~20 cm is adequate to house most of GPUs, for instant Sapphire NITRO+ RX 570 is about 135 mm (5.3”) tall while NITRO+ is above medium size GPU.
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The width of most of shoe racks are bigger than ~30 cm (12”).
Even the largest GPUs barely are longer than ~30 cm (~12”), for instance, ASUS ROG- STRIX RX580 O8G GAMING is 29.8 cm (11.73") long.
Figure 4 - Picture of an ordinary 4-tier shoe rack made of thin metallic tubes and plastic links, each tier has 4 metallic tubes.
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Even if the card is longer than the width of the shoe rack it does not make a big trouble as it may just stay out of the whole rack for few centimeters, while this shoe rack chassis is an open-design chassis and there is no restrictions nor tight places. About the length of show rack or how wide it should be, well it depends on your build, you need ~10 cm (~4”) for each GPU, so for a GPU mining rig with 7 GPUs, your shoe rack should be bigger than 70 cm (~28”). A longer and wider shoe rack is preferable to smaller one, so the size is very important, pay attention to it before you buy one. There are some points you need to put into consideration:
1. Wooden shoe racks are safer than metallic ones, as there is no chance of electrical short-circuit, specially the motherboard is more troublesome, where there are lots of bare connectors at the back of it. Even when you buy a metallic shoe rack never get one that has not been painted or covered.
2. The arrangement of rod, metallic tubes or cube channel of shoe rack is very important, it must be horizontal along with the long side of the rack, that means the rods make a perpendicular angle (90 degree) with the GPUs.
3. The rods should be made a thick metal, because you need to drill some holes for the GPU bracket on it, so holes on weaker tubes get loose easily after few rounds of tightening and untightening.
4. Don’t buy those shoe racks that the section and shelf has a preassembled unit, welded or bound together. Why? Because usually GPU heatsink and fan assembly are taller than GPU bracket and holder. So, it makes it very hard to be fixed the on the rack. Also, sometimes you need to fix only two rods instead of four or five.
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So, let’s do it together.
1. place an order for below mentioned shoe rack or similar one from Amazon.de.
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These shoe racks can be purchased about $20 for four-tier types, but don’t expect to get something with a very rigid with thick tubes on this price. So, do your own research on the net, or on your local home & kitchen stores to find one.
2. Start to make marks with ~10 cm (4”) gap distance on the tubes, rods or wooden strips.
3. Make a mark with a distance of 20.32 mm (0.8”) after each previous line .
4. Drill two holes on the top on each marked line evenly. Use the drill bit size of 3 mm or smaller. Computer typical case screws have thread diameter of #6 which is defined as 0.1380 inches (3.51 mm).
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Figure 5 - Picture of parts of a shoe rack
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Next part is to try a GPU on the chassis to verify your drilling job, if you don’t have any, skip this part, go to next section, buy your GPU and come back here. Remember the GPUs are being installed upside-down, in this method, PCIE riser does not have a back support and just fixed on GPU with a small PCIE locking pin. This way suits a build when build dimensions are so accurate, like a home-made condition.
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Based on the model of GPU, some has large heatsink and fan assembly, longer than 120mm of GPU bracket, in this case you need to take out the second or third tube of tier basement of to make the card fit and is placed on the rack, as it is shown on the above picture. Always try to get a same brand and model GPUs. It makes it so much easier to build the chassis for them.
One of top tube was removed to let the card sits on the mountings.
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5. On next step, you are going to install or stick your motherboard and the PSU on the lower tier. Here, you need lots of double adhesive tape. The easiest way is to cut a piece of thin plywood or similar sheet with size of your motherboard and then stick with double adhesive tape on the sheet, then fix the sheet on the lower tier of shoe rack with double adhesive tape. PSU does not have a bare metal contacts on the outside, so you can directly stick it on the shoe rack.
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6. On the next step, you can install your GPUs on their places. As I said earlier upside-down, you can fix them upright but you need to build a base for PCIE riser to let GPU with PCIE riser sit on it. While it is possible to do it, but first there is no necessity for it, 2. It makes the build more complicated.
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This chassis can accommodate up to 9 GPUs on each tier of shoe rack, so on a 4-tier shoe rack, you can make two complete seven to nine GPUs mining rigs. The total cost of this chassis build was about ~ $50.
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