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Chia Plotting Hardware Buying Guide

Bunch of HW on a picture

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You can start plotting on almost any machine. There is one caveat though if you use bitfield plotting or not. Originally, the plotter did not use bitfield back sorting. The bitfield back sort is theoretically faster than not using the bitfield and we already know that it saves 12% of total writes but requires more RAM. Now bitfield plotting will not work on CPUs that predate the Nehalem architecture (CPUs were generally designed before 2010) so pretty much if you want to use Core or Core 2 DUO make sure you don’t use bitfield. It can be disabled if you go to GUI and when you click to the green '+ Add a Plot' button open 'Show Advanced Option' and then check 'Disable bitfield plotting'.

There are multiple options, you may go to ebay or other sites to buy servers with a bunch of enterprise grade disks which is perfect for chia, or you go and get a bunch of second hand workstations. Or if none of these options are available to you and you don’t have any machines at home that gets you a reasonable amount of plot on a daily basis then you need to buy new. Our aim is to help you with this by putting together the configs and put them into ‘plots / day’ buckets. Now the final result depends on what kind of OS (Windows, Linux) and some other factors but in general you won’t regret if you choose any of the options below. We are happy to help you once you get started just comment if you get stuck.

Some resources that might be useful:

If you want to diverge from the below and change the temp drive or the farming drive you can do that by using the searches below. It may happen that what we selected is unavailable. The reason why we did not go with 16 or 18 TB hard disk drives is because they are currently out of stock on Amazon.

Buying guide

Bronze (Intel NUC)
i7-10710U Mobile - 6 core / 12 thread
32 GB RAM

Silver (Intel)
i7-10700K - 8 core / 16 thread
32 GB RAM

Gold (AMD)
3950X - 16 core / 32 thread
64 GB RAM

Platinum (AMD)

3970X - 32 core / 64 thread
128 GB RAM

Plot / day

~12-14 / day

16-18 / day

26 - 30 / day

48 - 60 / day

Qty

Qty

Qty

Qty

Case

1 x

1 x

1 x

1 x

PSU

Built-in

1 x

1 x

1 x

Motherboard




Built-in

1 x

1 x

1 x

CPU

Built-in

1 x

1 x

1 x

CPU cooler

Built-in

1 x

1 x

1 x

Memory

1 x

1 x

1 x

1 x

Boot drive


1 x

1 x

1 x

1 x

Plot drive

1 x

1 or 2

3 x

4 x

Farm drive

The more the better

The more the better

The more the better

The more the better

VGA

Integrated

1 x

1 x

1 x

Add. card I.

N/A

1 x

1 x

Add. card II.

?

1-2 x

2 x

Peripherial

?