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description: Mining Rig
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# Components

Mining is the glue that holds Ethereum’s ‘decentralized app store’ together by ensuring that it comes to a consensus on each change to any of the applications (dapps) running on the network. Essentially mining helps verify and validate transactions within Ethereum’s network. But what do miners get in return for doing all the heavy lifting? Ethereum reward coins.



**HOW IS AN ETHEREUM MINING RIG DIFFERENT FROM A NORMAL COMPUTER?**\
Looks awesome right? A mining rig is made up of the same components that go into a normal desktop computer. But there are a few differences. In a normal desktop computer, you have a good balance between CPU, RAM, GPU, and HD. With gaming computers, you have higher clocked versions of CPU, loads of RAM, one or two GPUs and SDDs.

With mining rigs, you want the lowest clocked CPU, bare minimum RAM, 5,6 or 7 GPUs and a very basic HDD]/SSD. Oh, and as you can see from the picture, you don’t want (or even can) fit all those GPUs instead on a normal case. For this, specially assembled shelves are used to place each of the components. It's amazing when you see them all together!

![Clasic Mining Rig](https://233423813-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MdqCP7r3EpUU_0ZQJsR%2F-MfEcRNdpMU_cvedUEbE%2F-MfEdPXZwlFYSVH6t9zp%2Frif.jpeg?alt=media\&token=03b09c17-f396-4d81-aa88-5052262f4877)

The main components of any mining rig include a power supply, a motherboard, an operating system to run on your motherboard, computer memory, and a GPU or graphics processing unit.

An ethereum mining rig is just like any other computer you would build on your own; only instead of having an actual case that all the components live in, it’s in an open area. You need to do this because when the GPUs are running, their temperatures can go really high, and it’s important to have a lot of air circulation.

This rig, with only one graphics card, can run roughly 27 million math equations every second.

That sounds like a lot, right?

But on ethereum’s network right now, there are 600 trillion math operations happening every second. Performing the highest amount of math operations per second will equate to higher rewards.
