Author Archives: Alex Armstrong

The time has come to move my Chia farm from a Windows desktop PC to another system. (NOTE: Any links here are Amazon affiliated links to help support the website). I chose the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB because I wanted to save more power with the farm. This model is also the minimumContinue reading “Moving a Windows Chia Farm to a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB”

I was recently getting some office supplies from Office Depot and I always walk down the electronics isle just to check if there is anything interesting or if there are any good deals. They had an HP PC (shown in the image) on sale for $550 USD. I almost walked passed it when I noticedContinue reading “AMD 5700G Benchmarked in Chia Plotting”

It’s only been about two months since MainNet launch on Chia and I feel like there is still much to be discovered with the plotting process. I recently decided to upgrade the RAM on my plotting machine from 32GB (4 DIMMS) to 64GB (2 DIMMS). I’ve learned in the past that when using Big DIMMSContinue reading “Does RAM Speed affect Plotting Speed on AMD?”

With any new technology, information is king. As proverbial farmers, we need to know the ins and outs of our tools. In our case, the Chia Plotter is our main tool. What’s the best way to plot? What are these other K plots? In this post, I’d like to provide some more exact information onContinue reading “RAM information on available K plots”

With transactions live, you may have heard the term “Cold Wallet” mentioned in Chia Forums. This term means having a wallet that is not connected to the internet. If you are farming Chia and you can see your XCH balance in the Chia Client matches the balance on the wallet tab, then you have aContinue reading “How to Make a Cold Wallet in Chia”

As discussed in some of my previous posts, Plotting depends on the three main system components; CPU, RAM, and Temp Space. The best Temp Space hardware right now is the NVMe, with some exceptions. It uses the PCI-E bus to achieve blazing fast speeds. Some Chia Farmers, like myself, are lucky enough to have twoContinue reading “Does RAID Zero Help Parallel Plotting in Windows?”

There are many different system configurations out there. Many of them are unique in many ways. To be honest with you, the question I get asked the most is “How many plots can I run and what settings should I use.” Usually accompanied with the person’s machine specs. In this post, I will guide youContinue reading “How Many Plots Can I Make a Day?”

To gamers, a raid usually means you and your friends go and conquer an adventure. In terms of Chia, Raid means that you use drives together to act as one. RAID is an acronym for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are many different types of RAID configurations. These are RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5Continue reading “How to Create a RAID in Windows”

You Won! Celebration time! Everyone will remember their first win. All that work, all those settings, all worth it. This means that you are correctly farming. A big sigh of relief! On the Farm Tab you see a 2 XCH and now you have a block height that is not zero. Your next question mightContinue reading “Which Plot Won?”

I took some time to benchmark different plots in order to provide another data point for anyone out there researching what their plotter build should be. My machine specs are listed in the about page. A link to it is at the top right of this post. Below I give just some different configurations IContinue reading “Benchmarking Different Settings for K32”

Plots. Roughly 100 gigabytes in size, what are inside these things? Just put them on the disk and farm away. What am I farming? What’s going on? These might not be some of the questions that keep you up at night, but, you’ve probably wondered about them while looking at the Farming screen in theContinue reading “How Chia Farming Works”

You may have been like me, started your Chia Plotting and Farming on the first machine you had available. Then, after some time, you figure that you want another computer to stay on 24/7. How do you do that? Do you need to install Chia all over again and wait for the dreaded Sync thatContinue reading “How to Move A Chia Farm to Another PC”

Who knew that this metric could cause so much turmoil. I’ve read many many frustrations from members of the Chia community that they are well past the Estimated Time to Win (ETW) and they have not won any Chia Coin. In one sense, their frustrations are rightly justified. Its justified because this metric is, inContinue reading “Estimated Time to Win Explained”

The Chia Client comes with its own debug logger, but it isn’t activated by default. There is a configuration value to set in order to activate increased logging capabilities. Doing this is useful because if you ever need to troubleshoot something, you have somewhere to look at. Activating this is very simple. Open the followingContinue reading “How to Enable Chia Logs on Windows”

Windows PowerShell has developed into a great tool to manage and execute scripts on Windows machines. Its built into every install of Windows 10. In this post, we go into how to run plotters with PowerShell. There are a few advantages to running plotters in PowerShell: Plotting is not tied to the Chia GUI. IfContinue reading “Plotting with PowerShell on Windows”

Gaming PCs, depending if you are an enthusiast or not, can be a good start point for any new farmer. There are some drawbacks though that I’ve discovered when using the hardware to generate plots for Chia. Firstly, people with gaming PCs usually like to min/max the hardware to squeeze every frame per second (FPS)Continue reading “Plotting with your Gaming PC”