Reference Plotting Hardware

These are machines that work well to quickly create plots in parallel. These serve as starting points to think about acquiring or modifying existing systems to be good plotting machines on a TBs of plots created per day basis. You don't need this level of hardware to then farm plots that have been generated however. For that a Raspberry Pi is enough.

• Chia budget plotting desktop guide

• Chia plotting basics

Plotting can be done on consumer systems (laptops), but is much faster done on high-end desktops, workstations, and servers. Plotting takes scaling for CPU cores to improve the parallelism (this is -r number of threads, or number of parallel processes), scaling in DRAM per process, and fast SSDs or many small 10k hard drives for temporary storage space.

The amount of DRAM and temp space changed in 1.0.4. The new table below reflects the values in the GUI. You need at least one CPU core (but you can use r to increase thread count speeding up phase 1), and the DRAM and temp space below per plot. The easy math for a system is to take the number of cores and use that as the target for number of processes to run in parallel, the multiply the temp space and DRAM requirements by that to find the minimum amount.

K-value	DRAM (MiB)	Temp Space (GiB)	Temp Space (GB)
32	3390	239	256.6
33	7400	521	550
34	14800	1041	1118
35	29600	2175	2335

The goal of a plotting machine is to create the highest TiB per day of plots, with the lowest system cost. There are many unique combinations of consumer, data center, and enterprise hardware at many different price points that are adequate for plotting. For SSDs, please see the https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/SSD-Endurance page

This is a spreadsheet of the community systems to compare against: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14Iw5drdvNJuKTSh6CQpTwnMM5855MQ46/

User	System Name	OS	Motherboard / SAS Adapter (Server)	CPU	DRAM	Temp Drive	Time Phase 1 (s)	Total Time per Plot (s)	Time (min)	Time (hr)	GiB Written	GiB/min	// Plots	TiB/day (all // Plots)	Total Price (USD)	$/TiB/day	version	-r (Threads)	-b (Memory)
@storage_jm	Intel Wolf Pass Server	Ubuntu Server 20.04.2	Intel® Server System R2208WFTZSR	2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6130 Processor	256GB DD4 2666 ECC RDIMM	2 Intel SSD DC P4608 6.4TB, 4x 3.2TB in RAID 0	12,722	43,156.10	719.3	11.99	101.33	0.1409	46	9.11	5400	$592.53	1.0.5	5	3400
@kiwihaitch	My Boss	Ubuntu 20.04	MSI TRX40 Pro 10G	Threadripper 3970X	256GB DDR4 @ 3200	6 x Intel P4600 3.2TB	21,000	49,900.00	831.7	13.86	101.33	0.1218	45	7.71			1.0.5	3	3400
@storage_jm	Intel Wolf Pass Server	Ubuntu Server 20.04.2	Intel® Server System R2208WFTZSR	2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6130 Processor	128GB DD4 2666 ECC RDIMM	Intel SSD DC P4608 6.4TB, 2x 3.2TB in RAID 0	12,722	32,790.10	546.5	9.11	101.33	0.1854	26	6.78	4000	$590.02	1.0.5	5	3400
@storage_jm	brother in law build	Windows 10 2H20	GIGABYTE Z590 AORUS Elite	Intel® Core™ i9-10850K Processor	64GB DDR4 3200	2x Corsair MP600 2TB NVMe M.2 80mm	5,389	16,981.00	283.0	4.72	101.33	0.3580	8	4.03	$2,000.00	$496.54	1.0.5	8	4000
@rs967	MSI Z490 + i7	Windows 10 Home	MSI Z490-A Pro	Intel i7-10700K 8-Core 16-Thread OC 4.2GHz	32GB DDR4 3600	1x Inland Premium 2TB m.2 NVMe SSD	11,747	27,388.72	456.5	7.61	101.33	0.2220	6	1.87	$2,500.00	$1,334.78	1.0.5	3	5000
@eparrot	Lenovo ThinkStation (mini)	Ubuntu Server 20.04.1	Lenovo 314F	Intel i7 9700 (8 core, 8 thread)	32GB DDR4	Inland Premium 2TB NVMe	10,650	25,300.00	421.7	7.03	101.33	0.2403	5	1.69	$700.00	$414.27	1.0.4	2	3400
@guiser	NUC i7	Ubuntu Server 20.04.1	NUC10i7FNHC	Intel i7-10710U 6-Core 12-Thread	32GB DDR4 2666 SO-DIMM	1x 1TB Seagate Firecuda 520 NVMe	8,916	24,807.00	413.5	6.89	101.33	0.2451	3	1.03	$1,500.00	$1,450.75	1.0.4	2	6000
@eparrot	Cyberpower Gamemaster	Windows 10 Home	ASRock B360M Xtreme	i5-9400F 2.90GHz	16GB DDR4	Inland Premium 1TB SSD NVMe	6,843	18,184.00	303.1	5.05	101.33	0.3344	1	0.47	$1,000.00	$2,126.79	1.0.4	4	3400
@guiser	NUC i7	Ubuntu Server 20.04.1	NUC10i7FNHC	Intel i7-10710U 6-Core 12-Thread	32GB DDR4 2666 SO-DIMM	1x 1TB Seagate Firecuda 520 NVMe	7,777	19,388.22	323.1	5.39	101.33	0.3136	1	0.44	$1,500.00	$3,401.55	1.0.4	2	4000
@rs967	Basic Rig 2	Ubuntu LTS 20.04.1	Gigabyte Ultra-Durable 3	Intel i5-2400 2-Core 4-Thread	8GB DDR3 1333	1x WD Green 500GB Hard Drive	20,000	76,000.00	1,266.7	21.11	101.33	0.0800	1	0.11	$150.00	$1,333.38	1.0.5	3	6000