Rig Repository

There are several threads where rigs have been posted and discussed. This is an attempt at consolidating the best of all those rigs, while adding many of my own creations to the mix. It is split into 4 sections according to which relevant educations you have done. All the rigs included are optimal, meaning they are the highest MIPS you can get for the heat (or you can see them as the least heat you can get for the MIPS).

Each tab includes rigs with 1, 2 and 3 boxes and is sorted by MIPS. Because cloning a 1 box rig into a 2 or 3 box is trivial I've tried to avoid including those unless I've tested and haven't found anything better yet.

LINK: GOOGLE SHEETS PUBLISH


If you have no interest in building your own rig or modifying from this list or other's ideas, that's it! Feel free to ignore the next section entirely and skip right to the end for the closing thoughts.

Changes in market prices reduced the relevance of Budget Rigs. I have fully removed all budget and particular rigs from the main list to avoid confusion but if you happen to still be interested in them for some reason, you can find the legacy list here

Rig optimization considerations

In compiling this list and studying a bunch of different builds there are several pointers and common pitfalls that I came across and feel are worth including. This is mainly useful if you don't feel like just copying someone else's homework and want to build your own or are in a very particular situation such that none of the rigs here work for you.

To avoid redundancy with existing guides and being even more lengthy, this section does not cover and assumes you know most of the basics of cracking and how rig parts work. These are simply observations that may help you in optimizing your rig build.


General Tips

- Your rig is limited by the hottest spot you have so you should aim to have roughly the same level of heat being produced in all boxes. Having a box that produces no heat and one that produces 20 heat each time is likely to be suboptimal, even if the alternative is having both be at 18.

- Choose and build your rig with as much heat as you can handle for the amount of nerve you're putting into cracking. If you only do 3 or 4 brute-forcing attempts per hour, you probably don't need a 0 heat rig. Having a rig that can go for just a few more uses than what you normally do each time is ideal.

- When you get to rigs with multiple boxes, specializing one with PSUs and leaving the other boxes for most or all of the hotter HPCPUs and CPUs is often a good idea (far less impactful in budget rigs). This allows you to use less cooling overall by requiring very little cooling on the PSU box, which increases the total MIPS you can get to.

- Try to set your rig to use as much overclocking as you have unlocked via education. I have yet to find a situation where using the maximum available overclocking wasn't preferable. This is true even for eCPU-heavy rigs.

- Water Blocks and Heat Sinks do not overheat so heat accumulated on these parts can be ignored entirely.


Cooling patterns

The least amount of cooling parts you can use in a rig the better, as it leaves more room for CPUs and PSUs allowing for higher MIPS. So, it's important to not go overboard and not have more spots in your rig dedicated to cooling than you actually need.



This 9 cooling part design uses 4 water blocks and 5 heat sinks to make every single spot in the box be affected by both a water block and a heat sink. This combination is so powerful that no matter what you throw in there and level of overclocking and education, it will always be 0 heat, making it ideal to fill with HPCPU.

This also means that, unless you are lacking or don't want to use heat sinks/water blocks, using more than 9 cooling parts in a box is suboptimal.




This most recently found 8 part cooling design may look odd but is actually better than the normal 7 heat sink setup + fan. Allowing the fan to be centralized while still covering every square with at least 1 heat sink effect results in lower maximum heat.

This setup is only useful in fairly niche situations and optimizing the other components on it is much harder than normal due to its asymmetry.




This popular 7 heat sink configuration makes the entire box covered by the heat sink effect (divides heat by 10). This makes it particularly useful in high heat situations so, when you have a lot of HPCPU/CPU but aren't trying to reach 0 heat.

If you are considering adding a fan close to the middle (bringing the total to 8 cooling parts) to cool things down a bit, the previous setup is actually a better way to do it.




This simply covers the whole box with the effect of at least one water block. With a low number of HPCPUs, or a full rig of CPUs, this is often enough to keep the heat low. It is always 0 heat if you don't use any HPCPU, no matter which stage of education/overclocking you're using. One or more fans can be added in the middle for a bit more cooling all around if needed.

A common mistake with this pattern is to add a fifth water block in the very middle of the box. This extra water block is then only cooling down the other water blocks or areas already covered by 2 other water blocks so it is almost always redundant.



Using just a few fans is generally enough for low or zero heat when using a box with a high number of PSUs or eCPUs. Using more than 3 fans is unnecessary as the 4 water blocks are superior (if you really must, use 4 water blocks + fans, but also compare with the other cooling patterns above at that point)

Naturally the exception is if you're forgoing the use of heat sinks and water blocks (such as budget builds) you have no choice but to use as many fans as needed to get to your target heat level.



That's right, nothing. Using no cooling at all can be useful in a number of situations:
- When you don't care about heat too much because you aren't going to do much cracking and possibly just have a rig filled with eCPU. Example
- When your PSU box (or any box) is already colder than one of the other boxes (remember that only the maximum heat matters much). Example
- When going for an overheat build (more details on that below)


Layout tweaking tips

When changing, or trying to adapt some rigs from the list or others, or even when looking to fully optimize your own creations, these are some pointers to consider.

1) Hotter components like HPCPU or CPU are usually better sent to the corners, then sides, and only then towards the middle to minimize their overall heat impact (naturally leaving the cooler components like eCPU and PSU in the middle). This is quite often one of the easiest and simplest ways of optimizing heat in a rig.

2) A single HPCPU with 2 eCPU is very close to a set of 3 CPU, at any education level and overclocking. Both sets use exactly the same power, but the 3 CPU are both cheaper and not as hot in total, at the cost of just a slight amount of lower total MIPS. This means that you can easily make a rig only slightly weaker and colder by doing such a replacement or vice-versa.



3) Now getting into really small optimizations, notice a block of two PSU does not emit the same heat to all sides so rotating them so the lower heat (the long side of the PSU) is towards a hotter spot can help. Experimenting with moving and rotating PSU blocks is a big part of optimizing PSU boxes in particular.



4) The relation between eCPU and PSU is also important to understand for small heat optimizations. On the left, the base values with no education, a set of 2 eCPUs is simply strictly colder or equal to a PSU, whereas on the right, with all education at 50 OC the PSU becomes better on the long side and inside but still worse on the short side.

An illustration of these last two relations at play with PSU rotation and eCPU vs PSU can be seen in the PSU box of this setup where moving pretty much anything around causes some heat to pop up. Just to show that these tiny bits can make a difference depending on what you're aiming for.


Overheating

It wasn't always this way but overheating important components (CPU and PSU) still allows them to count as working as normal for the attempt as long as they weren't overheated before. This has been confirmed as not being a bug. The first and smaller consequence of this is that you can always take a rig into overheating, effectively providing one extra use to all rig setups.

The bigger impact however was the birth of the category of one-shot "overheat" rigs. These use no cooling but simply PSUs along with the strongest CPU possible (usually mainly HPCPU) at max overclocking. Heat won't ever go above 150 internally (the game's interface will show 100 at most) so these are always still usable at worst once every 50 minutes, being ideal for those not too invested in cracking or for leveling other crimes simultaneously.

There's very little to consider regarding layout placement in these rigs, simply maximize MIPS and consider the number of PSU needed. So, even though the example I have for a 3 rig overheat setup is this one, you can actually move everything around and it will work exactly the same. Go ahead and move things so there's a box of only HPCPU, it doesn't matter!

(IMO, this overheat change took some of the depth of rig-building away. Not going to complain and abuse it anyway, of course)


Closing thoughts

This list is still quite incomplete and very far from the full scale of MIPS vs heat that it wants to be for each category. However, I figured it's best to share something now rather than wait until I am happy all the best possible rigs for all categories have been found, in 3 years, after all crimes 2.0 have been released when barely anyone will be doing cracking.

It should also be easier for people to find improvements when they have an easy list to compare to and draw ideas from for their specific situation. I am also continuing to update this list with my own experiments and any rigs people post in the rigs thread, cracking guide or anywhere else I find them so it is going to be a continuous work for a while still.


Acknowledgments

A word of appreciation for these people without whom this work would have been close to impossible:

- Emforus [2535044], for the Detailed Cracking Guide and exhaustive study of the exact values and mechanics of cracking and rigs.
- Bug [1455582], for the Cracking Rig Simulator which this compilation pretty much depends on.
- Fetheryhorse6 [2317488] and everyone else posting and discussing their ideas and builds in Cracking Rigs.