Easy Miner showing zero work, no devices shown

Question

I have servers at my home (I work as a computer architect from my home for the Fortune 50) that are on all the time and plan to procure some Bitcoin hardware miners in the next few weeks. In the meantime I have got my own Bitcoin Wallet and signed up to a Bitcoin Pool and want to 'test the water' by mining with my extra GPUs I have in one primary Windows Server.

I have an account with Eclipse and have the original Wallet from Bitcoin Qt and I run a GUI mining tool from Butterflylabs called Easy Miner.

I am confused as I ran all night for about 18 hours but the logs show nothing but zero's when it talks about my work! It shows no devices and it 'looks' like no GPU!

I am confused...do I need a different Mining Tool to use my GPU or CPU (can you even use the CPU anymore...I know it would be slow and hence o not really want this.

Answer 1

So if you read the fine print on "Easy Miner", you can only use the software with their hardware devices in "out-of-the-box" mode (direct download --> run) (Disclaimer: I have a Jalapeno 5 GH/s miner, this shows up as a valid device. My GPU does not, however). See this thread about how to configure GPU mining. I believe it's in the settings, plus you need to set a bunch of flags to get the miner to recognize your GPU settings.

You would most likely be better off using CGminer / BFGminer, if you want to go the GPU mining route, however as the comment says, you're unlikely to get any real yields from any amount of GPUs, as they are just not as efficient as ASICs or FPGAs (see this for a good comparison of dedicated hardware versus graphics cards).

Answer 2

Like the previous answer mentioned - if you're mining with a GPU you will earn you close to nothing due to ASIC proliferation (specialized hardware that makes GPU/CPU mining for bitcoin [sha256 algorithm] obsolete). You may be better off mining a coin using an algorithm designed to be anti-ASIC. Several altcoins have been made in attempt to make GPU mining viable and to be resistant to ASIC takeover. Scrypt based coins for example may still be at least close to profitable with GPU mining. But there are tons other like X11 (darkcoin), Quark (ex: quarkcoin), Scrypt-Jane (ex: yacoin), Scrypt-N (ex: vertcoin) - each algo has tons of forked/cloned coins as well.

Almost all of these altcoins can be mined with a GPU/CPU and exchanged for BTC on any of the crypto exchanges out there. You can even find pools which you connect your miner to and the pool will automatically switch your miner to be mining the most profitable coin (some of those pools will even auto exchange for BTC as well). And like the previous answer mentioned, for actual mining software you will want to use:

• SGMiner for AMD/ATI cards (CGMiner v3.7.2 was last version with scrypt support so people made SGMiner to replace it)
  • Compiled binaries: sgminerwindows.com
• CUDAminer for NVIDIA cards
  • Compiled binaries: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.0
• CPUMiner for CPU mining. Some obscure algorithms will require modified versions of those miners but the descriptions for those coins will point you in the right direction.
  • Compiled binaries: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55038.0
  • Source: github.com/pooler/cpuminer (stackexchange won't let me post more than two link right now lol.. if/when I get the rep threshold I will edit this post to make them links..)

Answer 3

use the free easyminer from https://sourceforge.net/projects/easyminer/ , thats the right tool to test your hashing speed,mine bitcoins or litecoins..there is also no hardware limitations , cpu and gpu mining are alowed.Still the tool is available only for windows.