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Generally, it's not worth your time and effort to mine at home! (Some exceptions may apply.)
Age of ASIC mining
CPU mining has been unprofitable since 2011, GPU mining just slightly later.
Today, ASICs rule mining. The Bitcoin network has more than 1.7 Ehash/s (Oct 2016) now which is 1,700,000,000,000 Mhash/s. Your graphics card will be running full ...
33
Javascript has access to OpenGL ES, including shaders, so it has access to programmable parts of the GPU at nearly native speeds. I think that a smart kid might be able to build a fragment shader that does SHA256 hashing, which outputs to the stencil buffer, so that Javascript has a 2-way communication channel with the GPU.
So yeah, you could probably use ...
15
Summary: different approach to calculations. Nvidia GPUs are more like CPUs, in that they have only a few processors that do work, but faster. ATI GPUs have slower processors, but a lot more of them.
You can find a more complete description on the relevant wiki page :
Firstly, AMD designs GPUs with many simple ALUs/shaders (VLIW design) that run at a ...
13
Thanks for asking this question. I see a lot of people all the time who assume GPU mining is profitable.
Try googling "bitcoin mining calculator" and see.
Presently (in 2015) the calculator will tell you that you would be able to mine one bitcoin in about 1000 to 10 000 years. But you have to consider that there are reward halvings every four years, which ...
12
For solo mining with a single GTX 680, which will produce 120 Mhashes/s, you would expect to find one block approximately every 98 years.
At the current difficulty, solo mining is inadvisable under practically all circumstances. Pooled mining should be done instead.
Furthermore, mining utilizing graphics cards is rapidly losing viability with the release ...
11
Any CPU can still be used to mine Litecoin, although much less effectively as a modern AMD GPU could.
Mining with a CPU gives you very bad hashrate therefore I wouldn't recommend it.
Even a high end CPU will not give you the hashrate of a mid range GPU.
You should use a graphics card (GPU) to mine litecoins or switch to another coin
Additional Information:...
10
There are several options for Mining Bitcoins some of these are no longer profitable, but for the sake of being thorough here they are in order of efficiency lowest to highest:
Methods
CPU Mining (minerd)
GPU Mining (cgminer, bfgminer)
FPGA Mining (Custom software - https://github.com/fpgaminer/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner)
ASIC Mining (cgminer, bfgminer,...
7
Using the Bitcoinx calculator, I found that a $1,000 rig with a 300 W power draw would need to have 750 MHash/s just to break even on power at $0.20/kWh at the current difficulty (3,438,909), exchange rate (13.13), and block reward (25).
You'd never break even on the rig itself. Thus why GPU mining is on its way out.
For a more absurd example, I priced ...
7
It would not at all be useful for Bitcoin mining. However, it may be useful for other digital cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin or PPCoin.
6
Heavy usage will certainly decrease the lifetime, but I think it's not incredibly much as long as it's not overclocked. You will probably even buy a new card (because the current becomes too outdated/slow) before the current one breaks down.
Keep an eye on the temperature for a few hours (or as long as it's not stable/maxed out), it shouldn't exceed about ...
6
poclbm has not been set to alter the clock rate of your GPU. Windows media player is doing this when open and adjusts the system to what it requires.
If you specify clock speeds for your GPU via parameters or a separate application you can overcome this.
Theres a number of applications which effect clock rates on windows machines, flash player open within ...
6
It is likely that neither is profitable for you, because ASIC miners are alot more effective than any GPU mining, which in turn is alot faster than CPU mining. But don't take my word for it. This hardware comparison wiki is a good source to make an initial estimate. There is one entry listing the combination of an A10 and a HD7660G GPU, claiming to get 105 ...
5
They do indeed perform exactly the same
Crossfire is not encouraged as it gives no advantage and may impact your overall performance. The computation is done in parallel on each card so there is no need for them to communicate among each other.
5
After searching and searching I found these possiblites.
Use bitminter Java client in Version 1.1.2 http://bitminter.com/client/1.1.2/bitminter.jnlp (current version doesn't work)
Make your own miner which supports proxy
Use a tool like Proxifier (I have not tested it personally, because it is commercial)
5
With a decent enough GPU (or GPUs), your machine will be a fine miner. The only spec that ACTUALLY matters for mining is the GPU. RAM, CPU, etc don't have much of an impact.
5
For people reading through this in 2017+:
Times have changed and a lot of higher end cards are now far more power efficient. I'm mining ethereum with a 1070 FTW card and I get a solid hashrate around 25-26 Mh/S and my temperatures never break 65 degrees (C) even with an 100 Mhz memory overclock and 75Mhz GPU overclock.
As is common knowledge these days, ...
5
This is a question of efficiency regarding MH/s. Simply, I would like to know which is better
It doesn't matter. Every hash has an equal probability of finding a block. However, that being said, there's some hidden teeth:
Putting graphics cards together will make them harder to cool.
Putting them in multiple computers will use more electricity - all ...
5
CPU mining is DEAD. GPU mining is DEAD. Even FPGA mining is DEAD !
ASIC's ?
Yes them still can be profitable. But..... ONLY if you can get your ASIC cheap.
Here are the maximum prices you can pay for ASIC, and still have some hopes to get ROI in 3-4 month:
40+ GHs for 1BTC - if you get your machine TODAY
75+ GH/BTC - if ASIC delivered within 1 month
160+...
5
No, you can't. The days of GPU mining Bitcoins are long past.
4
If you are after bitcoins I wouldn't even spend time on CPU or GPU. It is now difficult with specialized hardware (butterfly labs, kncminer ... ). You can have a look at cloud mining (cexio) as well it is expensive and you have to have bitcoins already but you can buy and sell GH/s and you can actually make more from trading than mining.
4
This post from SmokesTooMuch seems to be the first time GPU mining was suggested:
Suggestion :
Since the coins are generated faster on fast machines, many people will want to use their GPU power to do this, too.
So, my suggestion is to implement a GPU-computing support using ATI Stream and Nvidia CUDA.
Here's satoshi in December 2009 asking for ...
4
Well, there are calculators for that.
In general, GPU uses a lot of power and at the current difficulty doesn't generate that much bitcoins. Even if you have a return of investment of 1 year, look at the current difficulty graph. It is rising rapidly. Also, note that the ASIC devices are still not out, the difficulty will increase a couple times that.
When ...
4
If you are mining bitcoins successfully, then don't worry about it.
There's no need to install the SDK. OpenCL drivers are included with AMD's Catalyst drivers.
Also note that solomining on a GPU could mean you never make a single coin. It may look like now that it will take a couple years, but by that time the difficulty is much higher. Unless you are ...
4
With the advent of ASICs, Bitcoin GPU mining is no longer profitable. I would recommend mining a Scrypt coin such as Dogecoin or Litecoin. (You can then trade it in for Bitcoin on an exchange, if you prefer.)
To answer your original question, yes, you can use one card for mining and the other for actually running the computer.
3
Mining on a GPU, especially on less powerful ones like the ones found in laptops is highly inefficient. You can find out exactly how much you can potentially earn or lose from various Bitcoin calculators, like mine for example.
If you are worried about overheating your laptop and just want to test what mining is all about, you could also lower your hashrate,...
3
No there is not. The ATI Catalyst driver implements OpenCL, which is what GPU miners use to accelerate the SHA256 hashing used in mining. The open source driver does not implement OpenCL. There are experimental projects that aim to implement OpenCL in the open source driver (Clover is an example) - as a Gallium3D state tracker - but so far these only run on ...
3
It is possible, but you really should first pause for a moment and consider a few things before proceeding further:
What graphics card will you buy - Go to this wiki page, look which graphics cards are good and then do a search for what you can find in stores. If you're looking for the most efficient mining cards, you might not find them, so you should take ...
3
According to the History page, puddinpop's CUDA miner was released September 18, 2010. The article also shows that the first public OpenCL miner was released on October 1, 2010.
http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History
Prior to there being publicly available software, the article shows July 18, 2010 as the date that the first block was mined by the first person ...
3
I have to say you did not research Bitcoin mining enough. Mining on a GPU is obsolete, reports say ASIC-based mining devices with x40 the performance have already started shipping.
3
First the bad news: your Motherboard appears not to have a PCI-E Slot, which is required to fit any modern GPU. On the other hand for the price of a single GPU you can order more than 1 ASIC miner with lower power consumption, i.e., cheaper to run, and more computational power.
I'd wait until the first ones actually ship, though.
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