57
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 ...
14
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
OpenCL is not supported on 3xxx series cards. Although it's not completely impossible to mine on a card that old it will be very difficult. Also, a card that old will produce less than 1 MH/s which will only be fractions of bitcoins. I wouldn't waste my time fighting the Radeon 3600.
If you are serious about mining check out the 5xxx and 7xxx series ...
3
You can actually pick up a PCI to PCI-E 1x (open end) adapter and plug in any video card you want. Then use a PCI-E 1x to 16x adapter. This is an example, but there are cheaper ones out there.
http://www.quill.com/startech-pci-cards/cbs/352874.html?cm_mmc=SEM_PLA_T_352874
3
I think I figured out my own issue here. I reset the SMC on the macbook (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964) and my GPU performance is back to normal.
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.
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
Bitcoin mining is essentially just the repeated calculation of sha256 checksums. Given that sha256 is a fairly simple algorithm that uses only basic integer calculations absolutely any processor core should be capable of churning out sha256 checksums very quickly and any added complexity beyond the basic instructions required for sha256 is wasted. To that ...
3
CPU is virtually useless for scrypt based coins like litecoin, stick to GPUs, for now.
Here is a comparison of the top GPUs you can buy for mining, with user submitted settings.
http://coinpolice.com/gpu/
3
Your intensity is very low (I:8) - dynamic intensity does not work well with scrypt. You will need to increase it manually. You can set a value to use when starting the program by adding --intensity 13 to your command line options/batch file. Replace the number 13 with the desired intensity. For a HD6850, I suggest you try values from 10 to 15.
If ...
3
I am using a slightly overclocked AMD 6850 and get around 270kh/s.
When running cgminer you need to set two environment variables. In windows I use a batch file with the following:
TIMEOUT 10
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer
Timeout is just there so it waits 10 seconds to make sure MSI Afterburner has overclocked the ...
3
The following program will show you the OpenCL-capable devices on a given Macintosh:
// clang -framework OpenCL dumpcl.c -o dumpcl && ./dumpcl
# include <stdio.h>
# include <stdlib.h>
# include <OpenCL/opencl.h>
int main(int argc, char* const argv[]) {
cl_uint num_devices, i;
clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, 0, ...
3
You can use your GPU to mine, but it is going to mostly be a waste of time and energy now that there is specialized hardware (ASICs) to mine.
You need a piece of software that will allow you to mine with your GPU. The miner built into Bitcoin Core is only for CPU mining.
Check out this page on the wiki. The exact software you choose will depend on a number ...
3
Bitcoin, as the answers imply, is long out of the reach of home miners, however other coins can use all your hardware, e.g. Gridcoin (GRC).
Gridcoin rewards work done on the BOINC platform which is a distributed super-computer. This clearly needs peers with general purpose computing resources, not ASICs which can only perform one task.
Anyone can make a ...
3
No, neither CPUs nor GPUs of any kind are of the slightest use in Bitcoin mining. This has been the case for several years, since the introduction of ASIC miners which are now many orders of magnitude more efficient.
See In the ASIC-age, is it worth starting mining Bitcoin at home?
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