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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 ...
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
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,...
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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:...
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
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
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
No, you can't. The days of GPU mining Bitcoins are long past.
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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
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.
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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.
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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
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
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
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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Reading this in 2017 with a chuckle. The Pi is pretty much the defacto controller due to its low cost and energy use. I have one running an ASIC over USB with cgminer, compiled on the Pi.
Some of Bitmain's Antminers use Beaglebone Blacks (TI?), I'm not sure why. I'm in a Debian ARM mailing list and there are more little ARM machines than I can count. ...
2
The -gpu=X command line is telling it which of your CUDA devices it should use, not how many it should use. Like most things written by programmers, the index starts at zero. If you have two video cards, run it once at the command line with -gpu=0 and then a second time again with -gpu=1. Once you work out your ideal fine tuning on aggression, gpugrid and ...
2
So if you make 0.000000485032112 bitcoin per minute, and let's say 1 bitcoin is $1000. So your making $0.000485032112 per min, or $0.02910192672 per hour or ~$0.69 per day, but the power costs of running the PC don't make it worthwhile.
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You will never mine your own block while in a pool. The owner of the pool owns all the blocks mined. Your best bet is to buy some ASIC (butterfly labs?) box and let it roll. You could get lucky.
Two years ago I solo'ed with a Raedon card and got luck after about 4 months.
I think with such a tiny amount of hashing power even being in a pool is not worth ...
2
That generation of Intel integrated graphics does not have OpenCL support, which is needed for mining.
2
Bitcoin mining with either CPU or GPU looses money on account of the amount you spend on power is greater then your expected returns. GPU mining is still profitable for mining some alt-coins such as litecoin but likewise CPU mining losses money in these instances as well.
So if your interested in getting started mining, I would recommend GPU mining either ...
2
No. A GPU will almost certainly always be faster than a CPU for Litecoin mining.
See the Litecoin Mining Hardware Comparison chart.
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