Cryptocoin Mining?

[geokilla]

My friends are asking me this:

How does mining work? Like what is my GPU looking for? What is the source of all this GPU power? What is it used for? The only answer I could give was "Here's the source of DOGE" and "Coins are created out of thin air out of a perceived market value where we are the ones in charging of "printing the money" by using our GPUs."

 

[Binky]

My friends are asking me this:

How does mining work? Like what is my GPU looking for? What is the source of all this GPU power? What is it used for? The only answer I could give was "Here's the source of DOGE" and "Coins are created out of thin air out of a perceived market value where we are the ones in charging of "printing the money" by using our GPUs."

Simplified bitcoin explanation. I'm sure mining is in there somewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE&desktop_uri=/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE&app=desktop

 

[wbynum]

Sapphire 270's BF4 edition on Newegg for $200 shipped currently.

 

[KlokWyze]

In case anybody cares, here is a follow up to the primecoin miner issue I mentioned beforehand:

I have now narrowed down the issue to the fact that primecoin miner decreases the hashrate performance of any card (in this case 7970) mining on two threads (-g 2).

I put my 7970 in my other PC with the 7950 and Haswell i7. Leaving primecoin miner running, I get the same performance hit I was getting on my sandy bridge build.

I have reconfigured my 7970 to run on 1 thread and I have OCed my card pretty much close to its limit in order to keep my hashrate comparable to what I was getting with 2 threads.

I am using:
--thread-concurrency 40960 -g 1 -I 20
1050/1600 @ stock voltage getting 610kH/s with the display running from the 7970. Beforehand, I was running the typical 8192 TC, -g 2 and -I 13 @ 975/1575. I would get 660 when I was AFK, and around 600-620 when I was using the PC.

I do. Thanks for your previous posts. I even have a 7870, but it's on an AMD system.

Sapphire 270's BF4 edition on Newegg for $200 shipped currently.

Hashrates on those are quite low. Maybe they have a good power --> hash ratio? I'd still imagine now isn't a good time to invest in scrypt miners. Even SCRYPT-ASICs may be no good.

 

[wbynum]

Side note: For anyone bringing up dedicated miners you should try out SMOS or BAMT if you haven't. They are linux distros with all the software ready to go. I have used SMOS for my two headless 7870 builds. Basically just flash to a usb drive and boot from it. SMOS is just a tweaked version of BAMT. One note with SMOS, by default the image starts mining with a pre-configured LTC pool account. Kind of sneaky.

Another sneaky thing with SMOS I found while reading the btc forums. There is a forced "donation" fee in the release. At 3 am each morning a cron job kills the current miners and switches over to mining for 15 minutes with a cgminer config that mines under the creator's pool accounts. Then after 15 minutes the miners are restarted with the user's normal config.

I don't mind donating 1% of my hashes to the author but the fact that this fee (that's what is really is, not a donation) is masked under a donate link on the author's website and is not even mentioned in the author's thread at litecointalk.org is a little under handed. To turn the fee off just comment out a couple lines in the root crontab:

root@smos-1:/home# crontab -l
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

[b]# 55 2 * * * /home/.update.sh
# 0 3 * * * /home/.script.sh[/b]
*/1 * * * * /home/.uptime.sh > /home/.time.txt

For now I have commented it out on my boxes. Maybe I will feel more generous later on, especially if the author decides to be more forth coming about the fee.

 

[wand3r3r]

My older cards would choke on I 20 but my 290x's seem to handle it with ease.

It's not just a straight answer, although I suspect the new cards are more likely to handle it based on my small sample.

 

[MTDEW]

I'm making like 100 doge on each block we solve on our pool (fluctuate but averages to 100)

What pool?

 

[T_Yamamoto]

What pool?

dogechain.info

 

[wand3r3r]

dogechain.info

What hashrate?

 

[Attic]

Another sneaky thing with SMOS I found while reading the btc forums. There is a forced "donation" fee in the release. At 3 am each morning a cron job kills the current miners and switches over to mining for 15 minutes with a cgminer config that mines under the creator's pool accounts. Then after 15 minutes the miners are restarted with the user's normal config.

I don't mind donating 1% of my hashes to the author but the fact that this fee (that's what is really is, not a donation) is masked under a donate link on the author's website and is not even mentioned in the author's thread at litecointalk.org is a little under handed. To turn the fee off just comment out a couple lines in the root crontab:

root@smos-1:/home# crontab -l
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

[b]# 55 2 * * * /home/.update.sh
# 0 3 * * * /home/.script.sh[/b]
*/1 * * * * /home/.uptime.sh > /home/.time.txt

For now I have commented it out on my boxes. Maybe I will feel more generous later on, especially if the author decides to be more forth coming about the fee.

Yea, it's a fee. Avoiding providing information about the fee that will be taken when using the OS on the main page is a no no to me. Sticking the fee info under a different page of his website and listing that info under donation is underhanded. That turned me off bigtime too along with the fact that this fee is taken in another hidden manner by having miners switch to another pool deep in the heart of night. What else has the creator done?

If the *fee* were listed in the general information along with the other important info regarding the OS I would be more likely to give it a shot.

 

[geokilla]

CAT needs some hash rates for pump and dump. Come on guys! Pump it then dump it!

 

[T_Yamamoto]

What hashrate?

I'm at 220-250

Pool is currently 2.81ghs

 

[SunnyD]

Another sneaky thing with SMOS I found while reading the btc forums. There is a forced "donation" fee in the release. At 3 am each morning a cron job kills the current miners and switches over to mining for 15 minutes with a cgminer config that mines under the creator's pool accounts. Then after 15 minutes the miners are restarted with the user's normal config.

I don't mind donating 1% of my hashes to the author but the fact that this fee (that's what is really is, not a donation) is masked under a donate link on the author's website and is not even mentioned in the author's thread at litecointalk.org is a little under handed. To turn the fee off just comment out a couple lines in the root crontab:

root@smos-1:/home# crontab -l
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

[b]# 55 2 * * * /home/.update.sh
# 0 3 * * * /home/.script.sh[/b]
*/1 * * * * /home/.uptime.sh > /home/.time.txt

For now I have commented it out on my boxes. Maybe I will feel more generous later on, especially if the author decides to be more forth coming about the fee.

Just use BAMT then. It's what SMOS ripped off and called their own after all.

 

[nwo]

Hashrates on those are quite low. Maybe they have a good power --> hash ratio? I'd still imagine now isn't a good time to invest in scrypt miners. Even SCRYPT-ASICs may be no good.

They get pretty decent hashrate and have fairly low power consumption, so you could say they are the most efficient and highest performing single 6 pin power connector cards. When OCed, they can easily get past 450 and up to 470kH/s. Which is still kind of overpriced at $200 but considering you get similar hashrates from a $200 used 6970 which uses twice the power, it's clear that the 270 is a much better choice.

 

[Binky]

Sapphire 270's BF4 edition on Newegg for $200 shipped currently.

Still pricey for what is basically a 7870. The BF4 coupon can be sold pretty easily for $15-$25. I recently sold one on the bitcointalk forums for BTC.

 

[geokilla]

There might be a 3 way fork for Catcoin. Different pools are on different blocks. ROFL dumping this ASAP.

 

[Torn Mind]

There might be a 3 way fork for Catcoin. Different pools are on different blocks. ROFL dumping this ASAP.

Lol, you never should have stuck with that garbage coin. I took your advice when they did their first fork and got burned with poolerino because they caused a fork too. So, I went back to the more reliable Doge and now to Kitteh.

 

[wbynum]

Still pricey for what is basically a 7870. The BF4 coupon can be sold pretty easily for $15-$25. I recently sold one on the bitcointalk forums for BTC.

What card is a better price/performance ratio than a 270 that turns out to be around $180 after selling the BF code?

 

[nwo]

What card is a better price/performance ratio than a 270 that turns out to be around $180 after selling the BF code?

Well... there was a $150-30MIR=$120 7850, the reviews claim 400kH/s but from my experience with the 1GB version, they can easily go up to 360-370 which is roughly 100kH/s less than the $50-80 more expensive 270.

I wonder if flashing a 7870 to a 270 BIOS would bump up the hashrate on the 7870 since they have the same core, but the 7870 is not capable of pushing much higher than 400 on stock VBIOS.

 

[Torn Mind]

I seriously doubt a 7850 can hit 400 Khashes/s without pushing clocks really high, which increases the risk of hardware errors.

 

[Kosmic1]

Hey guys, I have a problem that I haven't been able to find an answer to by searching. I have two 280x (sapphire vapor-x) that I mine with. One card mines 24/7, and the other one powers my desktop while I work and mines at night.

Both cards when mining on their own get a higher has rate than when they are both mining at the same time, even the lower card that stays pretty cool while mining.

For example, my 24/7 miner right now is doing ~708kh/s but when mining in tandem with the desktop card, it drops to around 685-690.

Here is what I am using for my two card .bat file:
-g 2 -w 256,256 -I 13,13 --lookup-gap 2,2 --thread-concurrency 8192,8192 --gpu-engine 1020,1020 --gpu-memclock 1500,1500 --gpu-fan 65,52

When I am mining with just the second GPU, this is the config I use:
-g 2 -w 256 -I 13 --lookup-gap 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 --gpu-engine 1020 --gpu-memclock 1500 --device 1 --gpu-fan 27,50

I have experimented with using two settings for each card vs one for each and it doesn't seem to make any difference, they always hash lower when both are mining at the same time.

I'm running a 1000 watt Seasonic power supply on a z87 / 4670k setup with 16 gigs of ram (4x4) so I should have plenty of PSU power to spare. Temps on card 2 (lower down) never go above 70, and the upper card with higher fan speeds stays around 74c (although the stupid bios starts to throttle the card at 74-75c, but I'll be putting a Kraken on it soon to take care of that.)

Anyhow, can anyone suggest some things to try and get both cards hashing at max speed when both are mining?

Thanks,
Kos

 

[nwo]

Kosmic1, I have a similar issue with my rig that has a 7970 and 7950.

My 7950 gets 660-670 on its own, but when I start up the 7970 then the hashrate of my 7950 goes down to 630 even though I am not using the 7950 for anything (display is plugged into 7970).

Would be nice to find a solution...

edit: To add onto the Intensity debate, here are some more recent results:

my 7950 @ I20 gets ~8% reject rate... my 7970 @ I20 (weird, I know) gets only a 2% reject rate...

HW is 0 on both cards btw. And all my cards are currently pointed towards fast-pool doge.

 

[geokilla]

Lol, you never should have stuck with that garbage coin. I took your advice when they did their first fork and got burned with poolerino because they caused a fork too. So, I went back to the more reliable Doge and now to Kitteh.

I know what you mean. I'm just waiting for it to transfer to CoinedUp so I can dump it. But at least there's no three way fork or anything. Coinium was lagging apparently.

At least that was the plan. If there's no problem, maybe I'll continue to take the risk..

 

[Attic]

Sapphire 270's BF4 edition on Newegg for $200 shipped currently.

I've been having more common issues with Newegg lately, ranging from account hack to shipping issues to delays on getting in stock items to ship carriers. Their CS has been 95% of the time awesome though. I'm shopping elsewhere when possible though now.

The sapphire 270 non x is the third different brand 270 i've used and by far my least favorite. I've used MSI 270, and Asus 270, both of which have better cooling and the MSI substantially so. The sapphire also was the cheapest packaged card, lack of plastic plugs over video outputs and smaller box which goes with the skimpy feel of the card. It hashes fine, but requires the most volts (1.075)of any of my 10 270's to get 430 kh/s at 1000c/1500m. I'll defiantly be buying more R9 270 GPU's to mine and the Sapphire is one id recommend passing on.

But at $200 it is cheap relative to what the other R9's are going for.

 

[nwo]

Hey Attic, I had really good luck with my HiS 270 (cheapest/slowest stock clock model). I was able to get it up to 450 stable, max was around 470 but it seems like it lacked power to stay stable at that hashrate since the clocks were extremely high.

It also ran extremely cool when OCed and overvolted, especially considering it was the top card in my PC case....

I'd recommend you give Gigabyte a shot if the price is right. They use two 6 pin power connectors on their cards which should translate into higher overclocks.