Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new at this whole Bitcoin mining thing and after watching it and following it for a couple months I decided to give it a go! I got my laptop mining but I'm only hitting 4.4 mhash/s which I know sucks and is relatively slow. SO I dug out my old desktop which has an nvidia geforce 6100 nforce 405 which again, I know sucks (and is too old to mine with!)

Anyways, the motherboard I have is an Asus M2N8-VMX with dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800. Is my motherboard too old to support any of graphics cards that are useful for mining??

Technically the board should be fine, as the data-rate back and forth is minimal, its just the GPU doing a lot of crushing by itself. I would recommend Linux though as it takes a lot less resources to run than for example windows 7 (the amount of RAM might become an issue, windows 7 loves 4gb or more, your average netinstall of *nix takes 500mb at most)

Here you got a calculator to calculate hashrate to BTC (with a bunch of other stuff) http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

Note though, that it looks like that today the difficulty is going up again... :( so less BTC per MH/s

Ahh I see! Ok, so what graphics card would you recommend that will work with my current rig? Or do you think I should get a new board to support a more powerful GPU?

I suggest you go reading across the forums, and find out why the prices of the BTC went through the roof, together with the Hashrate of mining. That should give you a good perspective on where to put your investment.

Ok thank you for your advice! Also, do you know where I can find out what graphics cards will work with my motherboard?

Technically any should do, though I suggest you look more in depth into the mining/mining hardware sub-forum and the wiki (http://en.bitcoin.it) onto which GPU would be best suited for your system. (power supply capability comes to mind for one ;) )

Go for ATI cards as they are much faster. You can check performance/price here

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Ahh I was under the impression that due to it being an old motherboard I would be severely restricted as to what graphics cards would work with it!

Not necessarily (read some weird stuff about people putting GPU's in PCIe x1 slots with risers...) but go research it and find out ;-) because if they can put them in x1 slots, you won't have any issues with your PCIe x16 1.0 slot. (latest version of PCIe is 3.0)

Ok I think I'm getting the hang of this! Sorry to be a n00b but what the hell is a riser?! haha!

Sorry, just realised what a riser is! Ok so with my current mother board I can only use graphics cards that are PCIe x 16 1.0 correct?

start digging in the mining sub-forums. I haven't done the research since my pc is the latest of the latest and I'm still dubbing what my future project is going to be... From what I understood, you should be able to dump one of the latest AMD cards into your mobo without issues. But once again, I did not do the proper research to confirm this, I just came across something and took a glimpse.

So once again do the research, the data is there in the forums, you just have to look for it. (being able to use a PCIe gen3 (3.0) would give great benifits, as they are a lot more powerful and cheaper. Since PCIe gen1 is so old, only cards you'll find is second hand, and then still, they just won't have that much GPU power, since they are 5+ years old)

Ok buddy, cheers for that. Looks like I'll be purchasing a new mobo so that I can reap the benefits of PCIe 3.0. Thanks everyone!!

Any more advice please do post :)

You're welcome.

Was kinda curious though about the PCIe x1 with the risers, as they have less bandwidth then a PCIe gen1 x16 slot... And I've seen people with 8 GPU's in one system... and I still haven't found a motherboard with 8 x16 slots... But getting a new mobo is most likely indeed the safer route.

Ideally I want to keep the cost (£) as low as possible as I would like to try this out as an experiment first just to see what the potential is. Also I am a bit concerned about these "ASIC" rigs which have stupidly high ROI. Im guessing once these are in the system the difficulty level is going to shoot up and push everyone out?

You connect them by USB :) But yes once these really hit the market, desktop GPU mining is most likely over for Bitcoin :( hence don't invest too much into GPU's. The only real recommendation I can give atm is, keep following the forums, the exchanges, the irc and everything around it. As many people are currently saying... I'm too late... and I'm not so sure about that, prices might go down (a lot) but at the end of the line... A max amount of money, thus incapable of real inflation (more money getting printed), will eventually rise until its value is the same as printed money. (and there are what, 1.1 trillion US dollars in circulation...)

I have been looking into Litecoin as well which I'm told I can easily switch over to and if I have worked this out correctly, if I was to spend £200 on equipment for a 600 mhash/s machine, my ROI would be 1 month, after that I can re-invest what I make from Litecoin back into the rig to improve it as much as I need to :)

Owh and as far as it goes to running a new graphics card on that old motherboard, works fine according to this gentlemen who was so kind to register for it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg1750290#msg1750290

My advice would be just to buy some coin rather then try to mine - I think it's a better value at this point

MB should be fine

Thanks for all the advice here, even if it wasn't aimed at me originally :)

Cheers for all the info posted guys. I will try a PCIe 3.0 on my PCIe 1.0 slot and let you know what happens :)

and no one metions or asks what power supply he has, shame on you all if the card is to powerful youll need to buy a new power supply

You are absolutely correct!! I looked into 1000 watt PSU, god damn they are expensive!!! Looks like this project will take a back seat whilst I save cash and to be honest, by the time I get round to actually mining the difficulty will be so high it wont be worth it :(

Donations are welcomed though :D

BTC address; 17ATLnHXW2VkNL6wonaqNV8D2SVoffHjRp
LTC address; LSPs36FjwcBjZk5Hp2Q8TSZMURLtmS96kb