Bitcoin Forum

My old pc has NVIDIA GeForce 210 and Windows 10 64 bit.

I installed:

Visual Studio Express Community Edition 2017
Visual C++ redistributable package 2017
CUDA toolkit (of what could be installed, I didn't have visual something or other installed, so I couldn't install a few features)

I got the latest version of ethminer zip and made a batchfile with the prompt -U -F miningpool/mywallet. . . but it said "ethminer has stopped working" Tried the -G switch too, same thing.

I tried to see if Claymore would be any different. . . and I made a batchfile for it, but it said it couldn't detect CUDA or NVIDIA GPU

I get that my video card sux, but MY GAWD CAN THESE PROGRAMS EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE ITS EXISTENCE?? It has like 2gb.

I just want to learn how to mine and get my feet wet. I know i won't be pulling in a lot of coins, but I really just want to get the process done successfully so I know what to do when I decide to invest in a more expensive setup... PLs just give me a chance :(.

I got the latest version of DDU and wiped the NVIDIA drivers and then did a fresh install of the latest driver -- still no dice for both ethminer or claymore.

Pls help :(

To learn mining, you should have the actual equipment. Many existing algorithms do not support your GPU. It seems to me that 2GB is only available for cryptonight algorithm. Maybe you need to find a site similar nicehash which will automatically test your equipment. But I don't know of such sites.

Can cryptonight mine eth and etc? :)

Haha I got the same Geforce 210 in my PC. Actually that PC is for my work, but even if it's not the case, I dont think it could mine or worth to mine any coin.

yeah. . . u know. it's not about profiting. It's just that I want to set up the software so I understand how to do it successfully. I'm not going to buy a $700 gfx card if I don't know if I'm even capable of setting it up right. . .

This is supposed to be a test run.

Mine on such old equipment does not make sense, the price of electricity will be more expensive than income

The GeForce 210 card won't do anything really.... you're wasting your time. Monero mining might be the only one to work (and wouldn't be really profitable)
the setup itself is straightforward, just get a GTX 1060 or RX 570, setup the drivers, and run the miner
nanopool.org's help section gives you links to download the mining software and sample configs if you want to start there...

What is your CPU model? There are some coins that can be mined with CPU. For instance Credits, Yenten, Aeon, Intense coin and Monero. But even for CPU mining you would need not too old CPU. AVX instructions help when CPU mining.

But as other already told you buying some modern GPUs would work.

You need a card with 3gb RAM or more to mine ETH/ETC

Are you guys all trying to say that ethminer and claymore won't work with my card? Or are you just saying it's not profitable?

Again, I don't care about the profit. I just want it to work so I can say I can successfully setup mining. It has nothing to do with profit.

I just need a clear answer on this. . .

shouldnt you probly google for this information bro?

Of course you can...my 6 year old daughter did it, its not complicated

It is impossible to mine ETH with your equipment. With my Geforce GTX 1080, i would be able to mine 1.4 ETH in one year with the current difficulty. But as every day/hour the difficulty is increasing, i think it would be more like 1 ETH. I stopped mining ETH as it was becoming too difficult and not so profitable. Try to mine other coins. Maybe you can mine ETN or Sumokoin? You won't get a lot but it should be mineable i think.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but in my original post I specified the painstaking steps I went through. I literally went through a whole afternoon and night installing/uninstalling/reading wiki.

I installed all those components, but ethminer and claymore were still not working.

shouldn't you read the thread your posting in bro?

seriously wiki? that's all you've looked at, you need to do more research and ill tell you why. if you do more research youll find out your current hardware WILL NOT WORK, its too old and even if it would work it wouldn't make you squat. so only thing that's left for you to do is DO MORE RESEARCH and get better hardware.

Not been sarcastic, I just bought her a proper card...what I wanted to say, you lost enough time that if you instead did something
to earn money instead, you could buy proper card already...didn't even have to spend that much, $100 for used RX560 4GB
that she can play Sims 3 when not mining

I just started mining a week ago so I am probably a bit more sympathetic to the OP here.

The short answer is that a GeForce 210 is way too weak to run anything. My old Win 7 PC has a GTX 460 and none of the mining software I've tried will run on it, either, and it is technically a bit more powerful. EDIT - LOL... my old 460 is about 15x more powerful...

My newer Win 10 PC has a GTX 1050 Ti which seems to be about the lowest graphics card that can run any of the major mining algorithms as it is both modern and has 4GB, though not necessarily at a speed that is worth the bother. However, because it isn't terribly desirable for mining you can still get them for a reasonable price; a new one is about 150-160USD while a used one just popped up (and sold) on OfferUp for 130USD.

Personally, I wouldn't buy any [edit] used card that is or was popular for mining because it will: A) be way overpriced; B) have been ridden hard and hung up wet... ie, abused from being used in a mining rig, even if the seller claims otherwise.

think about what you're asking, nobody runs the hardware you're using, you want people to do research for you(lazy) so you can setup some old POS you have laying around (lazy) and it wont even make any profit(waste of everyones time)
how about you get serious dude, mining isnt free, every setup will be different, buy a modern gpu for under 100$, google what to get and how to do it and stop expecting to be spoonfed

16 CUDA cores on that card - even if you COULD find software to work with it, most recent CPUS are more powerful.

to be clear ethminer and claymore will NOT work on a card with less than 3G VRAM. It has to do with the DAG size.
again not judging just trying to give you clear info, don't try to mine ETH with your hardware

Some crypto algorithms require less video memory to solve than others, but if an algo requires too little memory (e.g. - Bitcoin) then it is open to solving with custom-designed chips (ASICs) and GPUs are left in the dust at that point.

You can see how much video memory is required for some of the more popular Ethash* based coins here:

https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size (https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size)

Note that running Windows at the same time as mining - especially to play videos (e.g. - YouTube) - will require some video memory as well. During my brief test of Ethereum mining, MSI Afterburner (an overclocking and GPU monitoring utility) reported I was using just under 3GB on my 4GB GTX 1050 Ti, of which ~2.2GB was for Ethereum (the so-called "DAG file"). This means a 3GB GTX 1060 will be unable to mine Ethereum any day now (if not already)

However, when mining Ubiq I was using right around 2GB, so a 3GB card would have plenty of life left in it. Also, there are other coins which don't use a massive DAG file but which are still somewhat to fully resistant to ASIC attack, such as those that use the Equihash algorithm like Zcash, Zencash, Bitcoin Gold, Hush, etc. I am mining Zcash right now and MSI Afterburner is reporting around 993MB of video memory in use (once again, with some of that consumed by Windows).

However, with just 16 CUDA cores and 512MB of memory, I don't a GeForce 210 will be able to mine *anything*, even if booting into Linux or some other O/S that doesn't use a GUI.



* - Ethash is the name of the algorithm for mining (ie - solving) Ethereum and it is used for several other coins such as Ubiq, Expanse, Musicoin, etc.

Not being funny, cos I'm sure we've all been there at one point or another, but if you had spent £150-200 on a secondhand rx470 you would probably be up and running by now. Cost benefit analysis is something rarely mentioned on here, but kinda important unless you have infinite time to waste. Either splash out on the necessary minimum hardware to mine ETH, or try Cryptonight.

What you think if pc have gpu geforce 210, what cpu installed on it ?  I dont think what installed high end core i10 there ))
Its officework pc.
TS you can only collect expirience in starting mining software and creating bat files

For reference - the GTX 750 ti is currently considered to be a BOTTOM LEVEL mining card.
It has 640 CUDA cores, and also clocks quite a bit higher than your GT 210.

 750 ti on Monero is good for around 250 hash/s - even IF your GT 210 worked at all, it might manage 6 or so, which is LESS than the IGPU on my A10 APUs manage.

 By current standards, that isn't even an entry-level card - INTEL on-CPU graphics is more powerful, much less AMD iGPUs.