Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

My old PC ist collecting dust, so I thought about using it to mine some Monero

It's an Core 2 Quad, 6GB Ram, GTX 280

So I checked NVidia: https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-280/specifications and saw tht the card is CUDA compatible.
After some looking around I found this: https://miner.pizza/benchmarks/gpu (search for gtx 280)
MSI GTX 280 TWIN FROZRIII    1 GB DDR3    290    250 W    CCMINER 2.0 X64 (APRIL 2017)    WINDOWS 7 x64

So I did a fresh win 7 x64 (SP1) install and downloaded the latest drivers from nvidia (342.01 WHQL, Date: 2016.12.14 )
From the CUDA archive https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-75-downloads-archive I downloaded and installed CUDA 7.5

From https://github.com/tpruvot/ccminer/releases I downloaded "ccminer-2.0-rc3-cuda-7.5.7z"

Well ccminer tells me, that my Computer is not CUDA 7.5 compatible, which I highly doubt.

After this fail I tried also newer ccminers and Cudas, but all failed. The only Version of ccminer I got working is th very old one from MinerGate. It did show incredible Hash Rates of over 40000/s, but the Miner did not pop up in the List of my pools interface (I did not use it to mine at the MG pool!). So I guess it's doing while (1) {}

Does anyone have an idea why it won't mine on my good old gtx 280? Could it be because I had an GT 710 installed while setting up Win 7 (I forgot to remove it from the PC..) and it installed a very new driver (390.something), which did not work with the GTX 280. I removed the GT 710 and deinstalled the driver, before I installed the latest gtx 280 driver (v342)

OK - reply to myself.

I reinstalled Win 7 from scratch and just installed the lastest driver (342) for the GTX 285.

I got only one ccminer running - the one with CUDA 6.5. OK - I would not call it running - It finds the GTX 285, but tells me that it has 0MB memory installed. After some more diggin I found out that this card can only do compute 1.3 and it's not shown in any compatibility list.

So my guess is: The card is CUDA capable, but does not have the instruction sets to do the cryptonight algorithm?  Or am I completely wrong with this assumption?

I have found on other forum that users had similar problem like your. They say that problem is in drivers for GPU. Try installing pre-340.xx drivers, if that doesn't work try something like 322.xx . Hope this helps.

I tried monero mining.  I have low configuration laptop, have not good experience, PC got heated and sounding harsh..is it worth mining monero with low conf. laptop???

Here you go.

https://www.cryptoinfomag.com/2018/01/06/mining-using-notebooks/

Huh? The GTX 280 was the 2nd powerful graphics adapter of the 200 series. The 290 is the best, but at the time I bought it way too expensive.

Since it needs 250W at full throttle it needs 2 PCI-E power connectors and a rather good power supply.

You can actually play GTA V on that card ;)

http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/54/2009/03/10270-img8360s-1.jpg

I know - that if it would work, it needs way to much power, but I still wonder how the performance of this thing would be...
Maybe I have to try this with a Linux and compile xmr-stak forcing it to use OpenCL 1.3 ...

something like: cmake . -DCUDA_ENABLE=OFF -DXMR-STAK_COMPILE=generic

but install Linux just to try and error - uff ;)


PS: the pre-340.xx drivers were a no-go. If the driver is too old the card is not found at all.

Honestly I would not recommend mining with any kind of laptop. They are not built for something like that, and in most cases it would lead to overheating.
You can calculate if its profitable to mine with your laptop, you can go to WhatToMine (https://whattomine.com/) or Coinwarz (https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency) and calculate it.

Try W10, you dont need to activate it to mine.

Xmrig or xmr-stak is recommended...

Get support here:
http://supportxmr.chatango.com/