Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I have been having significant trouble this.

Cpu AMD 630 athon II rev2
Ram 2gig 1,333Mhz DDR3
Mobo M4N98TD EVO nforce 980a
GPU ECS 450GTS 192 core @ 789mhz -  1024mb 3000mhz GDDR5

I am using GUIMiner v2011-07-01

I have been mining for 3 days now and have earned 0.02 BTC.
I am processing 35.x Mhash/s
Notice the . please, its not 350+, but 35 .x

I have been trying out some commands to try to boost production, to no avail.

WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=12

I found a post about working command line things, but the reference I used does not display how to set long/muliti commands [so I assumed space without ,]

Judging by the comparison guide (http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin-wiki/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison.html) for miners, you're right on track.

nVidia sucks balls for bitcoin.  Sell your GeForce and come to the Radeon side of things if you want to get the BTC!

I'm not sure, but I think some of those flags are for ATI/AMD video cards and not applicable for NVIDIA video cards.

They are cuda commands :P

I quit using ATI back in 02 or 01.

However, I would like to ask about quadro and tesla.  Are they better for these tasks then non-commercial grade graphics cards?

I'd be extremely surprised if they were. They have better floating point performance than consumer geforce cards, but integer performance should be about the same. Which makes them equally unsuitable for bitcoin hashing.

Boy, a lot has changed from 2001 to now. Hell, back then i'd be surprised if you even had a 500mhz cpu. Card prolly had less than 8mb of vram.

In 2001 I had a 450MHz CPU and an ATI Rage Pro card with 16MB RAM. In 2002 I upgraded the video card to a nVidia Geforce 4 TI 4200 with 128MB RAM.

I had two systems then,

Compaq Pesario
Intel pentium III first version @ 333Mhz
bigfoot 5.2 20gig HDD
256meg SD ram @ 100mhz[the big thing after EDO ram!]

a agp 4x 32meg ATI PRO video card :P

system had 512meg SD ram @ 66mhz
cyrax 686 @ 533mhz
with riva nvidia tnt-2 32meg agp-4x

The TNT won me over way-back-when :)

No. The Quadro are not much different from the normal cards, just have features targeted at graphics/CAD workstations enabled in software. While Tesla is a GPGPU design, its focus is on floating point ops and still missing the crucial integer instructions and performance for mining.

If you're serious about mining bitcoins, the AMD cards are the way to go.
I quit ATI back in their Rage days too, lousy drivers and such, went nVidia and didn't look back until the 4xxx series and the quality of the drivers at the point made the switch a pretty good decision so far. Especially with the hashrates I'm getting from my 5xxx's :D

Your speed is fine, 35 is what you get with your card.

My ATI 6950 make 315mhash/s without problems  8) A 6970 goes over 400mhash/s...

Nvidia just epic sucks at Bitcoin mining, despite all their "gpgpu cuda etc etc" marketing.


You speak about 2001? Wow, any chance you still use Windows 3.1 btw? We are in 2011, ten years passed since then...

And no, Quadro and Tesla aren't significantly faster.

Indeed, I am very serious about mining, and am looking at ATI cards that can produce 24x the mhash performance of my card!  According to the hardware comparision link that was posted - AMD/Radeon 5970 can produce roughly 700mhash/s!  I may purchase 2, however I think I will have trouble with my current motherboard [M4N98TD EVO has nforce n980 chipset].  I may get an equivielnt with crossfire chipset!

I still have windows 3.1 on small dedicated HDD, never use it though unless i need a good laugh.

Yeah, about that - good luck finding any 5970s anywhere. :)

(also, you don't need a crossfire chipset. Even though I seem to remember that many nforce chipsets are in fact crossfirex compatible)

I have found several retailers still selling them, one example:
http://www.upgradebay.com/c1_itemdetail.asp?rid=22&itemid=169148783 (http://www.upgradebay.com/c1_itemdetail.asp?rid=22&itemid=169148783)

Yeah, I meant at a reasonable price not almost $900.

Cross Fire not needed for mining with multiple GPU :D
So your old board should work just fine. They don't even need full 16x speed PCI-e slots, 1x would do just fine too although you might have problems fitting the card in without an adapter/extender.

Sweet, thanks alot that should help much, however what are extenders/adaptors to make it fit?

An extender/adapter has got a 1x (or 2x or whatever x) connector on one end so you can plug it into your motherboard's slot. On the other end, it's either an open end slot, or a full 16x slot so you can fit your graphics card into it.

This then allows you to use those shorter 1x/2x slots for mining purposes since mining does not require the kind of bandwidth actual graphics would.

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/PCI-E-PCI-Express-Cable-1X-16X-Riser-Card-2U-1U-/00/$(KGrHqMOKnIE3bd!Rwj7BN9kZ(kuNw~~_35.JPG

Using 2 of these on my open 1x slots, and my 2x 16x slots, means I can have up to 4 GPU's on this machine?

In theory yes, but some motherboards don't allow all of the slots to be used at once. Check your manual (sometimes slots share bandwidth)

I did some teaking, now its reporting im processing 20Ghash??  is this a mis-report?  holding at just over 20Ghash!  Thats a huge jump from 34.4MH is it not?!

Whatever you do, do NOT divide by zero!! :)

I adjusted my GPU clock from 789MHZ, now running at 1,102Mhz [ram downclocked to 381mhz from 1800mhz]

My GPU is running colder now @ 1102Mhz, then 789Mhz!? maybe im going batsh^t

http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j168/ex_core/ghash.jpg

from 35.5Mhash to 21.3Ghash?  With just 1 GTS 450 @ 1102Mhz?

Lol, nice bug you found

Of course it's a wrong number! I wonder what you did to have it anyway lol

Do the number change?

I increased my GPU rate from 783mhz to 1,102mhz
BUT
what changed my speed reading is - drop memory Mhz to 425mhz from 1800+mhz

Dropping the memory Mhz also seems to affect the shares in a VERY negative way... [but that could be a mis-report aswell?]

my estimated rewards is dropping too =S

Nope, I've noticed it on nVidia cards as well. You can't decrease memory clock as you can on radeons - it impacts hash rate dramatically.

The reason ati's are faster for this specific mining work is that mining uses the SHA instructions (I think that's what it's called).

Pretty much it boils down to the nvidia card have to run a set of instructions (like say 4), where as the ati card can do it in 1 instruction.

So no matter what, until nvidia adopts openCL or gets some similiar instructions, they are going to suck balls at this.

I would waste my money on 5970's. Pick up used 5870's for 200 apiece and use the leftover money to get a dedicated rig. Apparently with the new drivers you can run more than 4 cards in windows, so just get a board with a lot of slots and go to town...

Run it for 5 minutes than see how many shares is accepted according to your pool's webpage ;)

nVidia has openCL but their hardware is lacking the 32 bit right rotation instruction, so they take 3 instructions to emulate.