Bitcoin Forum

Hey all & merry xmas,

Newbie here..
Is GPU power the single most important factor in mining for BTC? is CPU, MOBO or RAM factors to consider when setting up a mining rig?

MineAware

Forget GPU, no way to make a profit without ASICs.

But for your questions, the mainboard, ram and cpu need to transfer the data, so if you would use some 1990s tech you might get a bottleneck somewhere there. If you dont use ancient tech you should be fine.

If you want to mine with GPU, its better chose to mine some scrypt coins, because you wouldn't get any money mining BTC with GPU.

And yes, the GPU is the most important factor, however there are some minimal requirements as well, which depends on how many cards you want to run.
Make sure you have enough PCI-e slot on your MB, and for a 4card setup you would need 4GB of RAM as well under ubuntu.
Don't be cheap on PSU.

Thanks all for our prompt responses.

I have a 1000W  PSU and GTX 560 Ti card.. 90Mh/s
 
Looking to acquire BTC mining equipment and review setup trade off's.

Especially with 2-3Th/s equipment arriving in 2014

Any thoughts...

http://www.wheretomine.com/
It's best you check this daily. Cause what;s profitable today won't be tomorrow.
You have to take into account the herd factor , once some coin is profitable people start mining it , more hashrate , your part is getting smaller , move to the next coin.

nVidia graphics card too low for mining, use ATI/AMD Radeon.

Well, the Nvidia cards are not really made for mining, better to use Radeon HD7950 HD7970 or R9 280x.
About the PSU, you need 1250W for 4card setup of 7950s, one like Corsair, LEPA, Seasonic ..

Try this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.0 and point it to middlecoin or multipool

I am pretty new to this as well and really appreciate the great tips here, such as solid ASICs, and sites such as http://www.wheretomine.com/ and http://middlecoin.com. I have been following Middlecoin for awhile and need to jump in there.

Thoughts on the future of ASIC as a result of mining?

If you're gonna use nvidia you should def use cudaminer to pump out a little extra power.
here's a guide https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.0

Nonsense, you don't need more than 1GB of ram to run a linux miner. I have one rig with 2GB, and two with 1GB and they all hash wonderfully fast. What really matters for scrypt mining is GPU ram.

With cgminer and bfgminer you don't need RAM, I'm not entirely sure about cudaminer though, since it might be similar to reaper which eats RAM.

cudaminer uses 34MB of ram on my machine. Best config for a 660 is K5x32

Nvidia gtx 660 DC2 TOP - 210kh/s  @ 100% load and 64C

command line : cudaminer.exe -H 1 -d 0 -i 0 -C 1 -l K5x32 

no GPU power is not more important AsonBitKid

GPU is still very relevant to alt-coin/scrypt based mining...unfortunately its ran its course for sha-256 coins and of course "cpu only" coins that up until now are pretty resistant.

This is not accurate. When the miner software uploads code to the videocard, a large amount of ram is required. The higher the thread-concurrency the more RAM is needed, even more with some larger hand-optimized binaries out there. This is mitigated by the swap file, but considering the cost of 4GB RAM vs 2GB in the context of a $1500+ rig, it is silly to restrict someone else's machine to just 2GB even if it works for you. They may be interested in installing utility software and/or Windows 8 64bit instead