Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I am a new miner. I have been using GUIMiner to use my nvidia GTX 260 for more practical purposes. I am in the deepbit pool and have been making quite a bit, but I am not that concerned about becoming bit-wealthy. I do care about being able to live in my room though. Just a few hours of mining put my GPU at 80 degree Celsius and the entire second floor of my house went up 6 degrees Fahrenheit. I live in the south of the USA and summer hasn't even really begun, so I am concerned that mining won't be realistic for me if I can't control the heat generated by my PC. I have EVGA precision installed which easily allows me to over or underclock my card, but I am not sure which settings would be the most beneficial to lower in terms of lowering temp. I am not hardware illiterate but this goes beyond my experience.

The three settings presented to me are:
Core clock (Default: 576)
Shader clock (Default: 1242)
Memory clock (Default: 999)
Rate on default settings: ~45 Mhash/s

You really need an ATI card to mine such as an HD 58XX or greater.  I am not sure you can break even on the cost of electricity with an Nvidia card without even counting the cost of air conditioning. 

With the upcoming difficulty increase I wonder if you will even be earning enough coin to pay for the electricity that thing uses.

Does ATI have an inherent advantage or something? I got this card primarily for gaming, I have always gotten nvidia cards. I dabbled in folding@home before but not for very long.

Yes, and a crushing one at that. Within the same price range, ATi cards are 3 to 5 times faster than nVidia.

Yes, AMD gpus have a huge advantage.

You just decided to start mining without researching anything? How much power is your computer using? What do you pay for electricity?

Why does ATI have an advantage?

I was not trying to make a career out of mining or anything, I just decided to try it because I like the idea of bitcoins and haven't been putting my GTX 260 to work recently. Like I said, I've only done this for a few hours and it's likely I won't do it for an extended amount of time. I am just getting some bitcoins to try them out.

Integer Performance. Games and most GPGPU applications are mostly Floating Point performance intensive, so nvidia doesn't optimize for Integer Performance.

Because of this: Why are ATI GPUs faster than Nvidia GPUs? (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_ATI_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs?)

xenon481: it is not a matter of floating point vs integer. When comparing current generation GPUs, Nvidia does not have a floating point advantage anymore over ATI. Not even with the Tesla 2000 series which can do 1 DP op every 2 cycles (Tesla C2050 = 515 DP GFLOPS vs. HD 6970 = 676 DP GFLOPS).