Bitcoin Forum

Hey everyone.
I'm new, so please don't be mean to me.
My name's Jordon and I love animals (mostly dogs).
I mine for bitcoins using my CPU (I don't have an ATI graphics card).
I am giving my mining profits to the ASPCA to buy food, shelter, and toys for stray cats and dogs.
If you want to join my mining pool and help out, you can PM me for the link. 99% of your mining profits go to you and 1% goes to the ASPCA. Or you can send me some BTC directly and I will donate them. PM me.
On a final note, I also love computers. I am building my own mining rig/gaming computer. It's going to have 2 Intel Xeon processors and a lot of RAM. My current Hash Rate is about 3.08 MH/S. I hope my mining rig will have a better Hash Rate.
Thanks for reading,
Jordon.

Cool welcome.

A bit of a suggestion if your computer will be for mining and bitcoining only: forgo the Xeons. They will benefit neither.

I've got 12 CPU cores total mining right now to keep my hashrate above 800MH/s because I am OCD and have free electricity. Combined, they mine at 30MH/s. Higher clocked, they might get 40-50. My $40 radeon 6450 gets 32MH/s and consumes ~1/20th of the power. (My other hardware is a 6950, 6770m and a 5830).

Gaming will not benefit from the Xeons because most modern games will not benefit from more than 4 CPU cores. A lot still don't benefit from more than 2-3.

You're better off with a Core i5 2500k or 3500k. Overclockable (unlike all Xeons). Games will benefit from the high clockspeed.

Spend the extra money saved on a second video card. A single 7970 gets over 600MH/s  ;)

Out of curiosity, what CPU are you mining on and what CPU miner program are you using?

Right now I am using an AMD 64 athlon X2 CPU. I am mining on ufasoft's miner using the tripleming pool.
Do you know any miners that work for nvidia cards? Would it be faster than my CPU?
Thanks for the advice. Should I Liquid cool it? And can I mine CPU and GPU at the same time?
And you can join my pool if you want to help out the animals :)

Thanks but I'll pass. Really cool that you started a pool though. The more the merrier.

Here's a list of the hardware everyone has tested mining with. It's fairly accurate.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

AMD/ATI video card >> Nvidia card >>> CPU
For example,
a ~$100 Phenom IIx4 955 will get 12MH/s
a ~$100 Nvidia GTX460 will get 90MH/s
a ~$100 ATI Radeon 5830 will get 300MH/s
I'm going by overclocked settings. but all by about the same. Prices are what you could expect to find these cards for used.

Water cooling is a matter of opinion, and mine is don't bother. The effort is greater than air cooling and vs properly implemented air cooling, the benefit is debatable.

CGminer is what I use but I used to use GUIminer. Both are good programs. Use GUIminer if you are less comfortable with the command line. I am assuming Windows OS and both work well with their defaults. GUIminer also has CPUmining enabled, unlike CGminer. Both will work as best as they can on Nvidia and AMD video cards but the performance hit on Nvidia cards comes down to architecture. AMD's is best suited to mining. Basically, there is something AMD cards can do in one clock cycle that takes an Nvidia card 3 cycles that happens to be an important thing in Bitcoin mining.

You can mine CPU and GPU at the same time. CPU isn't worth it unless you have free electricity.

The ideal mining farm with electrical efficiency in mind is multiple AMD GPUs and a weak CPU (like a sempron) on a motherboard with lots of PCI-e expansion slots. But if you are gaming too, you will want something like the i5. If you want to keep CPU mining, I've found the one you are using to be the best so far although I only recently started looking into CPU mining.

There's lots of resources as well as the hardware comparison on the wiki I linked.
And of course, this forum is a good resource too. If you have any questions, ask. Or give the forum a search for some keywords and see if there are any existing discussion topics.

Welcome aboard, Jordon. I too share your compasion for animals. Do watch out for the meanies about the forums. When in doubt, don't take anyone any more seriously than you would take yourself. ;p I think Confucius said that or something similar.

cheers,
 Derek

Thanks for all the info mokahless. If you know anyone who needs to join a pool, can you send them to me?
Also, thank you Derek for your advice. If you want to join my pool Derek, you get 99% of the profit and 1% goes to the ASPCA.
If you don't want to, I am not offended at all.

Soo. Not a bad idea:). Once I assemble my rig I may join. So I might PM you  ;D

I appreciate the offer. I have gone back liquid with BTC until some unknowns can be accertained. =)