Bitcoin Forum

How do I start mining with a Nivida GeForce 9400 GT on Windows Vista.

Im having tough time getting started.  ???

I can mine using the CPU but not with the GPU.

Since it is not much better to mine with a NVIDIA card than it is with a CPU (because of the architecture), i guess that the miner software is ignoring any graphiccards that are not from ATI or ATI-based.
I was once able to use my NVIDIA card with the Diablo miner (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1721.0) ..maybe you give it a try with it.

Im currently using GUIminer using rpc-miner-4way.

I'm gonna try that Diablo miner and see if it works.

I heard I could use my nvidia if I used mOmchil poclbm miner or GUI miner. But I can't seem to work pyOpenCL to do that.

My computer has a AMD Athlon 645 X2 Dual Core Processor 3600+ as the CPU

I just got my updated drivers downloaded so im going to try again with them updated.

You are going to lose money mining with nvidia just from your power bill.

As they said mining with an nvidia is not a good idea, they simply do very low mhash/s

Should I just get a Radeon 5770 or similar to mine on my computer?

Im using a computer that I don't use at all, so I don't really need it to do anything else.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Useful to see potential of different GPUs for mining.

My GT 330m seems to be capping at 10M hashes.  Is it limited somehow or just slow?

See this page and it'll explain why nvidia cards are slower than AMD (ATI) GPUs.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU)

on this site, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

it said my 9400GT would only get 3.37 Mhash/s

and i couldn't get the new drivers installed either to actually use it for mining.

mining with a nvidia card is pretty crap yea.

My gaming PC has a GTX 470 and although it is fantastic in all the game I play, for mining it just isnt good for the amount of power it draws.
I would advise you to get a Radeon 5850. Right now they are extreemly cheap I got mine for £94 and with a little clocking I get 330 mhash/s where as with my £200(at the time) GTX 470 i get about 100 if i overclock it.
It is really not worth mining on your current setup. You wont see good results and the income you do get will be pretty small.

At the moment you will get 1 BTC every 20 days from a pool. And at current rates thats only $20 dollars
If you were to get a 5850 for $120 dollars, run it for 20 days, you would get 10 BTC (0.5 a day @ 315mhash/s) and at todays rates that would be $200, so as well as paying for the gfx card, you would have made $80 ontop.
Ofcourse who knows what the market will be like in 20 days, it could jump up to $30 or drop down to $10, even if it was down to $10 then you would still be able to get your money back in a month, and still have a better gfx card at the end of it.

Does it matter how much RAM the computer has?

I only brought the 9400GT because it was on sale and i didn't know that ATI were better.

I'm gonna try to get a ATI 5850.

Would it be better if i installed it Ubuntu and do mining on that?

RAM isnt a major issue from what I can see.

my mining rig, which is my old PC from 2008 just has windows XP on it and 2 gig RAM, although when I look at the RAM usage, it is using just 350mb during full mining usage.

the only thing you can do whit ram is making a ramdisk  :D

my computer just has windows Vista Home Basic on it and 512mb RAM

A ramdisk?

yes you take a part of your PC ram and create a little HDD the speed for the ramdisk is insane (because is on ram lol) http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk but if the PC run out of power everything is lost so you need to make backup's all the time
is there any point to use this  for bitcoin ? nope, just for the lols
are there any ramdisk monsters ? yes http://www.ramsan.com/

that sounds like fun.

My advice is that if you're going to use a ramdisk, rent some hardware like a bi-quad Xeon with dual SSD, then make the ramdisk on that. I've done it under proxmox and while it's not as fast as straight-up OS -> ramdisk, VM OS -> ramdisk gives you a lot more versatility than just a normal setup. OVH is good for hardware like that.

i probs won't make a ramdisk.

ill just install Ubuntu and just mine mostly

you need to make sure your driver is up to date there are guides for using poclbm but you need to have a versoin of forceware new enough to enable open CL

Short answer: Don't bother. Buy a decent card if you want to mine. Trying to mine with that card would be... unpleasant, to say the least. Pretty sure 5850s are the most cost-effective, but good luck finding any.

i actually found a 5850 for pretty cheap. Im going with a 5850 since they are cheap and powerful

Psh. Lucky. I spent like 3 hours trying to track some down. No dice. Oh well.

-Wizard-Ninja-

i wanted to get a 5870s but those are like twice as much i would pay for a 5850s

ultimately i wanted those 6xxxx  but those are really expensive.