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Title: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: Stoneysilence on April 28, 2013, 03:36:46 AM I know for gaming that the CPU can bottleneck the GPU. But can this occur during mining?
I am running a old Intel C2D E6600 on a nVidia 680i SLI MB. Currently I am running a GTX 460 which sucks. So I am planning on upgrading to a 7950 to mine with. I know this card is way overkill for my cpu and motherboard for gaming. But I want to turn this rig into a mining rig mostly and will do some minor gaming on. Will this CPU cause a bottleneck for mining? Originally I was mining Bitcoin using GUIMiner Poclbm which was whacking my CPU for 100% of one core and 50% of the other. But I recently switched to Lightcoins and am running Cudaminer. It seems to be running both cores at about 40-50% each. Anybody know how a 7950 will do in a old system like this? Will it handle two 7950's? (I know it's a SLI board but it should? work with two ati cards not in SLI/Crossfire mode shouldn't it?) Eventually I would like to make this a pure mining machine with two 7950's running Linux and buy me a better gaming machine. Thanks for any assistance. Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: bcpokey on April 28, 2013, 03:47:49 AM I have a 7970, 2x5870s and a 5850 running on an AMD sempron 140 (google it), and cgminer is using between 3 and 6% CPU, while I am mining about 1.75GH/sec.
Litecoin can supposedly be a bit more of a memory hog, but afaik still doesn't rely on CPU much at all. If you are getting banged for 50 - 100% CPU usage, you might consider switching mining clients. Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: Stoneysilence on April 28, 2013, 04:01:03 AM I have a 7970, 2x5870s and a 5850 running on an AMD sempron 140 (google it), and cgminer is using between 3 and 6% CPU, while I am mining about 1.75GH/sec. Litecoin can supposedly be a bit more of a memory hog, but afaik still doesn't rely on CPU much at all. If you are getting banged for 50 - 100% CPU usage, you might consider switching mining clients. I have tried many, they either crash nVidia's drivers (Reaper) or the system or something. I think the main problem why I am getting so much CPU usage is due to it being nVidia just sucks for mining. Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: crazyates on April 28, 2013, 04:48:48 AM I know for gaming that the CPU can bottleneck the GPU. But can this occur during mining? Nope. Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: Bitsaurus on April 28, 2013, 06:56:07 AM I have a 7970 mining on a Intel 420 Celeron. That thing is incredibly slow, especially paired with an old 40GB hard drive - like 4 min boot times. But the 7970 is still getting max hashrate.
Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: rograz on April 28, 2013, 12:48:14 PM One of my first miners was a 775 board with a underclocked single core P4 with HT turned off running below 2ghz, if that thing could handle mining with 4 cards then just about anything should work :P
Title: Re: CPU requirements for GPU Mining Post by: Stoneysilence on April 28, 2013, 07:36:38 PM Ok, thanks everybody for the info.
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