Bitcoin Forum

I just got a new iMac at work (I'm a PC/linux guy, but my boss is a Mac guy). It has a ATI 6970, which is one of the best video cards for bitcoin mining today. So I figure I'll download Diablo miner and set it up to run with default settings. Apparently Open CL doesn't work very well on a Mac, so I was only mining at about 1/4 the rate that the 6970 would get in a PC, but still figured it would be worth it to run it over the weekend.

So I come back on Monday, and the computer is froze. I restart, and I'm getting visual artifacts on the screen, and it freezes, usually at the login screen, sometimes it logs in, only to have more video artifacts, and freezes shortly after. I'm pretty sure I fried the video card. I'm assuming that the iMac must have really bad cooling on the video card, and it overheated. Aren't there any safety features to shut down the computer if the hardware is getting dangerously hot?

I load in safe mode, and delete everything related to bitcoin or the diablo miner, and call the company's tech guy complaining my New iMac is acting up, acting like I have no idea why it would do that.

A 6970 was a pretty good card back in the day, but that day was 2+ years ago.  Now it's about on par with a USB Block Erupter which only consumes 2.5 Watts vs 300 to 400 watts your Mac would draw if it even worked, and a Block Erupter isn't worth mining with anymore as it draws too much power.  If your doing this to goof around, know you'll never break even.

Diablo miner was one of the oldest miner's out there, so it probably didn't.  That was why CGMiner was such a big deal, because it used the ADL libraries to monitor temps and would throttle or shut down the GPU when it reached the preset temps.  But CGMiner doesn't support GPU's anymore since they aren't a viable mining device any longer.