Nice speeds Did you try starting all the GPUs at once? I've had reports of crashes resulting from doing that on Linux. I can't reproduce it on Windows, and my Linux machines only have 1 GPU.


Let me see what I can do...


It just flashes when you go into the red zone. The red zone should be 10% above what your GPU would normally deliver. The speedometer is adjusted for the specific GPU that is detected. But the "normal speed" for each GPU may be a little off - there are many GPUs and I probably don't have the right values for each one. Please report any GPUs that are not in the green zone even when running on stock frequenzy and voltage.

But yeah, if you are overclocking, then it is normal. I thought it was cool when I added it. But if it's annoying, I can remove it or make it optional.

I made some further changes to the beta right now to make sure this won't happen, even if there are problems with the settings.


That's the bug a few people have experienced, the blank login window. For some reason it seems the settings can get corrupted. Not sure why. But the beta now should handle it just fine. Although your settings could disappear. I haven't been able to track down the actual source of the settings problems.


Thank you, and welcome on the team. I'm happy to hear you find the low barrier to entry compelling - I spent a lot of time and thought on that.

Nice! Good to hear the speed improvements are working out.

I know, the two second average shown by BitMinter sometimes fluctuates a lot. I was thinking of putting in some sort of exponential moving average.

The GTX 580 has 16 CUs (compute units). Apparently there is a big difference between 460 and 580 according to the mining hardware comparison charts.

The reason you suddenly got a lower hashrate is probably because you forgot to turn off vectors this time. I forget that myself too. I'll have to make vectors off the default for nvidia soon - the way it is gives people a really bad impression of the miner on nvidia hardware.

Maybe the GTX 580 is that much faster than the 460? I dunno. I run it now at stock speed with 127 Mhps.

Yeah, the CPU mining isn't really intended for use the way it is now. Next step for that is to implement OpenCL CPU-mining. This should be a significant boost, but I don't expect it to beat the fast CPU miners. After that it may useful to implement CPU-mining based on assembly language. The question is whether it will really be worth the effort. But I do want to have decent speed CPU mining.

Wow, is CUDA that much faster on nvidia hardware than OpenCL? I will have to look into adding CUDA-support. I have to finish Radeon 5xxx optimizations first, though. Thanks for the info.

Yeah, they are both "1.0 beta". I will change this soon.


Hmm, I've never heard of this before. Since it crashes the whole system, I guess there's no crash dump left by Java on your desktop. Can you run other miners ok? Are you using the latest nvidia drivers? I would guess this is a crash in the drivers.


Sorry, there's a bug in there somewhere that I haven't been able to find yet. On rare occassions some users would get a completely blank login window. I put in additional error checking, which is causing the message you see about being unable to load settings. I guess this could be related to the "proceed" button not reacting. I will look into that. Hopefully I can finally squash this bug.

You could try deleting the BitMinter muffins, then restarting the client and trying again. Java WebStart muffins, on Windows, are located somewhere like:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\6.0\muffin

Muffins are kind of like browser cookies. It's where the BitMinter client stores its settings, like username and password.

As a general note about nvidia and 100+ Mhps: you have to turn off vectors, otherwise there will be a performance hit. And vectors are on by default (I'm going to change that for nvidia GPUs).


Perhaps the wording of this message should be changed. What it means is that your nvidia drivers only support OpenCL 1.0, not the OpenCL 1.1 interface. This means BitMinter is unable to detect optimal work group sizes for your GPU and warn you if you use a sub-optimal one. Not really a big deal, so it can just be ignored.

Nvidia had an OpenCL 1.1 driver in beta for over a year, without 1.1 support making it into the regular drivers. But I believe I read somewhere that the latest nvidia drivers have OpenCL 1.1 support, or that the next release will. Can't find where I read that now, though.

I'm working on this right now. You can try the beta version (see the miner thread) - I believe it is about 1% faster on Radeon 5xxx. I'm still working on improving this further, though.

Sure, it's now in the beta version as you can see from the miner thread.

Also I have tried to increase performance a bit on Radeon GPUs. The beta should already be a little faster than the regular version, but I'm hoping to improve it further.


Thank you and welcome! Added BitMinter to your directory. Nice website, by the way, just the thing Bitcoin needs. More merchants, and a nice website to find them.


Thank you kindly, sir. Let's hope our luck stays with us.


That is very nice! The new beta miner could perhaps give you 2 Mhps more. Not much, but it's hard to get more out of the 69xx GPUs than what the miner already does.

In the future I will release new changes as a beta release first before they go into the regular miner version. When you log into your account on the website there is a button to start the beta version of the miner. You can also start it from here:



Changes in the current beta:

• Faster on Radeon GPUs, especially 5xxx series (still working on improving this further)
• Minimize to systray option (under the "settings" pulldown menu)
• Remember settings for systray and verbose logging between sessions

Let me know if there are any problems.

Yes, that was a lucky couple of blocks. 


Thanks, and welcome aboard! Simplicity and user-friendliness are some of the things we're going for.

For 6950s you'll want to keep vectors and BFI_INT on. 128 seems like a good starting point for work group size, but you can try some others out too.

For the break interval I have found that using a high value doesn't always play nice with multiple GPUs. One of my machines with 4 GPUs runs very well with 20 ms intervals. I'm considering lowering the default value. But I also have single-GPU systems that like a relatively high value like 50. The difference may also have to do with Windows versus Linux. Anyone else have similar or different experiences with this?

If you are feeling adventurous you may want to experiment with overclocking the GPU. And possibly underclocking memory to reduce temperature.

I am also working on new optimizations to get the hashrate up a little further. More info will follow.

Yes, the problem was only there for a few hours and produced just a few bombs. If you have 25% bombs there's probably something wrong.

Is the GPU overclocked? Getting hot?

Yay Good work, everyone!


I will look into this.

That is a good point.

So either it takes a long time to get paid, or you have many shares you don't get paid for. Neither sounds perfect. But it seems miners at mineco.in don't care too much about unpaid shares.

If anyone has a preference on this, let's hear it.

High N (2*difficulty): small chance shares don't get paid, but payments still coming for old shares after 12 days
Small N (difficulty/2): high chance shares don't get paid, but payments for a share finish within 3 days or so

If anyone has any questions about PPLNS or another reward system, feel free to ask.

I would say over 1% is high

Pool backend was just restarted with a small bug fix. It would sometimes send out work that the new miner version did not like, which would result in miscalculations ("bombs" in the GUI). This is now fixed. Sorry if this caused you to think you had a hardware problem.

Quick fix on the pool backend a few minutes ago. It would sometimes send out work that the new miner version did not like, which would result in miscalculations ("bombs" in the GUI). This is now fixed. Sorry if this caused you to think you had a hardware problem.

Some updates to the miner today. Details are in the separate miner thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31163.0

Hopefully I will be optimizing Radeon 4xxx and 5xxx performance in the next update.

Some updates to the miner today. Details are in the separate miner thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31163.0


I have some good ideas for this. Hopefully if things work out this will be in the next update.

Some updates for the software today:

• The status bar (the only thing visible in performance mode) now has a start/stop button and shows some information about proofs of work. Much requested features - sorry it took so long!
• Upgraded to latest version of Steel Series. The power meter tick marks looked weird for some CPU models in the old version - this looks better now.
• Better error handling when reading settings (currently names+password to log in). Some users got a blank login window with nowhere to enter name and password. I'm not sure what causes this, but at least now the login window should be usable. Please let me know if your saved name+pass disappears and/or you get error messages.
• Bug fix: when stopping a device, it would burn through a bunch of work units (you could see the "work units started on" counting up). This has been fixed.

You will get the new version the next time you restart the miner.


I can't reproduce this. Could you try starting it from the command line with the exact same environment you run other miners, and as the same user? To start the miner use this command: javaws http://bitminter.com/client/bitminter.jnlp