With two curves with different units on the Y axis, you can make them intersect anywhere. The intersection has no meaning.

Even comparing the shape of the two curves over the same time is fairly meaningless. Difficult is just the output of an equation and doesn't actually represent the change in cost of mining, since there were quite a few developments over time that increased hashrate for the same investment.

If you remove --failover-only it will also switch when the pool is up but failing to send work. Setting --failover-only is saying "I want to stick with this pool as long as it isn't completely dead, even if that means having my machine mine nothing for hours because the pool isn't sending work."

I bought a 270X about a month ago and have unrealized gains that equal what it and the power supply cost, but that was because I was able to solo mine an obscure altcoin before it was listed on an exchange. My returns in doge and the others has been mediocre in comparison. My investment in time has put it so far below minimum wage to be completely laughable.

There are people here who will tell you that it'll be profitable, but a lot hinges on when custom dedicated Scrypt mining hardware comes on the market. If it's late this year (which is the longest it will possibly be), then you might get a return on investment. If it's next month, then not so much. Of course if you keep the mined coins in whatever altcoin or Bitcoin then you're also betting that the altcoin/Bitcoin price doesn't crash again.

If you buy one card and put it in your computer and are happy to use it for gaming once it's useless for mining, then that's not too bad of an investment. Thinking about it now, I've not run a game on my computer since I put this card in, I bet Half Life would actually run at decent quality now...

It's hard to say unless you post your settings. Set gpu threads to 1 if it's set any higher.

You can get 130 kHash/s or possibly a bit more depending on the card, using cudaMiner. https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison#NVIDIA

If you steal the electricity, that will make you about fifty cents a day in Litecoin. A bit more if you chase the alt of the moment, though definitely not worth the time you'll put into it.

Mostly keep it as it is, but get rid of --lookup-gap 2 and set --gpu-engine on the 290 to 1000.

Are you sure you want --failover-only? Without that setting it will only mine the first pool as long as it's up and working correctly. Setting --failover-only means that it will only switch when the pool fails completely, but stick with it if it's up but failing to feed work.

As he was suggesting, you didn't exceed 100 kh/s per card, you're getting 82.

But your work utility is under 30 on each card, which is the real work actually being accomplished, and your hardware errors are quite high when they should be 0. So something is very misconfigured.

Your temps of 92+C are also frightening.

Well, I don't understand exactly why, but the relation appears to be 65536. So if the network difficulty is 0.063387, that times 65536 is 4154, so a share has to be greater than 4154 to be a block. Or, from a freshly restarted cgminer, the "best share" has to exceed 4154 to have found a block.

With current Bitcoin difficulty of 2,621,404,453.0646, a miner needs a best share of 1.718e14 to find a block, which would probably be represented as 172T (because it's 172 tera-somethings. Terradifficulties?).

Peleus, I'd like to understand this as well. I'm currently mining an altcoin where the difficulty is 0.063387 but to mine a block the share must be greater than 4154. Unfortunately this thread is what comes up when I google it and doesn't yet contain an answer.

Please add Stalwartbucks (SBX). Why?

It's already on Crypto Rush, another exchange: https://cryptorush.in/index.php?p=trading&m=SBX&b=DOGE

It's actively supported, with a block chain, pool, faucet, Windows and Mac clients, etc: http://stalwartbucks.com/

It was invented by a journalist, and thus gets free press: http://www.businessinsider.com/introducing-stalwartbucks-2014-1

You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?

(If you want people to pay the pool, set the fee above 0. Being pissed at people because they're contributing to a pool and not "donating" is BS. That you think someone putting a big hash rate into a pool is a bad thing suggests that you don't know how this stuff works.)

This forum seems to be mostly dedicated to Scrypt alts, not SHA-256, so you're probably not going to find much great help here. You might post it to one of the bitcoin ones instead.

What do you mean by "die", anyway? What's the miner saying? The Woodser did ask a good question, for screenshots, and you just blew him off.

I hadn't heard of topcoin, that's an impressively dumb idea. Not even any pretense of long-term viability, it'll be forgotten before April.

Nice that you had your sock do four posts before bumping your thread, though.

The 4800 isn't even in the https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison list, which is a bad sign. It may not be supported.

Are you sure that there aren't any processes running that are temporarily using a lot of CPU? Saturating the CPU will cause a hit to hashrates of about that size.

Backup program, software update, trojan, anything? Watch task manager through one of the cycles and see if something is misbehaving.

Is the case closed or open? Mining is harder on the card than gaming; mining is designed to use it 100% all of the time. Gaming doesn't do that.

I have a 270X rather than a 280X, but even in an office with temperatures in the low 60s F and an open case, it still runs the fans at 4300 RPM (~84%) to stay below 75 C.

Set the fan to 85% and see how loud it is and what temperature it runs at. If it stabilizes below 80 C, it's ok. If it's too loud for you, then it's too loud for you and you won't be mining. In cgminer that's [G] [C] [F] [8] [5] [enter].

You really can't put the magic smoke back into a chip.

What temperatures were the GPUs running?

Set gpu threads to 1, you can get higher intensities. At any given intensity 2 threads will be a percent or two higher hashrate, but intensity 19 with 1 thread is much better than 13 with 2.

Using the Windows wallet? What's your hashrate? Thanks!

Your machine is seriously misconfigured. WU is what the pool actually sees and should be 90% of the hashrate. "HW" is hardware errors and should almost always be 0.