I'm rather new to mining, having been at it for a few months now with some "slow" hardware. These days I tend to lurk plenty and post only when I have something to contribute. Right now I am hoping to figure out why my "slow" hardware is performing so much better than what's on the comparison charts and elsewhere. I'm sure others with the same, or similar hardware would like to know too.

I recently started using cudaMiner for altcoin mining and the results are oddly spectacular. On my older 640MB 8800 GTS, I've gone from 15kh with CGMiner, to 43Kh+/- with cudaMiner! Almost everything I've seen, except for one 768MB 8800GTX, is still only getting about 15kh, even with cudaMiner. Then on my GTX 280, I'm getting 93kh and that's on stock speeds. That is at least twice as fast as what others have reported getting! I have it up to 100kh right now with some slight shader overclocking. The card was also pretty faulty with the common solder issue, but I resurrected it with the oven bake trick, lol. Still, it was getting 93kh before and after the oven bake. The mining pools I use also report these same speeds, so at least I know it isn't some kind of odd glitch.

I am using XP Pro x64 and I have read that people are getting better speed on XP, but 2-3x the speed? Surely if that were the case, then everyone would be using XP to mine with, lol. I can't say it's the system either, because the 8800 gets the same speed in both PCs that I've put it in. One being a newer quad core, the other is a older dual core. I haven't tried putting the 280 in the older PC.

Well, I think that qualifies as a few sentences, lol. I look forward to posting more in the cudaMiner thread and hopefully it will end up helping others to get more speed out of their hardware.