Noob in Bitcoins and Mining!

[mihapiha]

Hey guys.

I am totally new to this, and I barely today got intro Bitcoins and the mining-section. The reason someone introduced me to it is, because I have a server and I haven't found a real purpose for it lately.

In order to test how this works I installed Bitcoin and GUIMiner on my MacBook Pro with retina display. Because I wanted to avoid initial problems I decided to start with the windows installation and then move on to MacOS or Linux if I find it useful and understand how to properly set everything up.

For now the MacBook pro with Windows had to do. I got both things running and this I managed to get out of it:

http://www.abload.de/img/1r3s25.png

Needless to say that for testing purposes it will do, but that I will not run this 24/7

The server this was initially meant for was build for Folding@Home purposes. It is CPU based folding and I'm unsure if that Bitcoin-mining thing even supports CPU based mining. And if it does, would it be worth it.

My server has 4x Opteron 6180 SE CPUs installed which are overclocked in Linux to 2.75 GHz. So 48 real cores at 2.75 GHz. Although that is really fast, any modern graphic card is faster, that's why I'm unsure if that's even an interesting option.

Also this server pulls 700W from the socket while under full load. I'd be thankful if anybody would let me know whether this computer can be used for bitcoin mining and whether it would be even worth it.

This is how the computer looks like

http://pic.sysprofile.de/images/jGZ22648.jpg

[inter5]

I think you should try and see what kind of hashrates you can get with this build, but I don't think it's going to be worth running it keeping in mind it draws 700w of power.

[mihapiha]

As I don't know what these hashrates are I won't be able to know whether it's any good. It would be nice if there was a Ubuntu Linux based mining program. My overclock is limited to Ubuntu...

Any guides for noobs come to mind. Then I will take the computer off it's F@H work and doing this...

But thanks for letting me know

[Rant2112]

You might want to check Litecoin mining.  It may be more suitable to a CPU setup.

[Splicer]

HD radeon seems to be best for BC.

[mihapiha]

I suppose this rig then ain't good for this purpose. Thanks for the heads-up

[Rockford]

I would also suggest not mining with this setup.

To give some figures:

A Radeon 7950 is hashing at 680Mhash/s (OC and lowered MC)
and consuming power in the range of 250-350W (don't quote me on these figures as they are estimates)

With the ATH of roughly 260USD/BTC you wouldn't care about the energycosts but now there's change in
the market obviously, making these setups only viable for optimists who believe in a quick recovery.

I have no expierience with CPU mining, just that you couldn't even touch this rates.

If you run the same graphicscard however for LTC mining, you get roughly 6xx khash/s

So if you believe in LTC and your server is somewhere near these specs then go for it
Still energycosts/speculation on LTC have to be taken account for and with 700W
you have a pretty thirsty Setup in the first place.

Hope these chunks of information give you a blurry picture.


Regards

[nightminer]

Definitely go for Litecoin! I've causally mined Litecoin for a month on an i7 and got 15 Litecoins. Litecoin is geared toward CPU mining.

I'd say, get your mining software sorted out, do some cpu mining and see what hash rate you get. I'd say it's pretty much worth it for anything above 300KH.

[btcfanx]

It's not worth to use CPU to mining. Today's only GPUs and FPGAs. In a short time (ca. 1 year) only ASICs.

[pushitup]

from your screenprints i see that you are mining with 25.7mh. That's to low to be profitable.

here are two links for you:
btw calc:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

hardware comparison
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

nobody knows when the ASIC mining hardware will be ready. But then the difficult level will be pushed up so high that the CPU and GPU bitcoin mining will die.
All these GPU miners will flip to litecoin mining.

So my advise would be, stay away from mining, or buy a good GPU based rig and mine litecoins.

greetings to germany... 

[lixoaqui]

Try Litecoin mining and use this calculator to estimate if it's profitable
https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc

[nightminer]

@mihapiha

Don't listen to these guys. They don't even seem to know that bitcoin uses SHA256 encryption and that litecoin uses SCrypt.

SHA256 works great on GPU's and ASICs
SCRYPT works great on CPUS. You've got FORTY-EIGHT of them.

Litecoin was designed to get around the massive GPU and ASIC power. There are no known ASICs that can compute SCRYPT fast. CPU's can.

Just go for it. Otherwise that awesome machine is just going to sit there. Don't be the dumb-ass I was. I knew about litecoin for 8 months and I did nothing.

As for the guys saying 700W of power isn't worth it - we all draw around 700W with our rigs.

Can't wait to see how many Khash your rig is going to pull (In litecoin Kilo Hash is good).

[mihapiha]

@ nightminer:

I pay roughly 80 Euro a month for letting the Server fold 24/7. That's electricity alone. I am not convinced this mining type deal has any real purpose what so ever.

I would need to know though how long I have to let the Server mine to get a KH value I can expect. And I need a good Linux based guide how to set it up in Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to take the Server of it's F@H purpose for more than a few hours, unless necessary.

Unless this produces $200+ a month I cannot really be interested honestly. Especially since I have people in a waiting list offering to pay 150 Euro a month if my server folds in their name. My server was build for the F@H purpose and in that it pretty much equalizes in a month what normal folding@home-people fold in a year if they're really active.

According to the calculator lixoaqui linked me to I'd need to get about 900 KH to full fill this purpose, and I will give it a go next week or so when I'm back home. It is a bit strange. As I don't fully understand where to exchange them Bitcoins in a currency I can use

[mihapiha]

Ok I installed LiteCoin on both my MacBook pro (in MacOS) and on my Server (Windows).

The LiteCoin did take forever to download and start mining, but when it started, I saw "only" 32 cores being utilized. But even the 32 cores which were being used, didn't work properly. I know, because Windows has caused only problems with pretty much any software I've used. My guess is, that the Litecoin software I used was only 32Bit. I have set to 48 of course. Also I don't believe that the numbers could be possible accurate as I saw only 40 kH. In order to see what my server can do, I would need to set it up in Linux.

 My guess is, that the Ubuntu guides I found would work fine if I wasn't using such an old Ubuntu version.
I'm using 10.10 and I'm unsure if it will make much of a difference if I update to 12.04. But I will give it a try as I'm sure it probably won't cause that many problems...

The software for Windows and MacOS is just so easy to set up, I wonder why nobody addressed the design of the Ubuntu version.

But both values of both rigs are much much lower than I ever would have thought. The MacBook Pro is at 8 - 9 kH, and the Sever at 45 kH.
I don't really see a way, how the server could possibly crack the 400 kH-mark to even cover the electricity expenses...

______________


Edit:

Even if all 48 were running properly and I would gain another 10% due to the OC in Linux, I'd still be 75 kH in Linux. Which no were close would be worth the effort. Could anybody confirm the kH numbers I got? Or Are my numbers just smaller?