Best way to mine with a GTX 460

[allinvain]

Hmm, I dunno but I think you're going to have some problems if you game and mine at the same time. ATI driver's can be sketchy sometimes and I bet you'll get some crashes once in a while. But if you wish to do it anyways set the miner's priority very low so it won't eat up the GPU too much. With poclbm if you set the the -f variable to -f 120 you should be able to game and mine at the same time.

Doesn't matter where you set the variables, the ATI driver is bad. Your game will eventually crash and burn if you mine while gaming. You'll know it's happening when your FPS suddenly drops and you start seeing rendering artifacts. At that point, no more gaming until you reboot the computer. This even happens if you dedicate a single card to gaming and another to mining.

The NVIDIA driver doesn't do this, but since the card doesn't get enough hashes to make it worthwhile, gamers are kind of between a rock and a hard place here if they want to mine.

Ah I see. OK, well that does it then. Mining and gaming = bad. Someday, someday, ATI/AMD will get their shit together and write some rock solid drivers.

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[zale]

Well if you have 2 cards just use card #2 for mining and card #1 for gaming. Turn off crossfire of course

[error]

Well if you have 2 cards just use card #2 for mining and card #1 for gaming. Turn off crossfire of course

Doesn't matter if you do this (I tried it). The ATi driver will still crap out.

[ItsASpork]

I could just turn off the miner when I'm gaming. I only ever play paradox titles and a little SC2 anyways.

[PcChip]

A lot of misinformation in this thread.  

It is true that nvidia and amd cards don't play nice together in the same box, I personally tried it and Phoenix said no opencl devices found; so keep the nvidia cards in their own boxes and do the same for amd cards.

However, it is NOT true that AMD's drivers are more prone to crashing than NVidia's.  I use both for my family and the quality is comparable. They will both sometimes have a bad driver release that gets fixed in the next update.

Also, it's not true that you can't game while mining!  I do it on my GTX570 at times, but my 3 year old plays Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood it on the 4870/5850 every single day while it mines.  The miner still mines, it just slows down. The key is to use the correct aggression setting to let this be possible. For the 5850 it was 4, for the 4870 it is 3.  Anything higher and the games stutter noticeably.  Yes, using low aggression values lowers hashrate; that's the price you pay for using your kid's gaming computer for a few extra megahashes without disrupting gaming.

[PcChip]

And for those of you wondering why we have NVidia cards instead of similarly-priced AMD cards, lots of us made the choice before we learned about bitcoins.  I personally really wanted to buy a 6950-2GB and unlock a free $100 upgrade with the 6970 bios, but I couldn't because I was determined to work towards building a stereoscopic 3D gaming solution, and nvidia was the only way to go.

[Fiyasko]

And for those of you wondering why we have NVidia cards instead of similarly-priced AMD cards, lots of us made the choice before we learned about bitcoins.  I personally really wanted to buy a 6950-2GB and unlock a free $100 upgrade with the 6970 bios, but I couldn't because I was determined to work towards building a stereoscopic 3D gaming solution, and nvidia was the only way to go.

Lol. Steroscopic 3D has been in ATi Cards since the 5xxx

[mrb]

1. Sell it
2. Acquire same-price used RADEON card
3. profit

Yep. You can probably sell your GTX 460 for ~$100, which will get you an AMD card able to do ~100Mhash/s.

[PcChip]

Lol. Steroscopic 3D has been in ATi Cards since the 5xxx

No.  They announced their "HD3D Initiative" , making it sound like the 5xxx cards had something special that the previous generation cards did not.  I waited and waited, but nothing ever materialized.  Only very very recently, some monitors have come out supporting it, however their stereoscopic solution has ABSOLUTELY NO driver support - they rely on third parties!  Tri-Def and iz3d are the ones supporting HD3D, not AMD!

NVidia's solution is all done in-house inside their drivers, so compatibility patches can be very quickly made, and game compatibility is MUCH higher than with IZ3D or Tri-Def's solution.