New miner looking for some starting advice.

[kalzekdor]

Hey, I've recently just gotten into Bitcoin mining. I've been looking through this forum, and am astonished at the MH/s other people seem to achieve.

My computer has the following hardware:

CPU: AMD Phenom X4 925 Quad-Core processor - 2.80 GHz
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4600
RAM: 2 GB
OS: Windows Server 2008

Using the Python OpenCL miner I can get about 22 MH/s. Running puddinpop's 4-way miner concurrently boosts total processing to ~29 MH/s.

Also bear in mind that this is not a dedicated mining machine, but the load on it is fairly low.

What recommendations would you make to me to help improve my MH/s? I do not pay for the electricity, so that need not factor in. My capital, however, is very low, so buying new hardware is unlikely. Renting a dedicated server is not out of the realm of possibility though, if the price is within reason (and there's net profit in it, of course).

Thanks in advance for your time, and anyone who can help me significantly increase my MH/s will definitely be receiving a tip from me.

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[timmmay]

To be honest with that card you probably won't get much more out of it!

You can try playing with the askrate, workload and framerate switches of the miner to see what gives you the best result.

Eg: poclbm -v -w64 -a2 -f1 (then host, user and pass info) and see what you get

Also you can try different driver/SDK versions (what version are you currently running)?

And then there's linux which should give you another 5-10% performance.  You would usually only run that if it's a dedicated miner.

[kalzekdor]

I'm using the latest drivers from ati. Linux isn't really an option for this machine.

I'll try to finagle a few extra MH/s with the miner options, but what graphics card would you recommend? I might be able to justify spending $100-200 on a new card. I vastly prefer ATI over nVidia. I've been out of the hardware realm for a couple years though, so I'm a bit lost when it comes to the new stuff.

[airdata]

Newbs giving Newbs advice !!!! Love it.

The 4670 I had in my wifes setup was only getting around 30MH.  I picked up a couple of 5770's from anandtech forums for $80 each and they run at 160-195MH.  They only require 1 6-pin power plug and they're not ghastly gigantic video cards. 

As far as ATI vs Nvidia, ATI is the only way to go for mining.

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

[kalzekdor]

Are those rates per card? If so, I'll probably get one. I'll need to do the math first, but 500-600% improvement for ~$80 seems like a great deal.

[kalzekdor]

Just placed an order for a Radeon HD 6670. Ran me $110 including shipping. Should arrive sometime this week. I'll post back here when it does with the kind of MH/s I see with the new card.

[kalzekdor]

After installing the new graphics card and fiddling the settings into optimal position, I'm getting about 100 MH/s. I was hoping for twice that, but it'll do. It's just going to take a bit longer to break even.

Airdata, do you have an address you would like a tip sent to?