newbie questions

[rogerdv]

Hi all
Yesterday I decided to give a try to bitcoin and see what happens, today, I have a couple of newbie questions. I think that mining is my best choice, I have a geforce 9500 video card so I downloaded DiabloMiner for Linux, registered an account at mining.bitcoin.cz and started working. My first question is: should I keep the mining software working without interruptions or can I stop it whenever I need the computing power? The second question, do I need bitcoind to be running while my miner works? Why?

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[wyze]

You can keep it running or stop it when you want to use the PC. You could also change the aggression or a "-f" flag, depending on the miner, and this will not utilize as much of the GPU if you wanted to use it to watch movies or something. You do not need bitcoind running to mine since you are mining in a pool. A reason for running it would be it helps out the network by creating a node that transactions can process through which helps them process quicker.

[zerokwel]

yea wyas is correct. if you set a high -f number I set mine to -f 120 you can game fine. I was playing fallout wile this pc was working.

I know different people will tell you different -f numbers to use but it what works best for you have a play with the settings

[BtcNmcMiner]

I run a 5770 and notice a drop of about 20 Mhash/s if I let guiminer run at the default aggression while watching something with winamp, no lag in the video though. I see about a 75% decrease in hash rate with the same settings when playing a youtube video in Opera and the video is slightly choppy. Haven't tried gaming at all since I started mining.