CPU requirements for GPU Mining

[Stoneysilence]

I know for gaming that the CPU can bottleneck the GPU.  But can this occur during mining?

I am running a old Intel C2D E6600 on a nVidia 680i SLI MB.  Currently I am running a GTX 460 which sucks.  So I am planning on upgrading to a 7950 to mine with.  I know this card is way overkill for my cpu and motherboard for gaming.  But I want to turn this rig into a mining rig mostly and will do some minor gaming on.

Will this CPU cause a bottleneck for mining? Originally I was mining Bitcoin using GUIMiner Poclbm which was whacking my CPU for 100% of one core and 50% of the other.

But I recently switched to Lightcoins and am running Cudaminer.  It seems to be running both cores at about 40-50% each.

Anybody know how a 7950 will do in a old system like this?  Will it handle two 7950's? (I know it's a SLI board but it should? work with two ati cards not in SLI/Crossfire mode shouldn't it?)  Eventually I would like to make this a pure mining machine with two 7950's running Linux and buy me a better gaming machine.

Thanks for any assistance.

[bcpokey]

I have a 7970, 2x5870s and a 5850 running on an AMD sempron 140 (google it), and cgminer is using between 3 and 6% CPU, while I am mining about 1.75GH/sec.


Litecoin can supposedly be a bit more of a memory hog, but afaik still doesn't rely on CPU much at all.

If you are getting banged for 50 - 100% CPU usage, you might consider switching mining clients.

[Stoneysilence]

I have a 7970, 2x5870s and a 5850 running on an AMD sempron 140 (google it), and cgminer is using between 3 and 6% CPU, while I am mining about 1.75GH/sec.


Litecoin can supposedly be a bit more of a memory hog, but afaik still doesn't rely on CPU much at all.

If you are getting banged for 50 - 100% CPU usage, you might consider switching mining clients.

I have tried many, they either crash nVidia's drivers (Reaper) or the system or something.

I think the main problem why I am getting so much CPU usage is due to it being nVidia just sucks for mining.

[crazyates]

I know for gaming that the CPU can bottleneck the GPU.  But can this occur during mining?

Nope.

[Bitsaurus]

I have a 7970 mining on a Intel 420 Celeron. That thing is incredibly slow, especially paired with an old 40GB hard drive - like 4 min boot times.  But the 7970 is still getting max hashrate.

[rograz]

One of my first miners was a 775 board with a underclocked single core P4 with HT turned off running below 2ghz, if that thing could handle mining with 4 cards then just about anything should work

[Stoneysilence]

Ok, thanks everybody for the info.