Is anyone litecoin mining on a Mac?

[Anonymailer]

So I'm developing MacMiner with the intention of supporting all there is to be supported.

But I've hit a few hitches with scrypt/litecoin. It's a 2012 Mac Pro with a 5770 which gets 150-170Mh/s BTC mining, yet with bfgminer using scrypt I get ~5Kh/s from the GPU and 30+Kh/s from the CPU.

So I want to know, are any mac users getting better out of their GPU and if so what's your setup? Should I bother to support scrypt right now?

[wrenchmonkey]

I'm using a Macbook Pro Core 15" with core i7 and 6 GB RAM. I'm using Pooler's Mac binaries, and getting 5.1khash per thread, hyperthreading with 8 threads, for about 40k/Hash.

I'd be interested in trying out a miner that could also utilize the GPU for hashing, but not unless it's going to get me more hashing power than I'm currently getting doing CPU-mining only.

If I lose 5khash from the CPU side, in order to pick up 5khash on the GPU, I'd just as soon not bother.

[Anonymailer]

Thanks for the info, i figured it was worth testing and it bumps the CPU up 3 times to 85Kh/s using that binary, and I suppose it could be worthwhile if you mine BTC on the GPU and LTC on the CPU - I was expecting much higher memory use from the little I've heard but the process only uses about 12MB… shame I can't get anything nearly useful out of the 5770 though. Might give it a shot on a 7870 sometime soon and see if it's worth compiling bfgminer with scrypt support for Macs or just a lost cause for now. The drivers make BTC mining slower than other OSs but with scrypt it's just ridiculous!

[Anonymailer]

I've had a message from someone restricted to the newbie forum:

Hey,

 I'm a newbie so I couldnt post in your thread, but I just started litecoin mining on my mac pro with a 5770. With cgminer I am able to mine litecoins at 60 kh/s using the flags: -lookup-gap 2 --intensity 10 --worksize 64 -g 1


I'm using your macminer for bitcoins on my mac and loving it so far so hopefully this helps you design a macminer that can also do litecoins.

Let me know if there is anything else I send test out or send your way if it would be helpful.

Raider

These settings do indeed give a 10fold increase in GPU hashing so I think I'll keep that supported but use cpuminer backend for the CPU as it still gives me more Kh/s than running on the 5770. I'll be interested to see what I can get out of a 7870 now too!

[nwoolls]

I'm a newbie so I couldnt post in your thread, but I just started litecoin mining on my mac pro with a 5770. With cgminer I am able to mine litecoins at 60 kh/s using the flags: -lookup-gap 2 --intensity 10 --worksize 64 -g 1

Raider

Great stuff - that worksize parameter is what really helped me. I've got my 5770 smoking my CPU now with a few more changes:

Code:

cgminer --scrypt -w 64 -g 1 -I 16

The -I flag, which is generally advised to be 9 or lower for Bitcoin mining, really needs to be cranked up for Litecoin GPU mining. With these settings I get 95kh/s with my 5770 and 135kh/s with my 5870.

[LOLMoney]

I'm on a i7 Mac mini and get about 42khash/s mining LTC via the CPU.

[Anonymailer]

cpuminer for scrypt (as well as bfgminer which can mine GPU/CPU BTC/LTC) are now included in the latest MacMiner at http://fabulouspanda.co.uk/macminer/

[SpaceCadet]

I'm getting 23 khash/s on an I5 iMac running just 3 threads using minerd.  Hoping to have MacMiner installed soon.

[cheesylard]

My friend is using minerd on his computer and wants to use his GPU to mine but he doesn't trust the extra things being installed that require being an admin. Also he's running Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

Will it be just a standalone program sometime in the future? (i.e. no other things to install, no admin privileges needed, etc) And can you support 10.6?

[Anonymailer]

The original .app is still available but poclbm+10.8 only, I'll have a look at 10.6 on the weekend but I'm not as confident in saying I'll support that as 10.7 and I have no plans to maintain a .app.

If someone's worried about the contents here are reassuring factors:
1. It's signed with my developer certificate
2. you can get the code from github.com/fabulouspanda/MacMiner compile in xcode/install dependencies yourself
3. you can look at the ext a files being installed by downloading the package and exploding it as detailed in the answer here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/15658/how-can-i-open-a-pkg-file-manually
4. You can choose not to install the extra files in the installer and install dependencies yourself

I'm hoping my reputation will become well known enough that people stop worrying, but the code will always be available up there.

[cheesylard]

The original .app is still available but poclbm+10.8 only, I'll have a look at 10.6 on the weekend but I'm not as confident in saying I'll support that as 10.7 and I have no plans to maintain a .app.

If someone's worried about the contents here are reassuring factors:
1. It's signed with my developer certificate
2. you can get the code from github.com/fabulouspanda/MacMiner compile in xcode/install dependencies yourself
3. you can look at the ext a files being installed by downloading the package and exploding it as detailed in the answer here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/15658/how-can-i-open-a-pkg-file-manually
4. You can choose not to install the extra files in the installer and install dependencies yourself

I'm hoping my reputation will become well known enough that people stop worrying, but the code will always be available up there.

It's just really sketch needing root access to run a bitcoin miner. And still having the need to install other dependencies isn't optimal either

[Anonymailer]

Granted it's not ideal, you can still get the poclbm version without needing root access, but there's currently no way to install bfgminer or cpuminer and their dependencies without needing root access at several points in the process, so at the end of the day you're always going to be trusting a developer, at least when MacMiner asks for root access to install it's within an installer signed with my Apple Developer ID.

I will look at packaging the dependencies in the app soon though.