Solo vs Pools

[califminer]

I am a part of a public pooled mining for Litecoins. I have engaged 15 workers, each with minimum 4 Intel CPUs, some have 8.
Would it be advisable to do Solo Mining? Will that help me make more profits?

Also is this setup good enough for Solo Bitcoin Mining? This setup does NOT have AMD/NVIDIA GPUs.

[Dayne]

Even though there is much less LTC Miners at this current point in time I believe it would still be more profitable in a pool.

Unless you can get decent M/hash mining LTC you're not going to win the "lottery" feasibly often.

I'm new to AltCoin (and BitCoin too) so don't quote me on this, I'm just trying to get involved in discussion.

[whiteG]

1. sell the CPUs and buy some GPUs, seriously!
http://en.litecoinpedia.org/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

2. like Dayne said, as long as you don't have some Mhash/sec, working in a pool will stabilize your income i.e. lower the variance.

[califminer]

Thank you both.

One small query: Typically how many CPUs would I need to match a bare minimum nVidia GPU ( hear ATI/AMD is little more efficient than nVidia ones).
P.S. I can;t sell CPUs  for GPU although pointing me to a good BTC mining client which utilizes Intel's GPU would be appreciated ;-)

[zed_man]

You will need a lot of CPUs to come close to any decent GPUs hash power. CPUs will waste more electricity running on full power as well and i do not recommend this at all

[HuuHachu]

Well ... do you pay for the electricity bill ?

If so, I'm pretty sure using CPU will cost you more in electricity than what you can currently earn.

If not, you can keep going ... but the odds of finding a block in a reasonable time with less than a few tens of MH/s are very small ... you should go for pool mining.

And the difference between AMD and NVIDIA card is considerable ... As for CPU, I'm not sure mining with NVIDIA is worth the electricity.

[Dayne]

You simply can not match GPUs with CPUs, it's just not going to work.

The hash rate on a decent nVidia card is around 20m/hash. With a decent AMD GPU you should be able to get about ten times as much.

As such, mining isn't really profitable without an AMD GPU or preferably an FGPA or even better, an Asic.

With an AMD 6950 you can get 300m/hash, I believe.

CPU has rates are in the order of k/hash. Simply incomparable.

(Somebody pull me up if I'm completely wrong, please. Lol.)

By the way, I'm pulling 32m/hash with my nVidia 630M 1GB and Integrated Graphics and I'm only just breaking even with the power consumption at 0.27USD per kwh.

So I'm basically converting my power bill into BitCoins at the moment.. lol

[califminer]

Where is the Thumbs up button?? I thank you all.

So what I now understand is that unless I have a 100 CPUs (1Ghz atleast) I shouldn't go for Solo LiteCoin mining.
And unless I have 5000 CPUs I shouldn't go for Solo Bitcoin mining.. right?

[HuuHachu]

Where is the Thumbs up button?? I thank you all.

So what I now understand is that unless I have a 100 CPUs (1Ghz atleast) I shouldn't go for Solo LiteCoin mining.
And unless I have 5000 CPUs I shouldn't go for Solo Bitcoin mining.. right?

1GHz CPUs ??

A modern CPU (read i5+ can probably give between 20 and 100 scrypt KH/s depending on the number of cores and the clock). Where at least a few MH/s are recommended to mine solo.

But if you intend to use 1GHz CPUs (btw, do you have a farm of pentium III ? ^^) ,you would need even much more than 100 !

[sayaz]

At this point i dont think buying a big gpu farm purely for LTC is worthy... LTC's future is still uncertain, let alone bitcoin.

[califminer]

HuuHachu you are quite funny :-)
These CPUs are not P3, these are i7s and i3s.

Thanks.

[Supercoin]

Solo is better if you have lot of hash power.

[califminer]

How much is lot for LTC and BTC ?

[MrBSmith]

I would not solo mine LTC with less than 100,000 KHs or 100 MHs.

Solo Mining at difficuty 605 will give you on average the following:
100,000 KHs = 3 blocks (150) LTC per day
10,000 Khs = 1 block (50) LTC every 3 days
1,000 Khs = 1 block (50 LTC) every 30 days

Pooled mining at the current difficulty 605 will give you the following:
100,000 Khs = 166 LTC / day
10,000 KHs = 16.6 LTC / day
1,000 KHs = 1.66 LTC / day

Try using a LTC calculator like the on at https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc

MrBSmith

LTC LUwVTpW14FvbfVFz7YNNhjsA3FUZUXQgDu
BTC 1KkGkBPsMMyV8ccgsywgQmVgmpZL5fEQzc

[califminer]

Thanks MrBSmith.

[dellstreakone]

i  think solo is better than a pool , but you must be lucky to get lucky block

[AzureEngineer]

Solo mining and pool mining gets you the same amount of coins, assuming the pool has no fee.

[Pheal]

What I do:

1. Are you lucky? (Yes, go to 4, else continue)
2. Can you compensate with multiple machines? (Yes, go to 4, else continue)
3. Pool mine.
4. Solo mine.

[califminer]

Good one Pheal.
How much role does luck play in finding a block?
And hope by multiple machiens you mean > 1K systems. That's what I learnt here.

[thisnewcoin]

depends on your computing power