New to BitCoin and BitCoin Mining

[papamurphy]

Hi all! I was just posting to say hello! I am excited to join this community, and hopefully help it thrive!  I have installed the guiminer on both my computers, and my desktop seems to have a problem running it on the GPU.  I have a ASUS Radeon HD 6900 series card, but when I try to mine with it, it gets a validation error.  If anyone would be able to help, I would really appreciate it.  If more info is needed please let me know and I will get it! 

[Cyberclones]

Welcome to bitcoin and mining. As for helping you with your card i'm still new myself but will try to help if I can. Which mining software and pool are you using? Have you tried to remove all the extra setting to see if it might be one of them?

[candunc]

It would help if you were to post an error log. You can bring this up by opening the console (One of the drop downs from the top) and press 'Start Mining'. Copy and paste the log from the console and we'll help you out on the errors. Just so you know, GPU Mining is on its way out, but you can still make a small amount of bitcoins from mining in a pool.

[Cyberclones]

Another thing that might help is to step back your driver incase there is something in their that isn't playing nice with your card. I've heard Catalyst 12.8 seems to work well for 6XXX cards but I'm not running anything that old so can't say for sure.

[papamurphy]

I will have to do that when I get my desktop back on.  Probably be tomorrow morning. Hopefully I can get some help then!

[BowieMan]

you could always pump and dump scamcoins 

[MikeLear]

Welcome aboard!  Try to mine some coins!

[papamurphy]

Here is the error I am getting:


 Verification failed, check hardware! (0:0:Cayman, 785f5379)
Verification failed, check hardware! (0:0:Cayman, c762e41a)
Verification failed, check hardware! (0:0:Cayman, e1a6e8d0)
Verification failed, check hardware! (0:0:Cayman, 7027e69f)

[tomman]

Welcome aboard!  Try to mine some coins!

yes

[Trillium]

Hi,

What mining software are you using?
What parameters (settings) are you using to run the mining software?
What clock speeds are your GPU core, and memory. Have you overclocked anything? Are you using the original BIOS or have you flashed it?
What is your exact card 69xx <-- fill in the rest?
Do the errors occur as soon as the mining program starts or after a few minutes?
Is your powersupply adequate to run the card? (Depends on the card, depends on the powersupply make/model/watts, it's age, the rest of your computer hardware it's running etc)

With more info we can probably help you. There is always a chance something is wrong with the card but usually its a silly overclock / BIOS / parameters.

[papamurphy]

It is a Asus Radeon HD 6950.  I don't know how many cores it has, but I believe it has 2gb of video ram. I am using guiminer, with default settings on slush's pool.  I have a 750w power supply powering my system, which should be adequate. The errors start soon after connecting to the pool. I am running all updated software, and haven't overclocked it.  Thanks for any help!

I noticed that my card doesn't have CUDA support.  Could this be the issue?

[Trillium]

CUDA is a nvidia technology and we don't care about that here. Mining takes advantage of OpenCl on ATI/AMD GPU's.

My suggestion would be to look at using something like cgminer instead of your current miner. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.0

It is arguably more complicated but is far superior in many ways to what you are using.

I'd suggest you download it and run cgminer.exe and follow the prompts. Although a lot of people like to run this miner using .bat files and/or shortcut parameters, instead I find it's easier to run the program directly and edit the config file, which the program can save (when it is setup, press S then W and then enter to save the default named config file).

Tip:  when you enter URL's and things into command prompt you can click the icon in the top left of the program and go Edit->Paste

Alternatively you could use something like FurMark or OCCT to stress test the card and make sure its stable. Mining involves pushing the hardware to its maximum so its critical that it is fully stable under these conditions.

[papamurphy]

I will try that when I get home tonight. Even though it was having errors, guiminer said it was hashing at 300m...