Just started mining and I need a little help please.

[grimreaper1014]

Hi guys,

I am new here and just started mining. I have a decent PC that I just recently built and figured I would give this a try. I have two Sapphire 7970 w/ Boost. I have MultiBit downloaded and installed on my PC and I am using Cgminer. I registered over at tripplemining.com and have setup a worker account. The reason I registered here is because it was the only place I new about when I asked how to get started on another forum. If I want to switch to Slush's pool do I just do the same thing I did at trippleming.com and put in the information for Slush's pool instead? I believe the guy from the other forum that was helping me get started is new to mining as well but knows more than I do. He told me in cgminer there is a config file that can be edited to make my GPU's work more efficiently. I have not been able to find the config file. I have just been clicking on cgminer.exe inside the cgminer program. Then, he told me to create a .bat file with the fallowing in it.

@echo off
set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
cgminer.exe --auto-fan --failover-only

Therefore, now I have been running it as an administrator and it starts up cgminer.exe for me and I put in the information for the mining pool, my worker id, and password. Without a config file for my 7970's they are only showing a rate of 525MH/s on one 7970 and 570MH/s on the other. Can someone tell me where to locate the config file and what to put in it for my cards to make them run more effectively? I am running them at the stock clocks right now of 950 core and 1425 memory. I would like to run them faster or use the "Boost" Bios on the cards but one of my cards the temp is getting up to 85c while the other is only like 65c. What can I do about that? The cards are very clean. I clean the case out about once a week with my wet dry vac. Should I put my GPU fans on manual and turn them all the way up when mining? I also have all Swiftech Helix 120 PWM fans in all the the available air ducts. Should I go ahead and turn them all the way to the max while mining too and see what temps look like then?

I have been doing a lot of reading around the forums. I just haven't found anything yet on how to setup the config file. I know I need to do a lot more reading and I plan too. I just want to get these problems worked out first so I can at least get started the right way. Then, I will continue to read and research. I'm sorry for all the questions. I greatly appreciate you guys taking the time to help me out. Thanks for your help.

Regards,
Rocky

[SirMintALot]

You first have to create the configfile. When running CGminer press S then press W. Now you can input the name of the config file, but just press enter. Now you have cgminer.config in the same directory as cgminer.exe.
First thing to adjust is intensity. For SHA256 coins set it to 9, for Scrypt coins you can go higher (usually 12 or 13, depending on your configuration). Then adjust engine clock (as high as possible) and memory clock (for SHA256 as low as possible to save energy, for Scrypt you have to find the sweet spot) where it still runs stable. Probably someone with the same cards can help you with that, or you can do it by trying yourself to find the right values.
One card running hotter than the other could be caused by different things. If you have your cards in a typical pc tower, then usually the lower card heats up the upper card (because hot air moves up). Optimizing the airflow in youir tower should help a bit to cool the upper card down. Another thing is that graphics card companies use cheap and often too much thermal paste. After repasting my ASUS 7950 with Thermaltake TG-3 it now runs 11° C cooler than before.

[grimreaper1014]

Thanks a lot for your reply. I really appreciate it greatly. Right now I am trying to mine BTC. However, it doesn't matter to me if I mine LTC or something else too. I am doing this as a little project with my 10 year old son. I told him whatever profits we make if any he can keep. However, we are mostly just doing it for fun. In the future though if I can figure this all out I would like to invest in some better mining equipment for us to tinker around with. He enjoys watching me build computers and work on them. Thats what I do for a living. If figured this would be a fun little competition for us and a chance for him to make a little pocket change in the process 

So Bitcoing is SHA256 based so I would set the intensity to 9 right? Could that possibly be why the one GPU was getting so hot was because I wasn't using a config file and the intensity was too high by default? I have also read that GUI Miner is easier to use for beginners than Cgminer. Should I just go ahead and use that instead? Will it work as good as Cgminer? Thanks again for your help.

[TheHOFF]

Running cards maxed out you will need 25-30 Amps 12V. If you download and run hwinfo http://www.hwinfo.com/ this will show you the AMPS the VRM (Voltage regulators) are pulling. hwinfo will also show your the actual VRM temps this is the important one. Don't run VRM temps over 95 deg C. cgminer only shows thermal diode on PCB and not VRM temp.

create cgminer.bat file (in the cgminer folder) and put in this

setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

cgminer -o http://your.pool:1234 -u user.name -p x --scrypt --intensity 13 --shaders 2048 --worksize 265

Then run the cgminer.bat and should get you started. once cgminer running press S for settings menu and W to write config file. Then you will have cgminer.conf file in cgminer folder. Now you can edit cgminer.bat file to just the following

setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

cgminer --no-submit-stale

This is all you need in cgminer.bat the rest of the settings can be configured in cgminer.conf file and should look like below.

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "http://your.pool";,
"user" : "user.name",
"pass" : "x"
}
]
,
"intensity" : "13",
"vectors" : "1",
"worksize" : "256",
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "8192",
"shaders" : "2048",
"gpu-engine" : "1080",
"gpu-fan" : "100",
"gpu-memclock" : "1500",
"gpu-memdiff" : "0",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"gpu-vddc" : "0.000",
"temp-cutoff" : "95",
"temp-overheat" : "85",
"temp-target" : "75",
"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"gpu-dyninterval" : "7",
"gpu-platform" : "0",
"gpu-threads" : "2",
"hotplug" : "5",
"log" : "5",
"no-pool-disable" : true,
"no-submit-stale" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "30",
"scrypt" : true,
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"shares" : "0",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

[grimreaper1014]

Thanks for your help. I will give this a shot. Should I do what I said in my first post and also set the GPU fan to manual and set it to 100 while mining? Should I do the same with the case fans?

[SirMintALot]

CGMiner and BFGMiner set the Intensity of the main card (thats the one you have connected to a monitor) to a low intensity level so that you still could use it without too much lag. That's usually an intensity of 3 or d (dynamic, where it uses one thread less). If you are just mining with that computer (or don't midn the lag) then rise that card to 9 as well. If you still want to do some stuff (like surfing the web) then try 7 or 8 and see if the lag is acceptable for you.
If you want your child feeling successfull with mining then stay away from Bitcoin and Litecoin, as the difficulty is too high to mine some coins. With your setup you will probably need 45 days for mining one bitcoin (probably even longer as the difficulty is rising a lot because of ASIC miners) and the value is dropping (because of the ASIC miners just dumping their mined coins, and the GPU miners switching to other coins. When the GPU miners move to other coins also the Bitcoin bussiness suffers, so there are less people buying stuff at shops like bitmit or bitcoinpride or bitcoin games like poker or roulette . So there is less demand for bitcoins). Mining Litecoin is easier, you probably will mine a Litecoin within a week. But Litecoins aren't worth much now (<$3). There is a chance that their value will rise when they are traded at Mt.Gox and accepted by more shops. My tip: Mine let him mine some PPCoin. The difficulty is low and with your setup you should be able to mine about 1 PPC per hour. Ok, it's only worth $0.11 per coin, but you will make a lot of coins and there is the chance that its value will rise when shops accept it or Mt.Gox will list it. Another good thing is that it is not only a Proof Of Work coin (getting coins by mining), it is also a Proof Of Stake coin (you get an interrest rate of 1% if you keep your coins for a year). The bad thing is that mined PPCoins needs a lot of confirmations (520 with most pools) which takes about 3 to 4 days before you could move them from the pool to your wallet, but it will teach him to be patient...
Set the  fan to auto (if you don't mind that your card will run a bit hotter) or 85% (if you don't mind the noise). Going over 85% doesn't keep your GPU any cooler than using 85%, but your card will consume more power which could cause stability issues.

[grimreaper1014]

Oh cool thanks for the tips. I plan to bounce around a little and see which one works the best and keeps him the most interested. Our cable provider here sucks really bad for cable TV and internet. Then satellite is terrible due to the trees around my house. Therefore, I switched to DSL from my phone company. For TV I use HULU Plus and Netflix on my Smart TV. Some of the cartoons and stuff my son watches and some programs I watch are not available on those programs. I download torrents of our shows at the end of a season all at once. I was going to mine some Bitcoins to pay for the VPN every month too. It costs me like $6.95USD a month. Is there some cheaper mining equipment that the really expensive ASIC miners I have seen for thousands of dollars we can get pretty cheap to have some fun with and make some coin? I have a friend him and his son do this. They have really expensive equipment though.

[SirMintALot]

Well there are some cheap ASICs, Butterfly Labs Jalapeno isn't that expensive. But there is a long waiting list and the difficulty is rising a lot with every shipped ASIC. When you order a Jalapeno now, you will probably get it in a year, and but the bitcoin difficulty will has risen in that time so much that you never will get your investment back (as it takes longer and long to mine a bicoin with a fixed hashrate). So I would say the best would be mining with your equipmet that you have now and keep an eye open for cheap AMD graphic cards that you can add to your mining rig to increase your hashrate without a big investment. 
If you want to mine Bitcoins: Either mine on one of the big pools with lots of hashing power (BTC Guild, 50BTC, Slush's pool) where the rate of solved blocks is high (you will always only get a small piece of the cake, but you will get lots of pieces in a short time) or use a merged mining pool like Bitparking. Those have less haspower, so it could take a lot of hours to solve a block when the pool is unlucky, but you will not only mine Bitcoins, you will also mine other Coins. Namecoins are currently worth $0,32, IXCoin $0,003 and DevCoin $0,00006. That doesn't sound much, but you will easily mine 100 Devcoins in 1 or 2 days and if you collect them over a longer time then this is some little extra money you can make. Or you can balance your mining to more than one pool. That way you can combine both strategies and get a very constant flow from one of the big pools and a not so constant flow from a merged mining pool, but you will also get those altcoins as a nice little extra.

[grimreaper1014]

After doing some reading around I read that crossfire needs to be disabled when using more than one card for mining. I have disabled it in CCC. Then, it said you need to setup a worker account for both cards. I have done that as well. How do I setup the config file for both workers? Also after setting up my config file is there something I have to do in cgminer to get it to load it after editing it or will it automatically load it if it is optimized correctly? For some reason I tried a config file and it made my cards run really slow.