Best AGP ATI card for mining

[hotwired007]

basically i want a fan heater that also mines (its aproaching winter and i want to keep the temperature above freezing in one of my outside buildings - i either buy a heater or use one of my old PCs/wifi )

the PC (old SFF cube PCs) only have AGP and supports single core CPU (Socket 775 (P4 2. or A (Athlon 2600+)) - i have been contemplating just CPU mining for the hell of it but a GPU might be better

any recommendations?

[HellDiverUK]

Pointless.  Anything AGP won't be fast enough, even if it did have STREAM/OpenCL.  A HD9550 is the newest AGP card you can get, and you're probably faster mining with your CPU.

[Kluge]

It would be dramatically more cost-efficient to purchase an electric heater than pretend you're getting free heat mining a few Satoshis per day.

(Even if you had "free electricity," it would be more cost-effective to purchase an electric heater)

ETA: Without fail, every time someone talks about GPU mining, I forget altcoins exist.

[hotwired007]

Pointless.  Anything AGP won't be fast enough, even if it did have STREAM/OpenCL.  A HD9550 is the newest AGP card you can get, and you're probably faster mining with your CPU.

I've never heard of a HD9550 - got a link?

Edit - googled - you mean Radeon 9550

AGP 8x has maximum capacity of 2112Mb/s - PCIe 1x has 500Mb/s and some Bitcoin GPU miners are running on PCIe 1x ports...

I am currently scrypt mining on 3x 8x and 1x 4x PCI slots which are all slower than a single AGP bus.

the electric heater i'm looking at is 400-1200w - my PC pulls far less than the 400w i'm not comparing heat output vs power consumption - just the fact that all it will actually be is a heater in effect

the best cards ive found are probably 4670s (Whopping 40MHash!) - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison - also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port (under Legacy)

Now to see if i can find one cheap (ie giving away!)

[bitman442]

I have a suggestion. Since it is entirely pointless to mine with such ancient hardware, why not use the wasted cycles for something beneficial like folding@home?

[redtwitz]

Pointless.  Anything AGP won't be fast enough, even if it did have STREAM/OpenCL.  A HD9550 is the newest AGP card you can get, and you're probably faster mining with your CPU.

[...]

AGP 8x has maximum capacity of 2112Mb/s - PCIe 1x has 500Mb/s and some Bitcoin GPU miners are running on PCIe 1x ports...

That's not the problem. While the AGP interface may be fast enough for mining, there are no fast AGP video cards...

Keep in mind that a 40 Mhps GPU offers no advantage over a traditional heater. At the current difficulty, it will generate BTC 0.00125 per week. At 20 % difficulty increase every 2016 blocks, it won't generate more than BTC 0.015 before hell freezes over.

[ajw7989]

AGP is very old technology and just because of that the cards are also old therefore will produce almost nothing in MH/s. You are better off with just a regular PCI slot if your computer has that

[digit]

i had a HD4650 AGP, kept my socket A athlon working for alot longer as a gaming pc.  even ran skyrim and borderlands decently.
its in storage nw, incase i ever need it lol

AFAIK this is the most advanced card available for AGP.  Its also what made me a AMD/ATI fan

[hotwired007]

i had a HD4650 AGP, kept my socket A athlon working for alot longer as a gaming pc.  even ran skyrim and borderlands decently.
its in storage nw, incase i ever need it lol

Its a shame i cant do anything with my old nVidia cards - used to be an AMD / nVidia gamer now more of an Intel / AMD gamer/miner

[ssateneth]

AGP is an obsolete interface. There are zero modern graphics cards that utilize the AGP bus interface. Whatever your computer is, it is probably crazy slow compared to modern cpu/motherboard/ram. If you have an available older PCI slot, look into a PCI to PCI-E adapter. You don't be able to direct plug full height gpu cards in it and close your computer case, but they will plug in. Here is a picture of a gigabyte 7970 plugged into the aforementioned PCI to PCI-E adapter and mining bitcoins as well as showing power draw at the wall with kill a watt.

You can buy on newegg for $39 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1JM0ZD9502
Or you can buy on ebay for $23 http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-Expresscard-X1-X4-X8-X16-to-PCI-Card-Adapter-New-/171028509194?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27d217f20a

[Grim]

ah nice thread, i have a HD 3870 AGP at home but never tried to mine with it well it would be only "worth" it with free electricity 


@ ssateneth

ty for the ebay link for this pci to pci-e adapter quite cheap and I will consider it for an old rig which has 2 old pci slots.

Besides that I wonder if it is wise to plug in the gpu directly because the old pci slot is not rated for up to 75 watt of power so I would feel better using a powered riser alongside with that adapter.
Moreover I wonder if there would be an even cheaper pci adapter out there providing only a pci-e x1 slot instead of this x16 slot. (hint: powered riser ...)

[ssateneth]

The slot is mechanically 16x, but is electrically 1x.

[frank754]

The adapter sounds like a great idea. I too have an older box with an AGP slot and an ancient GPU to ditch, but the PCI Express 1.0 adapter you mention above could work to be able to use a newer card. Trouble is, I think the rig only has about 1/2 GB memory and a 280 watt power supply. even with a good card, I wonder if the memory will slow it down or overheat the PS?
Also, my PS only has the 4-pin power cables (for older hard drives and CD drives), if the GPU needs to be externally powered could I use these with some sort of adapter?

[HellDiverUK]

For scrypt mining you need at least 4GB of RAM.

[frank754]

Yes, I guess I'll have to give up on my oldest boxes, I have 3 of them, 2 are about 10 years old and one is actually from 1998. Mobos will never support anything decent. I can build an entire new computer for under $200 from Portatech.com, not including case, PS, or the GPU. But the GPU alone shoots it right up into the $600+ range in most cases.