yay, stupid newbie miner questions!

[brokedummy]

Hi guys I'm back! I just got my Radeon HD 6850 in the mail. Got it installed and the drivers sorted out, now I mine at around 100KH/s I guess. Whatever that means. So my questions are: how do I calculate how much power I use so that I know if I am mining coins for less cost than I could buy them. What do all these initials and numbers mean in cgminer, and how best to set up my mining operation to start generating some coins at a profit. I was thinking the easiest would be to use these new profit switching pools. Any favorites? How I do set up failover pools? Is it weird that my brand new refurbished graphics card started out at 100C before I even ran anything, probably a false reading? Lots of questions I know, hope you all can answer some for me!

[leetmodz]

Hi guys I'm back! I just got my Radeon HD 6850 in the mail. Got it installed and the drivers sorted out, now I mine at around 100KH/s I guess. Whatever that means. So my questions are: how do I calculate how much power I use so that I know if I am mining coins for less cost than I could buy them. What do all these initials and numbers mean in cgminer, and how best to set up my mining operation to start generating some coins at a profit. I was thinking the easiest would be to use these new profit switching pools. Any favorites? How I do set up failover pools? Is it weird that my brand new refurbished graphics card started out at 100C before I even ran anything, probably a false reading? Lots of questions I know, hope you all can answer some for me!

coinwarz.com is a pretty good way of getting profit estimates. https://www.multipool.in/ is a good switching pool.

[brokedummy]

What is share difficulty and what should I set mine at?

[leetmodz]

Its how hard each share the pool gives you to complete. The higher the diff, the higher the payout, but the harder (slower) it is to complete. At least I think that's how it works.

I am not sure what the optimal diff is for your card, but what you can do is sign up for a pool that has vardiff. Let your card mine their for 10-20 minutes or so, and then see what the pool sets the diff to, and use that number.
 

[brokedummy]

I tried to let it run last night but it shut off on me. I am upping the temp cutoff to see if I can get a full night out of her. I'm not sure my thermometer works correctly. It starts at 100c and never changes much more than +-5, when I would expect it to start low and slowly get hot. I might just have to hope it's not really getting dangerously hot. Also, I still need some help tweaking and optimizing graphics card and miner and pool settings and help calculating power consumption and profitability. Is there a guide to getting started with these calculations? I think I'll have to do my mining when I am not using the computer because the lag is unbearable. Hopefully people will start selling their litecoin rigs cheap and I can get a dedicated machine.

[brokedummy]

I left it running and when I came back where it normally says the KH/s rate it said DEAD. It tried to turn it back on and it still works, not sure what happened.

[leetmodz]

I left it running and when I came back where it normally says the KH/s rate it said DEAD. It tried to turn it back on and it still works, not sure what happened.

The driver probably crashed.

Try doing a 3d stability test like unigen heaven or furmark, and see if it runs stable for 10 mins.

[brokedummy]

Seems to pass the furmark burn in test for 11 minutes at least. Temps are good it shows 55C the whole time. I knew something was fishy with the cgminer temps. It would be something on my end and not the pool itself right?

[brokedummy]

The next time I ran the miner after I ran the furmark benchmark it was really unstable. I had to reboot. I use these parameters for cgminer, --intensity 18 --gpu-threads 1 --worksize 256 --thread-concurrency 6144 --auto-fan --temp-target 80 --temp-cutoff 95 Anything I can tweak here or what to look for. I just found somebody that had the Radeon HD 6850 and this is what they were using, maybe mine is a little different? I'm just not sure where to start.

[leetmodz]

Seems to pass the furmark burn in test for 11 minutes at least. Temps are good it shows 55C the whole time. I knew something was fishy with the cgminer temps. It would be something on my end and not the pool itself right?

Yea, I can't see how it would be the pool. It shouldn't be running much higher in temp mining than what it shows while running furmark, so yea, there must be something wrong with your cgminer.

Unfortunately, I am not sure where to go from here, as I use cudaminer (Nvidia). Maybe you can try lowering the intensity to 10 and see what happens with that, and then move up slowly to something stable.

[Grasberg]

What is share difficulty

Difficulty is how hard it is to compute a hash.  With the same computing power, higher difficulty will produce fewer hashes (and thus fewer chances of a coin solo and fewer shares in a pool).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

[formar]

I am just a noob to mining, but I know dust buildup in old laptops can stop them working and shorten their lives. Maybe the same thing can happen to a graphics card. If you want to safely remove the dust from a laptop you have to buy a special electronics wriststrap which has a wire coming off it to conduct electrostatic electricity built up on your body to the ground. You attach the wire to some safe ground point like a copper water pipe.

If you take the back off a laptop without one you risk frying the electronics. It might be worth buying a cheap one off ebay for a few dollars then checking your graphics card while wearing it.