Mining Altcoins.

[Theelguy]

Hello,
Had to build a virtualization pc and decided to buy 3 amd 7950 instead of one since they were on sale and put them on a 3 way Crossfire or something.
I only need 1 of them for my virtualization things, can i use the other 2 in the same PC mining coins without damaging PC performance?
My CPU and RAM will be working close to 100% with virtualization, i know the GPUs will be useless while mining, but CPU and RAM should remain almost unused by the mining program right?
Anyone has info/links about this?

Regards.

[Walkir]

Hello,

It depends from your configuration.
I am mining using 3 cards and I have no problem using my PC for e-mail/chat/www/etc... but I have i7 4core & 16GB RAM.
If you want to increase your efficiency invest also in RAM, virtualization uses it a lot...

[omnomnomnom]

That's interesting question.

Let me tell you my experience.
Under Windows, I was able to work normally on Windows while mining at "full speed".
Under Linux, it was very hard to work normally while mining - user interface was very laggy, even ssh.
Dunno why - the configuration was the same.
That's without virtualization, I can't tell what will be the difference with virtualization.

Also, I have seen posts where people said that they were able to play games while mining - with decreased performance of both mining and gaming.

[TJAP]

You can set the priority on cpu and gpu so that you can comfortably use multiple applications without burning out ur computer while mining.

[aesma]

It really depends on intensity from my experience, and maybe the type of card too. On my desktop I've got a 5870 and it performs best for mining at intensity=18, however the computer is totally unusable, taking seconds to display things. When I use the computer I must set intensity=13 and lose 1/3 of my peak mining performance.

On a dedicated rig however, with 3*290 and intensity=20, the desktop is still responsive.