7970 simultaneous Diablo 3 and mining

[tonto]

So if you're a gaming nerd like me, you might like to know that you can play Diablo 3 and still mine nearly full-bore at the same time, and not taking any noticeable (at least that I could tell) hit on visible FPS.  Any FPS loss that I could detect seemed to be from network lag
 
If there were any hits, my eyes suck then, or I'm just too used to old crappy video cards
 
I wanted to try it so that I could still mine and have the miner use unused GPU processing power when the game wasn't using it, thereby keeping me from "wasting" when I was gaming.  That way it would be above zero during my gaming time, too.
 
Using diablominer

[Kluge]

You're saying you're mining at the full rate - or just that you were able to play a game >30FPS?

[tonto]

er yeah, the latter.  I probably didn't word that very well in my original post.
 
I guess I just meant that if you love to game like I do, you can still do so... i've had games before that crashed when I tried to simultaneously mine, but with D3, I haven't had that problem.

[Kluge]

er yeah, the latter.  I probably didn't word that very well in my original post.
 
I guess I just meant that if you love to game like I do, you can still do so... i've had games before that crashed when I tried to simultaneously mine, but with D3, I haven't had that problem.

Ah, gotcha. I hate mining for what it's done with my thinking. Any time I want to play a game, I'm thinking... "So... if I play for four straight hours, it'll cost $1 + additional CPU power." Goes beyond that, too... Now I'm thinking of how much it costs to watch TV, run fans during summer, turn on the exhaust fan when taking a shower, how much it costs to heat a pot of water, and on and on. - And then there's "how much does it cost to enable high-res shadows in Skyrim given I could otherwise undervolt and downclock the card for the same FPS rate in the game?" Pretty sure I'll be willing to play D3 instead of mining at the full rate, though. 

[tonto]

Ah, gotcha. I hate mining for what it's done with my thinking. Any time I want to play a game, I'm thinking... "So... if I play for four straight hours, it'll cost $1 + additional CPU power." Goes beyond that, too... Now I'm thinking of how much it costs to watch TV, run fans during summer, turn on the exhaust fan when taking a shower, how much it costs to heat a pot of water, and on and on. - And then there's "how much does it cost to enable high-res shadows in Skyrim given I could otherwise undervolt and downclock the card for the same FPS rate in the game?" Pretty sure I'll be willing to play D3 instead of mining at the full rate, though. 

haha, yeah, before mining, it would be nothing that I might sit down in front of a game and just kill time that way, but now I have to ask myself, "Do you *really* want to play that game tonight?  At risk of losing that almost-daily bitcoin?"   
 
I've found myself getting more shit done around the house, fixing my boat, etc, etc.

[Projects]

This thread seems like it was made for me!
Any advices from the op or others would be grateful.
I am new to bitcoin and have just purchased a pc to mine and for gaming  (cant really game on my laptop well) and I am also waiting for D3 and will be playing it intensively when it is released.
The PC I have bought was in a bundle with a 21.5 inch monitor, keyboard and mouse and was a good price however I know I need to upgrade to do the above.
Please advise me what I should/need to upgrade to do this

•Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
•Intel Pentium Dual Core processor
•4Gb RAM
•500Gb hard drive
•USB optical mouse and keyboard included
•DVD+RW drive
•21.5 inch monitor
•8x USB port; HDMI
•Integrated graphics
•Dell Inspiron 620 desktop PC


THANKS

[smracer]

I would use USB graphics cards with that many usb ports.  Did you get the optional data glove?

[Projects]

Hi can you reccomend any usb graphics cards I had no idea they existed.
Also what is an optional data glove?

[-ck]

Dynamic mode in cgminer will allow you to mine and game at the same time as well. If you don't specify an intensity it uses dynamic mode.

[Miner99er]

Also remember Diablo 3 will have it's own marketplace when released.

In game gear for BTC or USD... yes please!

[Kluge]

Also remember Diablo 3 will have it's own marketplace when released.

In game gear for BTC or USD... yes please!

Man... Blizzard staff would be so pissed if after all this work and criticism they've taken for implementing a USD AH, an underground market again popped up because people wanted to trade using BTC instead of USD.

[echris1]

I have two cards running in my gaming PC using cgminer.  At first whenever I played I would just disable the GPU I was using for the desktop in cgminer, and the second one would plug along at full blast just fine.

Now I just set the desktop GPU to dynamic intensity.  Games are a bit choppy at times, but all in all you can't notice that mining is on.  Your MH/s drops accordingly, but only on the one GPU your using for gaming.

I am not in crossfire here, haven't found a game that really needed it and didn't feel like messing with the hassle for mining.

So, if you want to game, try setting cgminer to dynamic and check how the game responds. 

I've never had any problems, although I'm not sure how a single card system would handle this.