Bitcoin

[Aaron Murakami]

You can OC those cards without them burning out. You stay with the default settings and keep upping the TC by 2056 threads until it crashes. Then back down 2056. Then up the Mem bit by bit until it crashes then back off a bit. Then start at about 40% of the mem speed for the engine and go up bit by bit until you see a peak speed and when it starts to fall, back off. Then you have your settings. If they become unstable after running a while, leave the TC and back off the mem and eng a bit. With the stock settings, I get about 370 khs on the 270x's, and with tuning like that, I get 420 khs very stable running 24/7 and over 1 week with 8 cards, 1 card maybe go dead in cgminer. Of course the card didn't die, just needs reboot. That is really, really stable. And with a box fan on them to keep the temp down 10-15 degrees, they'll last a really long time. I also run these at Intensity 20 and still no problems. My cards stay in the 64-70C range. Without the box fan, can get to 79-80C so the fan max a big difference.

I am going to be taking Dogecoin for all our digital products and the others I listed. Will just take time to make the buttons and put on replica pages specific to cryptocoins. Teslacoin isn't in the coinpayments.net system yet but I hope it is soon. For now, we can just take the payments direct to the wallet address.

The Teslacoin is more profitable than litecoin right now as well. I'll have to check out that multipool which shows the most profitable.

One thing that you might like to know is if you have an account at the cryptsy exchange, you can set it so that any alt coins that get sent to your acct there, you can have them automatically converted to bitcoin or litecoin on the fly so makes it really easy. Haven't done that myself, but that's about as hands off as you can get it.

[ZPDM]

Just wanted to thank you for getting me to go back and try and tweak the cards. I finally realized I had to max out the powertune setting to 20 on cgminer, otherwise whenever I bumped up the memclock the engine clock just slowed down and it was limited no matter what without the extra power. So I am getting maybe another 25-40 Khz per card, not as dramatic percentage wise as what you did but it is still like adding another 50-100 dollars worth of hardware for free and it should be there making coins month after month. Now that I got the hang of it it is sort of addicting to see just how high a hash rate you can get. I had the TC set pretty high to start but that will be my next thing to look at and who knows I may just get another 25-40 Khz. Did you get a chance to look at multipool and/or similar mining approaches? I am a big fan of litecoin, but you can just mine the most profitable coin and trade it into litecoin and have more than if you mined litecoin.

Bad news of late for bitcoin what with the Russian central bank saying anyone using bitcoin will be considered under suspicion and probably more importantly MtGox going Code Blue (i.e. cardiac arrest). I am 90 percent of the opinion it is just ineptitude (I mean they were just magic the gathering card trading exchange in what 2009, 2010) but there is that 10 percent that they or the banks they were dealing with were persuaded. I mean unless or until bitcoin is widespread the exchanges to fiat seem an obvious point of attack. I am also surprised though how resilient bitcoin has been, it has really only dropped 10-15 percent after a huge exchange has just stopped trading for unclear reasons. I guess we will learn more Monday. Dogecoin will have its block reward halved around the 14th. I am guessing that and the Olympics may help out Doge and if so I am darn sure going to convert a good percentage to fiat later this month. While I hate to say it I think the argument about bitcoin being too deflationary (well maybe this pull back is a good thing) may have some validity, the transaction volume has just not increased anywhere near what the price has. Heck I just want to try and convert half of it into fiat each month, then if it all crashes in a few months, no worries. One last thing, Dogecoin started a new charity, "4 paws for disability" teaming with a group that trains service dogs for kids with disabilities. I was no big spender here, just giving them a few doge but the thing I realized (besides it being a couple clicks to send) right after I sent it was, they don't know who I am. Don't mean that philosophically, I mean, no junk mail, no selling my e-mail address, no spam.

[Aaron Murakami]

Just wanted to thank you for getting me to go back and try and tweak the cards. I finally realized I had to max out the powertune setting to 20 on cgminer, otherwise whenever I bumped up the memclock the engine clock just slowed down and it was limited no matter what without the extra power. So I am getting maybe another 25-40 Khz per card, not as dramatic percentage wise as what you did but it is still like adding another 50-100 dollars worth of hardware for free and it should be there making coins month after month. Now that I got the hang of it it is sort of addicting to see just how high a hash rate you can get. I had the TC set pretty high to start but that will be my next thing to look at and who knows I may just get another 25-40 Khz. Did you get a chance to look at multipool and/or similar mining approaches? I am a big fan of litecoin, but you can just mine the most profitable coin and trade it into litecoin and have more than if you mined litecoin.

Bad news of late for bitcoin what with the Russian central bank saying anyone using bitcoin will be considered under suspicion and probably more importantly MtGox going Code Blue (i.e. cardiac arrest). I am 90 percent of the opinion it is just ineptitude (I mean they were just magic the gathering card trading exchange in what 2009, 2010) but there is that 10 percent that they or the banks they were dealing with were persuaded. I mean unless or until bitcoin is widespread the exchanges to fiat seem an obvious point of attack. I am also surprised though how resilient bitcoin has been, it has really only dropped 10-15 percent after a huge exchange has just stopped trading for unclear reasons. I guess we will learn more Monday. Dogecoin will have its block reward halved around the 14th. I am guessing that and the Olympics may help out Doge and if so I am darn sure going to convert a good percentage to fiat later this month. While I hate to say it I think the argument about bitcoin being too deflationary (well maybe this pull back is a good thing) may have some validity, the transaction volume has just not increased anywhere near what the price has. Heck I just want to try and convert half of it into fiat each month, then if it all crashes in a few months, no worries. One last thing, Dogecoin started a new charity, "4 paws for disability" teaming with a group that trains service dogs for kids with disabilities. I was no big spender here, just giving them a few doge but the thing I realized (besides it being a couple clicks to send) right after I sent it was, they don't know who I am. Don't mean that philosophically, I mean, no junk mail, no selling my e-mail address, no spam.

In my mind, I have two analog dials when tuning the cards, one for frequency and one for pulsewidth. That isn't really what it is with card tuning, but what I have found is there are non-linear tuning zones. Most experts talk about boosting TC until crash and back off. Then increase mem until lock up and back off. Then tune engine starting at half of mem and increase until you see peak then it goes down and back off back to the peak. Well, once you do all that, if you go back and tweak the mem a little you might see another gain, then go back and tweak the engine and you might see another gain. I got the idea from tuning some high frequency circuits pulsing an inductive resistor using a frequency and pulse width dial and I was able to get results that weren't possible until you tuned it to one peak level first, then starting at that level, it would still be boosted. I also found the same with the SG but that is a long conversation for now. Can explain at another time.

Teslacoin will have a decrease in coins per block pretty soon - decrease by 18.56% because Tesla was born in 1856! Seriously! lol It is TWICE as profitable to mine Teslacoin as Litecoin now for the same equipment. I have not had time to check out multipool, etc... not enough hours in the day!

[Tom C]

guys,

can you recommend a couple of good gpu's I have everything else except the right graphics cards.

Tom C

[Aaron Murakami]

guys,

can you recommend a couple of good gpu's I have everything else except the right graphics cards.

Tom C

It is the most cost effective to use R9 270x's instead of 290x's. 290x's cost about 3times as much for only twice as much hash rate so payoff is longer. Asus is the one ones I'd use because they have the best heat sinks, but I'd still blow a box fan on them.

Quantity depends on your mother board, you'll need riser cables if you want 4 cards per rig. If you have two x16 pcie slots and one or two x1 pcie slots you can do 3-4 cards.

To put them directly on the board, 2 max is probably most you want to do. Dropping the motherboard into the bottom of a plastic crate and supsending the cards above and connecting with riser cables is the standard way to go.

[ZPDM]

Tom,

Wow! Welcome aboard and may this be a worthwhile and profitable venture for all. While I suspect Aaron has done his homework at least until recently the AMD 7950s were best cost/hash followed by the R 290s not R 290x's which cost an arm and a leg and aren't much better than 290s. The prices for all GPUs good at mining have increased some 30-50 percent or more. While I haven't used it I found this site http://www.gpuscanner.com/ which tracks available GPUs may be worthwhile. Finding a good GPU is the toughest part. The other thing to factor into your cost/benefit is how many GPUs you will run per rig. If you run 4 (or more) perhaps the less powerful less costly 270x's may make sense. If you run only two or three a more powerful GPU may make more sense as the cost for the motherboard, power supply, etc should remain constant, or close to constant. I used the two tutorials linked to at this site https://litecoin.info/Mining_tutorials to get up to speed. I'm by no means expert and am actually surprised I was able to get things running so relatively easily but let me know if you have any questions and I will try and help.

[Tom C]

thanks Z,

the more I researched the more it seems like a way to do "forex" style trading while not accruing much risk.... we will see! I wont mind getting 270's I think as I am just rying to learn.

Tom C

[ZPDM]

Bitcoin Update,

I am so proud of/happy for bitcoin at the moment. On the technological end at least, it seems the gloves came off this last week in the attacks on bitcoin. The previously largest bitcoin exchange Mtgox reported a problem with how it handled transactions, basically while the bitcoin information was safe, the header information on each packet had a potential vulnerability that if not paid attention to could lead an exchange to pay a customer twice. Mt.Gox had a lot of custom software code and got burned on this, leading them to shutdown the exchange until they could try and clean up the mess (also depending on how many times they double paid, they may not have sufficient funds to cover all withdrawals, very fortunate I had nothing to do with them). While they were only the third or fourth largest exchange when they went down it dropped the price of bitcoins/dollar from about 800-700.

The next day there was a "massive and concerted" DDOS attack on all major bitcoin exchanges where they were flooded with transactions with faulty header information. While it didn't compromise any coins it led the currently largest bitcoin exchange, Bitstamp (based out of Solvenia don't ya know), to stop withdrawals for a day or two until they dealt with the problem. There were also 6000 (if memory serves) bitcoins dumped onto a major exchange in a few seconds leading the price to drop to something like 200 dollars or less for a few minutes on that exchange. There were hundreds of articles out with headlines trumpeting, "bitcoin crashes", ""Is it finally the end" and the like. I read a bit on the bitcoin forums about other potential vulnerabilities and someone mentioned a potential "time stamp" vulnerability. At the very same time there was the largest DDOS attack yet recorded on timestamp servers. The price of bitcoin then proceeded to plummet from 700 to ... 600 while it is now around 640. I am convinced (well pretty suspicious) it was expected these actions would drop the price to 10 - 100/bitcoin. It didn't, and as the previous argument was that bitcoin was too deflationary to ever be a currency it looks rather comical, even as the uber geek squad attends to the glitches pointed out in the system. Now make no mistake, I understand that bitcoin may just go to zero, but it held up remarkably, astonishingly (in my mind) well against this attack. I think the attackers didn't bank on the fact that the majority of bitcoin holders are still primarily nerds and engineering types, so when they realized there was no flaw in the underlying protocol they would be embarrassed to sell.

In the meantime, the adoption of bitcoin by merchants proceeds apace, another 60 or so merchants showed up on coinmap.org over the past couple days, a bit better than they had been doing for the past week or two and no drop off in coinbase merchants. In other news, a couple programmers on the dogecoin reddit forum are claiming to be closing in on 1) A tipbot (a way to tip people for comments or articles) that would work on Facebook and other major social media sites. This blew my mind because if it can work, it opens up a whole new way to monetize content. 2) And this one really, really blew my mind, but a very good programmer at the Dogecoin reddit forum is saying (mind you dogecoin has only been around for maybe nine weeks) he has a beta that he wants to try and test soon of a browser (say firefox) extension that would pop up over various merchants like Amazon and let you purchase anything there in bitcoin, litecoin or dogecoin. As far as I can see the merchant wouldn't even be directly involved as the conversions to fiat would be handled by the pop-up. If this could potentially, maybe, possibly happen it could increase the number of merchants "accepting" bitcoin (and Doge) by orders of magnitude over night. While Doge may also go to zero, we helped get the Indian luger to the Olympics, the Jamacain Bobsledders (who are racing in a couple of days) to the Olympics and trained some service dogs for disabled children, that can never be taken away.

[ZPDM]

Dammit Tom, Why'd you have to say that! Keep in mind I've only been at this a few weeks and a good trade has been "wheww a Starbucks cup of coffee" but "Forex" arbitrage trades have been maybe 5 percent of my profit. If liquidity remains and imbalances between exchanges remain it may be more than 5 percent going forward.

[Aaron Murakami]

Tom,

Wow! Welcome aboard and may this be a worthwhile and profitable venture for all. While I suspect Aaron has done his homework at least until recently the AMD 7950s were best cost/hash followed by the R 290s not R 290x's which cost an arm and a leg and aren't much better than 290s. The prices for all GPUs good at mining have increased some 30-50 percent or more. While I haven't used it I found this site http://www.gpuscanner.com/ which tracks available GPUs may be worthwhile. Finding a good GPU is the toughest part. The other thing to factor into your cost/benefit is how many GPUs you will run per rig. If you run 4 (or more) perhaps the less powerful less costly 270x's may make sense. If you run only two or three a more powerful GPU may make more sense as the cost for the motherboard, power supply, etc should remain constant, or close to constant. I used the two tutorials linked to at this site https://litecoin.info/Mining_tutorials to get up to speed. I'm by no means expert and am actually surprised I was able to get things running so relatively easily but let me know if you have any questions and I will try and help.

Let me clarify my r9 270x cost/hash - r9 270's are the most cost effect that you can actually get your hands on! LOL

I watch the parts carefully and the 7950 series seem to be way harder to get than the r9 270's. Actually, I hardly see the 7950's in stock almost ever. I'm sticking with the R9 270x's just because I have my little system down with all tuning specs for 99.9% stability and have been very happy with them.

I have played with 6 cards with a MSI board and can get it to work but can get glitchy. I now prefer just 4 gpu's per motherboard in a crate and that is about it.

Sempron 145 cpu - lower power 45 watt chip that is cheap $30-40 - not a AM3+ chip but I use a AM3+ MB that it fits on Asus M5A97 R2.0. 4gb ram and that's about it. Power supply, I use only 1050 watt modular so with 4 rigs, it is drawing about 650 watts or so total - stay at 75% or less than the PSU rating since they'll run 24/7. No hard drive or windows OS needed, just get a 4gb usb drive and burn BAMT 1.2 on it. I saw 1.3 come out with newer drives for the r9 series cards but 1.2 works fine and I'll wait until everyone else works out the bugs before I try 1.3. That's the setup I use. Then I TTY into the rig over lan cable to setup passwords, etc... then I go into it with remote access, set config files for the mining pool and boom - all done.

[Aaron Murakami]

Security = diversification and I realize that the entire fiat money scheme is a house of cards right now anyway so having a small interest in bitcoin no matter the risk is better than not having any of it. Nothing is guaranteed so diversify and then diversify your diversifications. lol

[Tom C]

Aaron and Z,

you have brought up something that I want to ask.... are there no older GPU that can work? bitcoin has been mined for a long time and it seems that these Radeon cards are fairly new? the mobo I am going to use only has 2 16X pcie slots.

2nd can your mining machine be used for something esle also, seems a waste of a processor and ram if the GPU is doind all the work, especially since its not on the main processor bus but all on the pcie bus.... the chipset is handling instructions for the GPU. seems you could slap a couple of cards in your desktop, keep your office warm and do some mining at the same time....

not fond of terminal interfaces, I prefer a Gui and I have several license for windows XP including a site license for unlimited machines at my ip address pool. been with XP for years so will probably stick with that.


for me this whole thing will run off solar.... I have a 4.6 KW array, and am adding 3KW to the Roof of Teslagenx shop, so the whole shop will be off the Grid except when I need to weld or run the Mill or lathe, that is just too much power for batteries at this point.
Tom C

[ZPDM]

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

Gives a sortable database of what hash rate people are reporting they are getting from different cards. One thing you can see is you don't want to use an Nvidia card, might be better for gaming but not half as good for hashing. There may be older cards that are less powerful but are a better deal price/hash, you have to look around but it has unfortunately all gotten more expensive. Yes people have been mining for awhile with GPUs but the difficulty of the mining adjusts every few days to how many people are mining so as to keep the release of coins at a constant rate. Back when it started you could have mined 100s of bitcoins with a CPU, now if you go after bitcoin (instead of litecoin or another of the Scrypt algorithim coins) it probably wouldn't even cover the cost of electricity to mine with a GPU, you would need an ASIC. I wouldn't try and ASIC mine, at least two of the companies selling ASICs are being sued for not delivering products (why would they if they can make more money mining themselves with their product).

If you have two 16x pcie slots you may also have two 1x pcie slots and you can use 1->16 Powered riser cables for two more cards, doesn't slow down the hash rate, but you would almost certainly need a new PSU. I worked on getting two cards working first then later decided to expand the rig. The GPUs are doing the work so yes you could still use the machine as a desktop I'm pretty sure, but, you will probably be running the fans at like 80 percent, especially without riser cables so it would be noisy, maybe annoyingly so.

There is a GUIminer program, but it may be worth a few hours to get up to speed on the command line cgminer as it is pretty much the standard. I'm running Linux but that's partly because I'm cheap and stubborn and didn't want to buy a copy of windows. In fairness, the driver support should be better with Windows and you can do somethings, like undervolting the cards, in Windows that you can't in Linux, that could be important with running off solar.

[Aaron Murakami]

Aaron and Z,

you have brought up something that I want to ask.... are there no older GPU that can work? bitcoin has been mined for a long time and it seems that these Radeon cards are fairly new? the mobo I am going to use only has 2 16X pcie slots.

2nd can your mining machine be used for something esle also, seems a waste of a processor and ram if the GPU is doind all the work, especially since its not on the main processor bus but all on the pcie bus.... the chipset is handling instructions for the GPU. seems you could slap a couple of cards in your desktop, keep your office warm and do some mining at the same time....

not fond of terminal interfaces, I prefer a Gui and I have several license for windows XP including a site license for unlimited machines at my ip address pool. been with XP for years so will probably stick with that.


for me this whole thing will run off solar.... I have a 4.6 KW array, and am adding 3KW to the Roof of Teslagenx shop, so the whole shop will be off the Grid except when I need to weld or run the Mill or lathe, that is just too much power for batteries at this point.
Tom C

Radeon cards have been around for a while with different # series. But i wouldn't do anything older than a r9270x because of not enough hashing power. There are the 7950's but hard to get. Are there any 1X pcie slots on your board? You can use those too with a 1X to 16X riser cable.

I wouldn't use the computer while mining. I do, but it is problematic if you have the intensity on the mining up too high. I have 2 x 270x's in my tower that I mine with when I go to bed. If they're running while using computer, it works, but the screen gets glitchy plus you have to sit there and listen to the fans. If you turned the intensity down to 10 or something, then much better - I leave them at 20 (max). That's why to get just a cheap processor for the dedicated rigs - sempron 145 - almost 3 ghz chip and only $30-40 and low power 40 watt max or so.

You will have trouble mining with XP - can't even get the proper graphics kits for them from amd - they were all yanked. If you can find them, let me know. Win 7 is minimum to preserve your sanity or use the free linux on usb drive - especially if it is dedicated to mining.

Each r9 270x draws maybe 160w max at full 20 intensity. You're under 700 watts on a 4 card machine like that.

[Tom C]

ok thanks Aaron... soon as I get my 3D printer finished its my next project.

Tom C