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BITCOIN Discussion v. 8 Coins on an Old Computer

Lol I've been BCmining for about 12 hours now, and the electricity has probably cost me ~$0.50 and I've only made 17 cents. I'm a retard. :)
 
^ GTX 275. I figured I'll leave it run when my computer is on anyway since it's not like there's a point in running it or not running it at that point.
 
you can't use geforce for this. does anybody know exactly what difference between gpu architectures allows certain cards to crank out the bitcoins?
 
I'm all for alternative currencies, but I've always been pretty skeptical about BitCoin. I just don't like that the currency isn't tied to something concrete (which the liberty dollar almost did, except they shortchanged it a bit - that's why although I thought it was a great idea in spirit, the actual currency itself was not that fantastic. This strange free online floating currency thing is just far too nebulous and unstable to function as a reliable currency. Granted, I have yet to actually understand how BitCoin actually works - believe me, I've tried, and I've had it explained to me a few times, but it still kind of goes clear over my head.

That said, the Silk Road seems like a great experiment - buying things online with an anonymized currency and an anonymized browser - damn, that's pretty brilliant! And I'm glad to see that transactions have been going pretty well, and it'll be damn interesting to see how this evolves.
 
qwe said:
you can't use geforce for this. does anybody know exactly what difference between gpu architectures allows certain cards to crank out the bitcoins?
Click to expand...

LMFAO did you just say I couldn't use it? Well sorry, tell that to my bitcoins and see what they have to say.
 
Yeah, Geforce cards can use CUDA and OpenCL, nvidia cards only use OpenCL, so anything you can do with an nvidia card you can do with a geforce card, just not as quickly, by the sound of it.

Edit, someone really needs to make OpenCL better, so people bother writing (not so mainstream) applications with it.
 
^ the brand apparently does make a difference here. the nvidia card on that list with the highest mhash/s is 200mhash/s, and that card runs for 750$ on ebay. meanwhile the highest card (2000 mhash/s) is an ATI and runs for about the same cost (1000$), with many ATI cards in the 200-500$ range that can crank out 300-500mhash/s.

bitcoin mining must use a particular type of calculation that ATI's architecture does better with (not saying ATI is better than nvidia... if they programmed the bitcoin software differently, it could just as easily have been nvidia's architecture that we need to use)

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i'm going to give this a shot with a new AMD 5850. at 300-350 mhash/s, i'm told i should net about 3-4$ per day with the current bitcoin value / difficulty level.

i just realized my power supply, however, can't handle it (you need 450-500, i have 350W). PSU's aren't expensive, though, so that's no worry... my question: it's not a home built computer, HP built it, and i selected the nvidia graphics option when i bought it. so i'm wondering if there is anything to look out for on the motherboard in terms of compatibility with the new card.

i don't want to kill my baby ;)
 
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i know the following suggestion for a PSU replacement is not cool, but check it: go to best buy and buy a thermaltake, pay to have them install it so if it breaks everything that fries gets replaced...

...I did it with my HP "powerhouse" when i found out it only had 300 W. You can't run a decent graphics card on that. Don't forget to get a PSU with the extra hook-ups required by all decent graphics cards now, in addition to 500+ Watts for 2011.

btw I ran a thermaltake/high end Radeon with no problems on an HP box. Plugged it in through a Kill-A-Watt to measure how much power it was eating, and it took less than half of what the HP with its stock gpu and psu did. A badass power supply actually uses less power.
 
qwe said:
i just realized my power supply, however, can't handle it (you need 450-500, i have 350W). PSU's aren't expensive, though, so that's no worry... my question: it's not a home built computer, HP built it, and i selected the nvidia graphics option when i bought it. so i'm wondering if there is anything to look out for on the motherboard in terms of compatibility with the new card.

i don't want to kill my baby ;)
Click to expand...

Just make sure it'll fit is about all I can think of, some of the new radeons are huge!
 
qwe said:
^ the brand apparently does make a difference here. the nvidia card on that list with the highest mhash/s is 200mhash/s, and that card runs for 750$ on ebay. meanwhile the highest card (2000 mhash/s) is an ATI and runs for about the same cost (1000$), with many ATI cards in the 200-500$ range that can crank out 300-500mhash/s.

bitcoin mining must use a particular type of calculation that ATI's architecture does better with (not saying ATI is better than nvidia... if they programmed the bitcoin software differently, it could just as easily have been nvidia's architecture that we need to use)

-

i'm going to give this a shot with a new AMD 5850. at 300-350 mhash/s, i'm told i should net about 3-4$ per day with the current bitcoin value / difficulty level.

i just realized my power supply, however, can't handle it (you need 450-500, i have 350W). PSU's aren't expensive, though, so that's no worry... my question: it's not a home built computer, HP built it, and i selected the nvidia graphics option when i bought it. so i'm wondering if there is anything to look out for on the motherboard in terms of compatibility with the new card.

i don't want to kill my baby ;)
Click to expand...

All you really need is 2 power connectors to the card (older PSUs have 1). You can check what kind of lane configuration your board has and what the card needs (8x/16x). Also the PCI-e version can limit the speed. I'd go for 700w or more, would save you from having to get a new one with the next upgrade. Even my 4 core CPU eats over 200w in stress and I can see that growing in the future unless the CPU architecture changes.
 
You need to make sure you have a PCIe lane qwe... 4x/8x/16x doesn't matter, it needs to be 1x or so to bottleneck it


It depends on your video card what PSU you need, but with PSU it's more branding that matters and number of watts (amperage) present on the 12v rail. What you want is a 500w PSU with most of the wattage being possible on the 12v rail for a 6950/6970 or whatever. I've had a 500w antec psu loaded with a 5870 for the past couple months without a hiccup (while also running an overclocked quad core)

PSU manufacturers to buy are:
Corsair
Antec
PC Power and Cooling
Zalman

I would myself grab this one while it's still on sale for $40 after rebate: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371031
 
Tranced said:
So who exactly is paying real money for this stuff? And what do they get in return?
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Investors.... The price of bitcoin has been going up like crazy over the past year, if you had invested two months ago you'd have made 500% at the current price.

It's a speculative market like anything else, it peaked at $30 a few weeks ago and then declined to $12 earlier today, now it's back around 13.50$. It's governed by the rules of economics like pretty much any other supply of a commodity that is determined by deflation.

You can also use bitcoins to buy things at the following retailers: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
 
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