[How to] fund your cruncher's utility bill OR how to make money using bitcoin

[slaveondope]

Sapphire Xtreme 5830 stock volts 950/300 1.163v

[artemm]

Just signed up on Tradehill. Referral code is -> TH-R14100.

Waiting for the difficulty jump in about 12 hours. Curious how much the price per BTC will go up if it'll go up at all.

If you were the only one who knew about it and it was a surprise to everyone else tomorrow, then there would be a correction you could cash in on.

However, since it's well known, the current price already has people's opinions on the increasing difficulty factored in.

[INFRNL]

Anyone solved the high cpu usage on win7 64 and multi cards (I get it on a single card too)

I had a look around and saw that drivers/sdk won't fix this.... is it a win7 thing?

I use -f1 or -f2 on a system with this issue and the cpu usage went away

Lol!! Saw this this morning on BTCguild and laughed pretty hard. I love XS:

More servers coming online this week. The 800~900 GH/sec growth this week was not anticipated.

saw this too

Anyone else getting connection error problems today? My two cards are down more than up it seems

I have noticed serious connection issues for the past couple days

[Reflex1]

Can someone explain how to optimize a 5870? Its currently doing 230 Mhash/s ...it should be doing about 375 mhash. So what am i doing wrong?

I have win 7 64, 11.5 cat, sdk 2.1, flag: -v -w128

edit: nevermind, i fixed it. opengl was not installed properly lol

[[XC] Oj101]

Both exchanges seem to have dropped PayPal, that leaves me out of the picture (South Africa). Would anyone here be interested in exchanging my coins and keeping say 5% for themselves?

[Toolius]

Both exchanges seem to have dropped PayPal, that leaves me out of the picture (South Africa). Would anyone here be interested in exchanging my coins and keeping say 5% for themselves?

Virwox still does paypal and works very well too !
1) First deposit your BTC in the exchange
2) Then sell the BTC for SLL ( linden dollars ) BTC/SLL
3) Sell the SLL for USD (USD/SLL)
4) Withdraw to paypal.
5) Party !!! :P

[Blauhung]

was there a glossary of flags somewhere?


Edit: I did find this

-f FRAMES, --frames=FRAMES
will try to bring single kernel execution to 1/frames
seconds, default=30, increase this for less desktop
lag

-a ASKRATE, --askrate=ASKRATE
how many seconds between getwork requests, default 5,
max 10
-w WORKSIZE, --worksize=WORKSIZE
work group size, default is maximum returned by opencl
-v, --vectors use vectors

[jcool]

You made me go looking for info on phoenix, p2501, and I am rather glad I did so thanks {thumbsup}

If you want you can run guiminer with phoenix. get it here: http://cloud.github.com/downloads/Ki...r-20110609.exe

How to use:

Run GUIMiner as usual, then go File -> New other miner and navigate up one directory and pick phoenix.exe. Then enter your info as usual and start mining.

The following flags gave me a boost from 375 to 389 Mhash/sec on my 5870's


-k phatk VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=14 WORKSIZE=128

Thanks for this, was having issues with idles as well, heard Phoenix was better at handling connection issues, so I tried - well, it was a fail on my mainrig at least. Using those settings on my 5870's got me the worst GUI lag ever, PC was completely unusable. Hash rate lower than with poclbm and -v -w256 where there is 0 lag either. I think this may only work on SDK 2.4 as this rig is on 2.1 - gonna try with a 2.4 SDK rig.

[Reflex1]

How do i stop my 5870 from downclocking to 157/300 mhz?

i understand this is normal (under normal circumstances), but i want it to run 100% all the time for obvious reasons lol

[OldChap]

Thanks for this, was having issues with idles as well, heard Phoenix was better at handling connection issues, so I tried - well, it was a fail on my mainrig at least. Using those settings on my 5870's got me the worst GUI lag ever, PC was completely unusable. Hash rate lower than with poclbm and -v -w256 where there is 0 lag either. I think this may only work on SDK 2.4 as this rig is on 2.1 - gonna try with a 2.4 SDK rig.

Initially I misspelled AGGRESSION and only had around 89% GPU so maybe, just maybe, because I am at work and cannot test, Try lowering that number some to see if it helps.

I tried to connect to my rig and it seems to still have a driver issue, yesterday I kept getting hangs or bsods (xxx0116) atisomethingorother. Sometimes this shows as driver stopped and re-started.

This was not an issue on 7 and i7 but on this c2q Vista rig something is amiss

[shoota]

Quote: How do i stop my 5870 from downclocking to 157/300 mhz?

i understand this is normal (under normal circumstances), but i want it to run 100% all the time for obvious reasons lol

It is normal, those are 2D/idle clocks. Now, if that's happening while you're mining then there's an issue. But it will most likely downclock during a connection issue and that's normal and nothing to worry about.

[Reflex1]

It is normal, those are 2D/idle clocks. Now, if that's happening while you're mining then there's an issue. But it will most likely downclock during a connection issue and that's normal and nothing to worry about.

Hmmz, yes its doing this while it's mining. When i start the guiminer, it does 380 mhash for like a few mins but then this drops to between 200 - 300 mhash depending on how much it downclocks. sometimes it downclocks to 600, and sometimes 157. is there a way to get it to run at 100% all the time?

[RCG_Bex]

I still can't help but think that this is either...

a). a stunt from AMD - paying you to invest & win the market over
b). powering the major hacks that are going on around the world (after all, I did read some where that this is decryption that is being processed was developed by a hacker)

...with b) it makes sense especially since the FBI are now involved - how else would you get such a powerful PC that decrypts everything so fast (ie. Sony, Code Masters, The american bank)?

But a) also makes sense... or it could be neither. My gut feeling is bad about it though...

~Bex

[shoota]

Hmmz, yes its doing this while it's mining. When i start the guiminer, it does 380 mhash for like a few mins but then this drops to between 200 - 300 mhash depending on how much it downclocks. sometimes it downclocks to 600, and sometimes 157. is there a way to get it to run at 100% all the time?

I'm at a loss.. maybe temperature throttling?
At this point I just have to suggest the normal canned response of reinstalling drivers, programs, etc.. sorry I'm no help : (

[don_xvi]

Hmmz, yes its doing this while it's mining. When i start the guiminer, it does 380 mhash for like a few mins but then this drops to between 200 - 300 mhash depending on how much it downclocks. sometimes it downclocks to 600, and sometimes 157. is there a way to get it to run at 100% all the time?

It sounds like thermal throttling, check your temps. Your fan is on AUTO, right?
Are you using Afterburner? You can force the fan to 100%. The 5870 tries to self-regulate to 88C.

[Reflex1]

Thanks guys, i think your both right. This 5870 is sandwiched between my 2x 480 gtxs haha, so its getting some nice warm nvidia love : )

temp is 90C on the 5870, i guess i'll have to figure out a way to keep it cooler

[Jacka]

a). a stunt from AMD - paying you to invest & win the market over

ATI cards do have significantly more computing power than their nVidia counterparts.

[[XC] gomeler]

ATI cards do have significantly more computing power than their nVidia counterparts.

For this specific task. The architectures are different and handle different tasks better or worse.

[Sparky]

ATI cards do have significantly more computing power than their nVidia counterparts.

Don't let my friend hear that, he's insistent that ATI only does better at this because they made it for ATI, and nvidia should always blow ATI away for any sort of computational power if the software wasn't biased. Always.

I disagree with him

For this specific task. The architectures are different and handle different tasks better or worse.

This is what I agree with and told my friend. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and this utilizes ATI's strengths and nvidia's arch just doesn't fit well with it at all. Same reason as F@H on nvidia totally destroys ATI, as an example.

[OldChap]

Totally off topic

What would cause windows task manager to say that a hard drive is working properly but when I open computer it is not there

[Tom128]

ATI cards do have significantly more computing power than their nVidia counterparts.

AMD cards can do more SHA256 calculations because they are simple enough to be run within the units of a single shader. It's more of a rare case where the simple structure of one shader can do all the work and does not need more complex structures. Nvidia cards simply have less shaders, but their overall design, when used correctly, can go beastmode on compute tasks. But SHA256 does not require beastmode.

As for bitcoin being used to decrypt the secrets of the googlewebs and bring down all the internets and humanity, the source code is open-source. I quickly looked at it before I spent a penny on my 2 extra cards. It really does very little more than run brute force SHA256 commands until it finds an input string that matches an output the system wants, either for a new bitcoin or to verify a transaction was actually valid. The entire system is based on the idea of one-way encryption along with public/private keys. It is easy to verify that an input matches an output, but very hard to guess an input to match an already known output.

I.E.
XS Member Captain Good Guy: "Hey I just found a bitcoin with the identifier 1234omgbbqsauce!"
Bitcoin Network: Oh really? What's the input you found to get that eh mister?
XS Member Captain Good Guy: Oh it was <some key>
Bitcoint Network: Oh, well I see here that SHA256(<some key>) does equal 1234omgbbqsauce! Cool you just created a coin!
XS Member Captain Good Guy: Awesomesauce!


***Key point alert*** It's TRIVIAL to determine that SHA256(<some key>)=1234omgbbqsauce. however it was not trivial to find <some key> in the first place. The odds of randomly guessing that key or any other key, that comes out to exactly "1234omgbbqsauce" is pretty much impossible. It takes the entire combined force of a mining pool to brute force, doing guess after guess, to find an input the matches an output. Please note, this is an extremely simplified version of what it actually does, I am just trying to lay out a basic scenario of why we have cards running millions of hashes for what appears to be an unknown purpose. It's very hard to find an input to match an exact output.

This is also, for example, why many websites let you reset your password but can't give you your original password. In this case, your password would be <some key> and they stored your password in their database as "1234omgbbqsauce". They can check if sha256(<some key>)="1234omgbbqsauce" to verify you gave a right password to login, but they would have to open up their own mining pool to try and give you your original password back.

[Sparky]

Is it a new drive?

[OldChap]

About 6 months old and has just been running wcg with win7 nothing else till I wanted to put mining on it

Went to boot and got disk read error press ctl alt del to restart but it would not so I hooked it up to the rig next door and got it not showing in computer but ok in device manager

Samsung hd103sj 1G spinpoint

[Sparky]

What happens if you go to disk management? What does it report the partition as (if any)?

[BeepBeep2]

Guys, how do I get Phoenix to run on my second GPU?
I am getting 185 Mhash/sec on my first 5770, dev = 0
phoenix -u http://XXXXXXX:XXXXXX@bitcoinpool.com:8334/ -k poclbm DEVICE=0 VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=7 WORKSIZE=128

But dev = 1 for some reason is my CPU...and after it starts it nearly locks up the rig, then when i go to close it I get a nice BSOD or lockup.

Anything I am doing wrong? I would also like to note that GUIMiner does not start at all on my rig, running Vista 32 Bit Home Premium.