Litecoin - the GPU Mining Alternative to Bitcoin

[Presto]

Originally Posted by Amuro Ray

alright so I'll be picking up at XFX 7950 tomorrow for $200, along with an old PC with a 700w PSU and some ram for $150.
(keep in mind that I don't need to worry about power consumption since... I get it for free haha)

can i expect this setup to maybe pump up 500 or so khash?
is that number realistic? if it is how many coins can I expect to pump out a week?
(Computer has 2GB DDR2, Athlon X2 CPU of sorts, and currently running a 8600GT)

You may want to upgrade that RAM to 4GB. I had trouble with thread-concurrency settings of 12000+ when I moved my 7870 from a 4GB machine to 2GB. I have a Gigabyte 7950, and it's running 680khash average. OC'd to 1141/1400, I:19. It runs hot, though. So, make sure you have adequate airflow/cooling.

Well, I guess mining is a good excuse for upgrading. Along with new GPUs, I've purchased a new PSU, and have a case on the way. This is the most I've geeked out in a long time

[CP.AR]

haha the thing is in half a year I'm going to either A) sell this stuff for cheap or B) ship just the card back to myself in Canada or Hong Kong

I don't want to put too much money into it - just enough to mine some coin before the prices and difficulty goes anywhere

[Ulic Qel-Droma]

Originally Posted by SkinnyPupp

I was going to say exactly what the top post said - this is an AMA about gambling addiction, not bitcoin.

But yes, putting money into bitcoin or any investment is like gambling. So don't gamble more than you can afford to lose. Don't try to use it to get out of debt, for instance.

it ain't gambling if you use logical strategies that are preplanned and don't trade on emotion... or add onto losing positions like that guy did.

lol. everyone that's never traded before, that made a lot of money on bitcoins were just lucky to be at the right place at the right time. but too bad they're super inexperienced traders, i bet a lot of them gave it all back plus more. it's all about money management.

like any market, the people with better money management will eat all the other players. making money is only half the game.

that guy is a mathematician, and thought he had the edge, but he forgot to factor in the human element... his primal self.

[s3an]

Which Pools are you guys in?

[Hondaracer]

Originally Posted by s3an

Which Pools are you guys in?

I'm also looking to try Somthing else other than coinotron once I get over 10 again
Posted via RS Mobile

[Presto]

Originally Posted by s3an

Which Pools are you guys in?

Give-Me-LTC. I think I like their reward system more than PPS pools (Pay Per Share), like Coinotron. Give Me LTC uses PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares):

First of all, if you’re talking about PPLNS it’s important to understand how it works. PPLNS is short for “Pay Per Last N Shares”. The current proportional reward system is round based. One round is the time between the first share after the last found block and the share which solves a block. PPLNS however means that we no longer consider valid shares of one round, but we consider a number N of shares, no matter if they’re apart of the round or not. The number N is currently for each blockchain twice the difficulty (actually rounded down to an easy to calculate integer value).
Let me illustrate PPLNS using the image below. One round has an arbitrary number of shares which is solely based on sheer luck. On proportional reward system only shares of one round are considered for calculating rewards. However with PPLNS, a quite constant number N of shares is considered for calculating rewards. This number N changes only with the difficulty. Please have a look at the image below:



As you know the number of shares needed to solve a block within a round is different. Round one and three needed (difficulty * 2)shares to be solved. Round two and four are quite short rounds. There were less than (difficulty * 2) shares necessary to solve them. Round five however is a very long round which means the pool needed more than (difficulty * 2) shares to solve the block. From this follows that:
Rounds one and three are like proportional rounds. All of your shares from the given round are considered for reward calculations
For rounds two and four, shares from the previous rounds are considered for calculations as well (marked green). In other words: regardless of round boundaries we always consider the last (difficulty * 2) shares. Your portion of the amount of shares is used to calculate your reward.
Round five however is very long. In this round your lowermost shares (within the marked red part) are silently dropped if they are not within the last (difficulty * 2) shares.

[Hondaracer]

Questions for you guys who actively trade

A) how long does it take for me to deposit LTC in my BTC-e account from my wallet? Is that like an instant process or an hour or a day?

B) do trades happen quickly once initiated on BTC-e?
Posted via RS Mobile

[CP.AR]

I'm in Ozcoin

[Hondaracer]

is it secure to have funds just sitting in your account on BTC-E?

or should you always withdraw them to your wallet?

[TOPEC]

swapped my gtx580 for a 7970, went from 20kh/s to 700kh/s, i think i have everything up and running properly

[SkinnyPupp]

Originally Posted by Hondaracer

is it secure to have funds just sitting in your account on BTC-E?

or should you always withdraw them to your wallet?

I would! It's your money, be responsible with it. These exchanges are targets for massive DDOS strikes. And BTC-e is a bit sketchy anyway

[CP.AR]

getting 500khash/s on a machine I spent 350 on
probably need to spend another 10 since the cooling seems a bit shit on the GPU (needs new paste maybe?)

edit: running it full power wasn't a smart idea, it hit 105 degrees and then BSOD...
for now I have it underclocked to 700mhz (Stock 900) to keep it holding a steady 75-ish degree temperature

still doing about 300khash/s, not too bad

in other words..
800 shares accepted... 1 stale wohoo

edit2: Where are you guys getting your hash rates from? from guiminer readout or from the pool website? the two figures vary by quite a large margin...
also can someone quickly explain to me the significance of "Thread Concurrency" and "intensity"... I've tried googling day in and day out for a good explanation of the two terms with regards to litecoin mining to no avail. TIA!

[Presto]

Originally Posted by Amuro Ray

edit2: Where are you guys getting your hash rates from? from guiminer readout or from the pool website? the two figures vary by quite a large margin...
also can someone quickly explain to me the significance of "Thread Concurrency" and "intensity"... I've tried googling day in and day out for a good explanation of the two terms with regards to litecoin mining to no avail. TIA!

TC is how big a chunk of work your GPU can do. The readme recommends using --shaders instead, but I stuck with just using TC. Intensity is how hard you want to allow the GPU to work. Generally, the higher the setting, the higher your hash rate. When mine is set to 19, I can not do anything on my PC except mine. If I dial it back to 12, I can do everything on my system except play games.


I believe the pool determines your hash rate based on the rate it receives your shares. GUIminer is the UI for CGminer. If you go to the console tab of GUIminer, after starting mining, you should see the command and variables it uses to execute CGminer. Copy and paste that to a batch file, and run that. You're also able to adjust your GPU overclock settings in that interface. The first two lines give a lot more information than what GUIminer displays.

Decoder Sheet

The output line shows the following:
(5s):1713.6 (avg):1707.8 Mh/s | A:729 R:8 HW:0 U:22.53/m WU:22.53/m

Each column is as follows:
5s: A 5 second exponentially decaying average hash rate
avg: An all time average hash rate
A: The number of Accepted shares
R: The number of Rejected shares
HW: The number of HardWare errors
U: The Utility defined as the number of shares / minute
WU: The Work Utility defined as the number of diff1 shares work / minute
(accepted or rejected).

GPU 1: 73.5C 2551RPM | 427.3/443.0Mh/s | A:8 R:0 HW:0 U:4.39/m

Each column is as follows:
Temperature (if supported)
Fanspeed (if supported)
A 5 second exponentially decaying average hash rate
An all time average hash rate
The number of accepted shares
The number of rejected shares
The number of hardware erorrs
The utility defines as the number of shares / minute

The cgminer status line shows:
ST: 1 SS: 0 NB: 1 LW: 8 GF: 1 RF: 1 WU:4.4/m

ST is STaged work items (ready to use).
SS is Stale Shares discarded (detected and not submitted so don't count as rejects)
NB is New Blocks detected on the network
LW is Locally generated Work items
GF is Getwork Fail Occasions (server slow to provide work)
RF is Remote Fail occasions (server slow to accept work)
WU is Work Utility (Rate of difficulty 1 shares solved per minute)

[Hondaracer]

Originally Posted by Presto

Give-Me-LTC. I think I like their reward system more than PPS pools (Pay Per Share), like Coinotron. Give Me LTC uses PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares):

cant seem to get givemeLTC working?

my config seems all right but it wont start mining hmm what is your host and port when using it?

[Presto]

Originally Posted by Hondaracer

cant seem to get givemeLTC working?

my config seems all right but it wont start mining hmm what is your host and port when using it?

Using the Stratum host:
stratum.give-me-ltc.com:3333

Here is my cgminer command-line:
cgminer.exe --scrypt -u prest0x.1 -p x -o stratum+tcp://stratum.give-me-ltc.com:3333 -w 256 -v 1 -I 19 -l 2 --thread-concurrency 23000

[CP.AR]

thanks for the help presto you are awesome!

I'm doing all the overclocking via Catalyst control panel right now
and just to clarify: the hash rate on the website is inaccurate? so I should be looking at the rate that my miner is giving correct?

[TOPEC]

my guiminer reports a constant 700kh/s where as coinotron reports 300-900kh/s

ive been mining for 1 and a half days and so far i got 3LTC, is that a good rate?

[Hondaracer]

That's pretty good I mined 10 with coinotron over like a week

Getting about 420 hash rate whole time but I usually only mine when I'm at work and when I'm sleeping
Posted via RS Mobile

[Presto]

Ah crap! Here comes the warm weather. Time to buy more case fans!

[Krayzie135]

anyone want to buy some feathercoin?

1000FC @ 25LTC

[Mr.Money]

hmmmm...has anyone reviewed this for mining yet?


AMD unleashes Radeon HD 7990: A dual-GPU graphics card beast | PCWorld

[Krayzie135]

yea one of the guys over at bitcointalk did a writeup about it and said its better to just go buy 2 7970s unless you are really tight for space

[TOPEC]

based on performance alone, the 7990 is on par or ever so slightly better than 2X7790, so at $1000 a card, i think ur better off running 2 7970 or even 3

[Hondaracer]

So LTC been holding steady around 4 for the last week or so, $4 the new $2?
Posted via RS Mobile

[CP.AR]

bump!!

is anyone giving Feathercoin a try?
Difficulty is really low right now... my main mining rig is going at it right now as a test run but I'm not sure if it'll be worth anything...