PLEASE READ THIS, OR USE THE SEARCH BAR. We'd like to keep this forum clean of repeat questions. Thanks!I've made this quick guide to help people new to mining, and I'll add to it if I missed anything. I hope this helps.
Hardware requirements to start mining.
GPU: It's up to you to choose what graphics card you want to mine with. Do your homework. How much is it. How much power does it need. How fast is it in terms of its hash rate. The GPU must have at least 2GB of memory, AMD cards are best to use and AMD GPU driver 15.12. This Mining Hardware Comparison list is very helpful.
http://62.212.74.86/~mining/list/If you want a custom rom (Higher hash, lower power), you can contact HelioxFor example: RX 480 8G Samsung: 32+Mh ETH, RX 470 4G Hynix: 31+Mh ETHMotherboard: You'll need a motherboard that has enough PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots to support the ammout of graphics cards you plan on using in your rig. The Asrock H81 Pro BTC and Asrock H97 Anniversary, are both good boards to use, they are relatively cheap and they can support 6 graphics cards with 1 PCIe x16 slot and 5 PCIe x1 slot. And you will need to buy a power button, obviously to turn on your rig.
Riser Cables: To use the PCIe x1 slots on your motherboard, will need to buy PCIe x1 to x16 riser card extender cables, it can also be used on the PCIe x16 slot. It's also great to give your cards some space from each other. I would recommend buying 1 or 2 extra ones, because sometimes you'll get one that doesn't work.
CPU: You'll want to buy a CPU that fits your motherboard. If you go with the Asrock H81 Pro BTC or Asrock H97 Anniversary, the Intel Celeron G1820 or G1840 works just fine for it.
Power Supply: You'll need to calculate how much power you need. For example, I have a 6 card AMD R7 370 rig, each card uses 110watts of power for a total of 660watts, and the rest of the rig uses about 200watts. So knowing this rig will need 860watts of power, I went with a good 1000watt power supply that came will all the necessary cables.
Hard Drive: A 60GB hard drive is all you need, and you can find a small solid state drive now for a good price.
RAM: A minimum of 4GB of RAM.
You'll also need to buy a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and its best to use an Ethernet connection not WIFI. You may temporarily need an optical drive, to install your drivers and Operating System. If you can do all that with a flash drive, that's great too.
MiningIn this link from Nanopool.org,
http://eth.nanopool.org/help, you'll find 3 mining clients you can easily download and configure to start mining. Claymore Dual Miner, Genoil Miner, and EthMiner.
For example. I use Ethminer and I point it to nanopool, so I edited the start.bat file so it looks like this:
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
ethminer -M -G -F
http://eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:8888/YOUR_WALLET/YOUR_WORKER_NAMEThen all you have to do is just run the bat file and you're mining away.
You should know where your DAG file is, because if you don't keep an eye on it, your hard drive may quickly fill up. You only need the 2 most recent DAG files so it's OK to delete any older ones, but sometimes you'll have to delete all of them. For me, I just had to search for the folder "Ethash" and put a shortcut of it on the desktop.
Also some helpful tips.Set your rig to turn on when power is connected, AND set your miner to run on startup. Just google run on startup. It's a must and you'll love it when your power goes out and you're not home. When your power comes back on, your rig will turn on and start mining again.
Use a remote desktop. I use Google Chrome Remote Desktop, and I set it up on all my rigs. From my phone or another computer, I can control any of my rigs and keep an eye on them.
Comments
1. Do 15.12 drivers work for RX 480 and 470? I thought that you need 16.7.2/16.7.3?
2. Is anything else needed, like AMD OpenCL SDK and Microsoft redistributables, or are they unnecessary now?
2. I didn't need anything else to mine.
I don't think it works for Rx470/480 but I know they were working on it.
Here are a few other pools
ethermine.org
miningpoolhub.com
If you look here: https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners it will show you a graph and a list of mining pools, and their relative size in terms of how much hashrate they contribute to the network. You may want to join a larger pool because it's payments will be very predictable and regular, or take a chance on a smaller pool if it happens to be geographically close to you or you like something about it. Smaller pools can be unpredictable in terms of payouts and luck - but that can be either in you favour or not.
https://www.nicehash.com/?p=buy-ethereum-mining
Use them for quite some time now...
I have just finished to set up my new rig which is composed of:
ASROCK H81 PRO BTC
1200 PSU
INTEL PENTIUM DUAL CORE G3258
8 GB RAM
EXTERNAL SSD
6 x XFX RX 480 8 gb
Considering that I don`t need the miner to do anything else than just mining (is not my pc), what do you think is the best software setup starting from scratch, to make sure I use 100% of the miner capabilities (so best operating system, best mining software, if I need drivers, GPU`s managing software, mining pool, etc)?
I hope your reply can also be useful for someone else more than me, thank you so much for your help!
So just to make sure I have got it, win10+ claymore's dual miner if I want to mine ETH and something else (let's say SIA), otherwise, if I just want to mine ETH I can simply use win10+ethminer, is that correct?
If I do dual mining with Claymore, will that affect my performance in mining eth?
Would I get better results on eth if I just focus my mining on it instead of dual mining, or it is not affected by dual mining?
But I am facing a problem that is driving me crazy and I'm pretty sure is a software problem. I've been 3 days trying to start mining and there is no way I can make it happen.
My system is a
Windows 10
genoil,etheminer or claymore
crisom 16.7
Hardware
AsRock H81 PRO BTC
CPU Celeron G1840
PSU EVGA 700W
Powered USB 3.0 Risers
8GB corsair memory
120GB SSD
2 XFX RX 480 8GB
- The problem is that any of the mentioned miners above can find or do not recognize my GPUs, as soon I execute Start.bat it close intermediately after. My listing hardware is fine, the drivers are fine I'm using this PC to write this connected to one of the cards, my iGPU is deactivated in the MOBO, I've tried with just one GPU, changing the PCI-E ports and frankly I'm exhausted trying to find the answer in the forums and google, but there is no answer because everyone that happens this is because they don't have the proper GPUs and enough memory and the problem is that! I DO have the proper video cards!
- I'm full of frustration about this because I have 4 more GPUs and 2 more PSU ready to mine but I can't even start with just 2 cards. My conclusion for know is, I'm doing something terrible stupid or terrible wrong.
PD: The motherboard says if you want to connect more than 3 GPUs you should connect the 2 molex extra power to the MOBO but I have powered risers and as far I know only data go trough the connectors that goes into the MOBO I suppose I don't need to connect the extra molex. Do anyone have a comment about this confusing recommendation of AsRock?
-
GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
EthDcrMiner64.exe
-mode 1
-logfile
-tt 1
-tstop 85
-ttli 83
-fanmax 85
-epool eth-eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9999
-ewal 0xb6cdD1E003a8fa77553F1F55b30AD79F9c258602/ETHRIG00/[email protected]
- I'm not sure if the problem is I'm configuring the miner in the start.bat
- This is the log:
20:14:12:283 ee0 args:
20:14:12:286 ee0
20:14:12:290 ee0 ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
20:14:12:294 ee0 º Claymore's Dual ETH + DCR/SC/LBC GPU Miner v7.0 Beta º
20:14:12:297 ee0 ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ
20:14:12:300 ee0
20:14:12:503 ee0 ETH: No pools specified! Specify at least one valid pool in "-epool" parameter.
- About the Molex connectors I'm still not sure if I'll connect the 2 molex from the primary PSU or split the to connections across the other 2 PSU. I know the right thing to do is the first one but I'm not sure my PSU will hadle that.
- Thanks for the time.
1, If you didn't already, download the latest Claymore miner for windows.
2, Right click and edit the file, start_only_eth, to look like this,
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9999 -ewal 0xb6cdD1E003a8fa77553F1F55b30AD79F9c258602/ETHRIG00/ -epsw x
3, Run the file, start_only_eth.
Let me know how that goes.