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How to get started using your GPU to mine for Bitcoins on Windows
Bitcoin, Random :: Posted on: November 28th, 2010 - 6:23 am EDT
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(In a slight departure from my normal content…)
Money for only running your computer!? It's more likely than you might think! No referral pyramid scam shit, you can make as much money as you have computing power to devote.
This post is aimed mostly at people who are already familiar with Bitcoin (Wikipedia page), and would like to get started using their GPU(s) to mine for bitcoins in a Windows environment. (Additional explanation may follow later, but for now you can learn more here)
Just some quick terminology: miner = program which is external to bitcoin.exe that uses your graphics card to perform calculations; your GPU is much more efficient at the type of calculations bitcoin does than your CPU
First of all, you are going to need a graphics card that supports CUDA and/or OpenCL; most graphics cards from the past 2-3 years will support this.
*UPDATE*: If you are unsure, please download GPU Caps Viewer (I recommend the portable version) to determine if you have a compatible video device and a working version of OpenCL installed. If you are using an AMD/ATI card you likely need to install the ATI APP SDK (make sure you obtain the correct version for 32/64-bit Windows).
(Please Note: this guide was written using 2 NVIDIA GTX275 graphics cards running version 260.99 of the official NVIDIA drivers. If you are using a Radeon and are having problems, please see this threadfor more info)
Also, make sure you are using the most recent drivers for your particular graphics card. Important: Make sure that windows explorer is configured to show file extensions and show hidden folders - In windows explorer go to tools(alt+t)→folder options→view tab→tick the show hidden files/folders button, and also make sure the box for hide file extensions is unchecked.
Updated March-2-2011 to reflect new filenames for more recent versions
Please note that this guide will show you how to do everything manually and via the command line. A GUI-based tool exists here which may help to speed this up and may even make some of the steps in this guide unnecessary. If you have no idea what you are doing you may at want to at least briefly look over this guide first before attempting to set up a miner. Please note that I have not tried this tool myself (yet).
1. To start, head over to http://www.bitcoin.org/ and download the latest windows client (.zip archive is recommended). Try to keep the directory path somewhat simple, because batch scripts and launching from the command line will follow. For argument's sake just extract the contents of the zip file to:
C:\bitcoin\bitcoin-0.3.20.01
At the time of writing, the latest version of bitcoin is 0.3.20.01, so your overall path to bitcoin.exe should be:
C:\bitcoin\bitcoin-0.3.20.01\bitcoin.exe
You do not need to nest the directories like this, but it may make files easier to manage when an updated version is released. To start, open up a command prompt (windows key + r → type cmd → hit enter), and then navigate to the directory where bitcoin.exe is located. If you've been following along with my examples, you will want to type this into the command prompt window:
cd c:\bitcoin\bitcoin-0.3.20.01
2. Put the command prompt aside for just a second, because before launching bitcoin, you will need to create a text file called bitcoin.conf (the location of this file will vary depending on which version of Windows you are using)
If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, navigate to:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
If you are using Windows XP, navigate to:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Bitcoin
(You will probably need to create the "Bitcoin" directory, as bitcoin.exe will auto-create it on first run, but you haven't yet run it… This is also where showing hidden folders comes into play, because on Windows 7 the AppData directory is hidden; Application Data may be hidden on XP as well)
Inside the appropriate folder, just right click and select new→text document, then rename this file tobitcoin.conf
Once you have created this file, open it up with your favorite text editor and add the following 2 lines (don't forget to save it when finished):
rpcuser=youruser
rpcpassword=yourpw
Where youruser and yourpw should be any arbitrary username and password; this is supplied to the miner later on via command line so that the miners can communicate with bitcoin.exe (these are the values that bitcoin expects, if the miner specifies different values at launch it will not connect to bitcoin.exe).
3. Next, you want to start bitcoin.exe with the '-server' argument specified. This tells bitcoin that there will be external programs running and allows bitcoin to communicate with them. To do so, bring your command prompt back into focus and type:
bitcoin.exe -server
(alternatively you can just launch bitcoind.exe from the \daemon directory, which is the GUI-less client, but I prefer to use the GUI client. Using bitcoind.exe is equivalent to launching bitcoin.exe with the arguments -server -daemon specified)
Now you will see bitcoin start up for the first time. Your client must first download the block chain before you will be able to start generating coins, and this is done automatically on first startup. You will see the number of blocks begin to increase over time, and at the time of writing there are 111,449 blocks (you can view the current block count here). This can take several hours so be patient and let it do its thing. This process can be sped up if you forward port 8333 TCP on your router, but this is not required.
4. Next, head on over to this thread and download the latest poclbm_py2exe binary from the first post. There are other miners available which work in windows, but m0mchil's is the one that I use and this guide will instruct how to set up this particular miner. (poclbm stands for (I believe…) PyOpenCL BitcoinMiner)
If you have been following along so far, I would suggest that you create a new directory insidec:\bitcoin to reflect the latest version of the windows binary. At the time of writing the most recent version is poclbm_py2exe_20110222, so you should create a new directory
C:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222
and then extract the contents of the archive to this new folder. The executable which will be used ispoclbm.exe, but this must be launched via command line and given several launch parameters. This can be tedious to do on windows, so we will expedite this with a batch script. (and your final path to poclbm.exe should be C:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222\poclbm.exe)
5. You can place this batch script anywhere you like, but I put mine on my desktop for easy access. Right click again and create a new text file, then rename it to whatever_you_want.bat, all that matters here is the .bat extension. Right click on this file and hit edit (double clicking on it will launch it). In this batch file you want to put the following contents (this is assuming you're following the convention of this guide so far - if you are using your own directory structure, then use whatever location you have chosen instead):
start /DC:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222 poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=0
***(Important Note: Some people have been having issues with the batch script failing to launch initially. It seems that it may be important to specify your device number along with the rest of the launch parameters on each line of the batch script. This can be done by simply specifying --device=X, where X is the number of your desired video device; most likely 0. If you have multiple devices, then the 2nd device is likely "1", and so on; if you are using onboard video I am not sure how this would work…please see the forum thread linked here.)***
Start just tells the batch script to start a new process in its own window, the /D parameter specifies the directory that the program is located in (this allows the batch script to be launched from anywhere on your computer), and then poclbm.exe is just the target program, followed by the arguments it needs to run properly. Make sure to use the same user and password that you specified earlier in your bitcoin.conf file.
Now all that's left to do is save this file and wait until bitcoin finishes downloading all the blocks; you cannot generate until you have acquired all blocks.
(You may end up waiting a long time for this to finish, so if you want to take some time to go read more about bitcoins and how the system works, now is a good time 
Once all blocks have been acquired, make sure bitcoin is running with the -server switch, then simply double click on your batch file. A new window should pop up and after a few seconds. If all is going well, your hashrate will be displayed. When you want to exit just "x" out of the window or press ctrl-c.
You can make a batch script to launch bitcoin.exe with the -server argument as well, its contents would look something like this:
start /DC:\bitcoin\bitcoin-0.3.20.01 bitcoin.exe -server
If you have more than one graphics card, you can use them both at the same time by doing something similar to this within your batch file:
start /DC:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222 poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=0
start /DC:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222 poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=1
for however many devices you use. This will open up a new window for each graphics card and show each card's hashrate.
Another switch you may want to play around with is the -w switch, which indicates the worksize for your card to use; for example:
start /DC:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222 poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=0 -w 256
By default, m0mchil's miner will use the maximum work size supported by your card, most likely 256 or 512. You can play around with different sizes to see which gives you the highest hashrate; the size must be a power of 2. You will know if you have exceeded your card's maximum size if the miner errors or crashes when you try to start it
I use nvidia GTX275s, my maximum work size is 512 but I seem to get the best hashrate with 256. Going too small will greatly lower your hashrate and could possibly be used as a way to throttle power usage (I have only tested the effects of worksize on hashrate and not on power consumption or core temperature)
You can also play around with the -v argument, but with my NVIDIA cards this seems to make poclbm.exe crash after a few seconds.
Something which was changed in recent versions seems to make the miner more aggressive with GPU resources. If you notice your desktop is being sluggish you can mitigate this by adding:
-f 60
to the end of each line of your batch script. I'm not sure what exactly this does, but for a small cost in hashrate (maybe 1-2mhash, if that) your desktop will be much more responsive while mining for bitcoins.
Assuming you have gotten this far and everything works, you can add the totals of the hashrate that bitcoin.exe is getting from your CPU, and each individual hashrate from your GPU(s), and put the grand total into this calculator to get an idea of how long it will take you to generate a block (and thus receive 50 bitcoins).
Now all you have to do is wait
Note that it may possibly take many days/weeks to generate coins, and you are likely to notice an increase in your power bill while you run your bitcoin miners (Please Note: if you are not using high-end hardware, it is conceivable that you may spend more on power than you can recoup via bitcoin generation and sales). Additionally, you may want to look into doing something like this with RivaTuneror a similar app to mitigate the temperature increase on your graphics device(s). (I think that rivatuner also works with newer amd/ati cards)
UPDATE: If you are using slow-ish hardware, take a look at the pooled mining option here. (New article on how to use m0mchil's miner with slush's pool)
Troubleshooting: It seems that some people are having issues where the batch script just pops up for a second and then closes without anything happening. This usually indicates that whatever you are trying to launch is failing and quickly prints out an error message on the console window opened by the batch script, but since it fails immediately it closes too quickly for you to read it. In order to determine what the problem is, you will need to navigate to the location of poclbm.exe within a new command prompt; just use cd as is described somewhat in step 1. Once you are in the directory where poclbm.exe is located, you should now try to launch poclbm.exe with the arguments exactly as they are contained in the batch script. So assuming you have been following the conventions of this guide so far, and your batch script fails to start the miner successfully, you would type the following once you are in the directoryc:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222:
poclbm.exe --user=youruser --pass=yourpw --device=0
This is just how you would normally launch the miner anyway, the batch script simply does this for you when you double click on it. By entering this manually from within an already-open command prompt, if the miner fails to launch, the error messages will be printed to the console and will remain there for you to read. This should give you the specific problem that is preventing your miner from launching, and allow you to provide a more specific error message than "it doesn't open"
Also…please read all of the comments before making a new one asking for help, it is possible that your problem may have already been covered.
Once you do finally generate some coins, you can head on over to www.mtgox.com and create an account. You can now deposit some bitcoins into your account and get trading (there are other exchange sites but mtgox seems to be the most popular at the moment). There are ways to convert your mtgox dollars into paypal dollars, and more information can be obtained by talking with the folks in #bitcoin-otc.
If you intend to stick with this and help the bitcoin community grow you should also make a forum account on the bitcoin site as well as join the irc channels #bitcoin-discussion and #bitcoin-otc, both onfreenode.
I hope that this tutorial helps, and it is only intended to be a rough introduction to getting a "no frills" miner setup working under windows. I decided to write this after seeing some people seemingly give up after not being able to figure out how to get everything set up correctly.
As I have stated before, this tutorial is only a guide for setting up m0mchil's python-based miner. There are other miners which work under windows, DiabloD3's for example - but his is based on java and you will need to launch it differently. Here is another miner which is developed and maintained by puddinpop.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I've been getting a lot of questions like "OMG is this legal!?". As far as I know, this is 100% legal.
Please leave a comment if you found this post useful, have any problems, or if you notice any errors or inconsistencies. If you are feeling generous, I will gladly accept any donations of any amount at the bitcoin addresses 1Q8rD6M2WTxR2gRbYhoyJVUnZjkydYiFho or 1H36FmM5et3KiNGVa1uKDrywFpLjGDwQHp
If you are having issues…you can usually reach me on freenode, nickname LobsterMan
(16 votes, average: 4.44 out of 5)
112 comments so far...
Is there any info on how many dependencies need to be installed for this? Just following this blog didn't work out for me.
I'll admit…my experience with it is probably atypical as it worked for me first try, just using the latest nvidia drivers, 260.99 I think. You may want to check to make sure that your device supports CUDA/OpenCL. If you still can't get it to work you can post a reply in my thread here and I can try to help you out:
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1985.0
Thanks for the post! I got an error about not finding a DLL, but updating to the latest drivers fixed it and got it working great. 15 Mhash/sec on a Geforce 9600 GT. It sure does heat up the GPU though, mine was steady at 86 celsius… not sure if that is ok for the long term or if I should throttle it back.
Thanks for the great instructions! I sent you some BTC from my first block.
It's only going about 12-14M on a Sapphire 5450/AthlonX2-5000+/Win7-64, but that's 7 times faster than it was going on CPU alone. Not going to make me rich, but it's something…
Have fun! :^)
Worked great for me. Missed the restart after installing Stream SDK, but after that all went smoothly. ~225 Mhash/s on a Radeon HD5850 compared to 1500khash/s on my 3GHZ Core Duo.
It's working, 300Mhas/s on a ATI 5870
Wow, very nice instructions!! Thanks!!
and temp is around 180 F / 84 C,… donation coming your way as soon as my first BTCs come in!
Got about 4000Khash/s on (1) 2.33Ghz Quad CPU (Xeon e5345)
and now 80Mhash/s on an ATI 4870 (looks like i need to upgrade to a 5870 like Johan
Thanks for taking the time to help out with this post!
I did these steps with a GeForce 9600 GT, and got 8000 khash/s.
Then I noticed that my driver wasn't as up-to-date as I thought it was, and after updating, got to 14000 khash/s. Doesn't sound too great compared to others here….
I checked GRU caps viewer, and I definitely have BUDA and openCL.
Any suggestions, or is my graphics cards a lot worse that I thought it was?
Apologies for my typos that make it look like I don't know my acronyms very well
Looking at a table of graphics card FLOPS, it might well be that my card is just that bad!
MC: That sounds about right, older cards don't do so well, especially nvidias
Another success…
Installing the ATI stream SDK didn't work for me, I had older ATI drivers. Uninstalled the stream SDK, downloaded & installed the latest Catalyst driver (the Accelerated Parallel Processing version), didn't need to re-install the stream sdk (it appears Catalyst 10.12 comes with stream 2.3). Doing 27M on my HD 4670, pretty good.
For interest I tried running the OpenCL on the CPU. I got about 1650 khash, compared to 3300 khash on the main client. So for me OpenCL on the CPU ran exactly half as fast as the native client on the CPU. I know that's not how you're supposed to use it, just interesting.
Thanks!
Thanks for the informative write-up. You helped me go from 6mhash/s to 365mhash/s now that I’m using my 5870 as a miner as well as a 9800gtx+ which is in another machine that I’m using as a remote miner client.
Needless to say I’m very happy 8D
I have one concern though, when using the gethashespersec command on the bitcoin.exe -server, it only calculates the CPU hashes/s as per the bitcoin GUI. Is there any way to get a total hashes/s, including the external miners?
Maybe I’m being too skeptical but I’d like some confirmation that the work the external miner GPUs are doing is not being wasted as those numbers just sound too good to be true! That or I sorely underestimated the computing power of a GPU
You can try launching bitcoin with -testnet which has a much lower difficulty for testing if your setup is working
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1509.0
it would be nice if there was some indication in either the bitcoin GUI or the debug.log that anything was happening, if not poclbm itself.
I connected to test and at least saw what it looked like to generate a few blocks, but my log looks very different on the test and the main. Main looks like
IRC got join
IRC got join
IRC got join
AddAddress()
IRC got new address
received: addr (31 bytes)
IRC got join
AddAddress()
IRC got new address
IRC got join
IRC got join
sending: addr (31 bytes)
mostly, where the test one actually looked like it was calculating more… does this make sense? I read on the forums that the newest poclbm was supposed to have a "block status" but all i see in my window is a slightly changing ###### khash/s number….
It can be annoying sometimes not knowing if it’s working, but if you can see the hashrate, it is working. When you finally do get a block it will show up with like “abcd0ef12 12/20/10 04:20 accepted”, but not much more than that. After a while it will show up in your bitcoin.exe UI as a “Generated” transaction.
Running -testnet just gives you a much lower difficulty so blocks will appear within a few minutes to indicate that all is well.
Don’t forget, for testnet, you may need to make a copy of your bitcoin.conf file inside the /bictcoin/testnet folder in your appropriate user profile location.
Great Success! I didn't realize how awesome GPU-accelerated stuff like openCL was.
Next, I'm probably going to find out that the cake wasn't a lie after all.
Has anyone tried to do all these via windows remote desktop? ATI stream SDK, poclbm seem unable to see my HD5770 GPU
I was under the impression that this will not work via RDP, and that you need to set it all up locally
Thanks. I have a headless desktop, only used VGA/TV converter occasionally.
Windows device manager shows there's a HD5700 card, but ATI stream SDK keeps saying there's no OpenCL driver found. CPU is used instead (something like that). I can run the poclbm but only got mere 1800 Khash out of it (the CPU I suppose).
@LobsterMan: You were probably right, MS terminal service session may not have access to the GPU driver I installed. I think I am going to get a monitor and find out.
Bought a monitor, got it working. Yes, it has to be installed from a console session, RDP doesn't work. Thanks!
I can't seem to get it to work. in the configuration file 'C:/Users/Nick/AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. If the file does not exist, create it with owner-readable-only file permissions"
I create the bitcoin.conf file in "C:\Users\Nick\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin", with a username and password, and then start bitcoin via the command line using -server.
But when I do it says "Warning: to use the '-server' option, you must set rpcpassword =
This is what my bitcoin.conf file looks like
rpcuser=username
rpcpassword=password
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is make sure you have file extensions visible, or maybe try putting a new line at the end of bitcoin.conf?
If you're still unsuccessful you can try making a post on the bitcoin forums
I would just like to say thank you very much to all of those who have donated
How do i know when bitcoin has finished downloading all the blocks ? thanks.
Bitcoin has all current blocks when the number of blocks displayed in the bitcoin client matches the number here:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount
hi,
I've an error, I launch the bat for poclbm.exe and I see a serie of that in the console:
"incomplete read:incomplete read(296bytes read, 15 more expected) unexpected error traceback (most recent call at last):
File "bitcoinminer.pyc", line 210 in mine
File "bitcoinminer.pyc", line 188 in getwork
File "httplib.pyc", line 525 in read
File "httplib.pyc", line 617 in _safe_read"
Any idea ? what's that shit? thanks for help!
(and sorry for my bad english)
[...] [...]
como veo los bitcoin generados ? abri el bitcoin como servidor, y luego el pocl… ambos estan calculando… donde veo cuando me calcule un bitcoin ?(segui la guia al pie de la letra)
Tony, you should try asking for help on the forums, Julio I apologize but I don't speak spanish…..no espanol
I have the same problem as tony:
IncompleteRead: IncompleteRead(296 bytes read,
20/02/2011 22:59:41, Unexpected error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "BitcoinMiner.pyc", line 210, in mine
File "BitcoinMiner.pyc", line 188, in getwor
File "httplib.pyc", line 525, in read
File "httplib.pyc", line 617, in _safe_read
Hi, lobster, only a noob question :
I just don´t get this part :
3. Next, you want to start bitcoin.exe with the '-server' argument specified. This tells bitcoin that there will be external programs running and allows bitcoin to communicate with them. To do so, bring your command prompt back into focus and type:
bitcoin.exe -server"
i mean, if i change the .exe file into "bitcoin.exe -server" the program will not be able to execute.. i don´t know what else can i do… maybe i read wrong..also, i followed all the following steps, and when i click (BUT WITH THE BITCOIN OPENED WITHOUT THE -SERVER) the .bat file i get this message :
"problems communicating with bitcoin RPC"
Hope to get a solution!, thanks for your time
problem solved lobster! i just rename the file ,and execute the bitcoin with the bitcoind.exe. and then the bat file.
i have an HD 5850 and getting 219,000/s any suggestion?
well, i add -w 128 to the .bat file and the hash rate has increased to 240,000/s, now another noob question :
do i have to leave the bat file open during 6 days (average time to generate 1 block), or can i close it whenever i want and just the probability of getting a block is the same?
because i don´t know if the videocard would resist 1 week at 98% gpu haha -.-!
thanks again, regards.
If I run the program and stop a few hours later, he resumed his calculations when he wasstopped?
The link for ATI stream is dead. You can find it in archives here:
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/pages/AMDAPPSDKDownloadArchive.aspx
Hey Lobster, would you be able to make a post about using poclbm and doing pooled mining?
72Mhashes/s on a HD5670 with -v -w 128.
Does this sound about right, or do I need to tweak more? Thanks anyway. Donation coming your way when/if something is generated.
Nick: bitcoind will work for you, but if you use regular bitcoin.exe you need to execute it from the command line, that is where you specify "-server". Also, the batch script should only be open for a very short period of time to launch whatever you are using it to launch, and should not even stick around long enough for you to need to x out of it.
ted: There are no calculations to be "resumed", bitcoin tries to "solve" a problem basically, and it just throws lots and lots of possible solutions at it. You may get lucky and find one and thus generate a block, but there is nothing that needs to be resumed if you stop coin generation
matteumayo: I plan to do that once slush gets the issues he's been having with his pool fixed
anon: that sounds a bit low perhaps, you may want to ask about that on the forums or IRC
Other anon: thanks for telling me that the link was dead. My spam protection plugin had your comment marked as spam for some reason so I had to approve that comment…
For those with the _safe_read error, I’m not sure, I would also suggest that you try on the forums or IRC
I also am aware that the version numbers in this post are pretty old, I plan to update them once a new version of bitcoin is released
Thanks
well , thanks a lot for your help, one more thing. I have this two ugly -.- but useful programs opened, don´t know i if am doing it well , see it below :
http://img204.imageshack.us/f/coindminer.jpg/
the coind.exe and de miner.bat up there. My question is, when do i realise that i have successfully generated a block (50 coins)?, and how do i check it , opening the bitcoin.exe again? or something appears into the .bat program?
Also, the bitcoin.exe it´s set as "bitcoin.exe - server" but won´t open. so reaching daemon folder i open bitcoind ,screen below again :p :
http://img833.imageshack.us/f/bitcoindbitcoin.jpg/
i wont bother you any longer , thanks for all again
Hey, how do I find all total hash/s including GPU?
Matthew, when you run the GPU client, it says the total k/hash rate, just combine that rate with the CPU rate displayed on the bottom left of the bitcoin client when it's generating.
The CPU rate will always be much smaller in comparison to the GPU however.
dont worry, I wanted to know if anyone knew of bitcoin speak Spanish, because there is not much information in Spanish … but the answer you gave to Ted, he answered mine.thanks … excuse my bad English.
Nick: I think you are still confused. You should not be renaming your executable to include "-server". You need to launch bitcoin.exe from the command prompt, and you only type "-server" into the command line or your batch script. When you launch bitcoin.exe properly with the -server argument, it will just show up normally as the bitcoin gui, but will also allow you to use your miner with it (you can then minimize bitcoin to the system tray if you launch bitcoin.exe). bitcoind.exe is just the gui-less version of bitcoin so you will not see anything aside from the console window that says "bitcoin server starting".
When you do finally generate a block, the bitcoin gui (using bitcoin.exe, NOT bitcoind.exe) will show a "Generated" transaction and you will be credited with 50btc. Also, the miner will report something like this to indicate a block has been generated:
24/02/2011 16:11:35, 2bca4325, accepted
I hope this helps….
(sorry about the delay on some comments appearing, some of them need to be manually approved before they will show up; I do my best to catch them all among the spam)
32000 khash/s with an ATI 4600. Not great, but SIGNIFICANTLY faster than my quad core cpu. Running with all 4 cpu's, it was 4200 khash/s, and the fan (of course) ran constantly! HUGE difference even with a mediocre card… Thanks LobsterMan!!!
apology "lobsterman" to make you suffer the retranslation lol.
Once you open the bitcoin-server, I connect the mine, it makes 250.000khash / s and the processor9500kh / s, it would be best to leave the vcard working alone? comfortable rest and let theprocessor? or both make an effort mancumunado(united)?
Thanks for you effort… from venezuela.
Julio (I'll do my best to interpret your question
): I don't think that there is any negative effect from running both at the same time (CPU + GPU), aside from increased heat output and power consumption. These components are designed for intensive computation, so letting them idle is just "wasting" cpu cycles that could have gone into possibly generating coins. Again though, you should take power consumption into consideration, because most modern hardware and quad core cpu's can use a lot of energy. Just make sure that the temperature of your card and cpu are reasonable and make sure yours fans are working (and dust-free) and you should be ok.
The only real consideration for me is whether or not I am playing a game at the moment, as counter-strike is somewhat laggy when I am running 2 miners. If you don't mind the lag, there should be no problem letting the miners run essentially forever.
Personally, I have rivatuner set up so that when my cards heat up, the fans go to 80% speed (~2600rpm, I am afraid of having them run at 100% all the time) and my GPU cores usually max out at around 80-84°C
http://i.imgur.com/y4dJd.png
Gracias… usted entendio muy bien
…
mi unico problema es la temperatura de mi tarjeta de video, 80º una hd5850, voy a comprar un disipador nuevo…
gracias por tu tiempo… espero generar algun bitcoin y enviarte algunos para apoyar tu esfuerzo.
Thanks … you understand very well
…
My only problem is the temperature of my video card, 80 º a HD5850, I'm buying a new sink …
thanks for your time … I hope to generate some bitcoin and send some to support your effort.
I was wrong, published in Spanish
80°C actually sounds about right; my computer keeps my room very warm
Thanks a lot lobster! everything is working fine now, i just read your guide too fast :p
I followed this guide but once I run the final .bat it seems that it's using my cpu instead of my gpu. According to MSI's overclocking tool my GPU isn't doing any work at all while it's running, and my cpu is at 100%.
Did I do something wrong? I'm very sure I have the latest ATi drivers, and I followed everything else correctly it seems, but it's just using my cpu instead of the gpu.
waka: you may want to try using different device numbers in your call to poclbm.exe. Device 0 is usually your first graphics card, but that may not always be the case
I followed your instructions (attempting both bitcoin.exe - server and running from bitcoind.exe), and I triple-checked that the .conf and batch files were set up properly. But once I have Bitcoin running and then launch the batch file, I just see the command window pop up very briefly and then go away. I don't get the window you describe that shows a hash rate from my GPU (which is an Nvidia). What could be going wrong?
If it matters, I had already downloaded Bitcoin yesterday, ran it, and got all the blocks before following your steps.
What could be going wrong?
In bitcoingui, meaning the connections? is better to have many or few?
good night…
Clippy: I added a section about troubleshooting after step #5, please try doing that and report back what error message(s) you are getting
Julio: As far as I know, even if you only have 1-2 connections your node is fully operational, and having many connections is not necessarily better than having only a few connections
Thanks, Lobsterman. I ran it in the console window and this is what I got as the message:
Traceback (most recent call last):File "poclbm.py", line 3, in
File "pyopencl\__init__.pyc", line 3, in
File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 12, in
File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.It looked like the problem might be that I needed to unzip the file "library.zip", which I did, into the same directory as the poclbm_py2exe_20110222 folder, but got the same message. I also tried copying libeay32.dll from the main bitcoin directory into that folder (because I had seen bitcoind.exe need that DLL in the same directory), but still got the same message.
Any further suggestions? Does library.zip need to be unzipped, or unzipped a different way?
Thanks again for helping me troubleshoot this. You're a good human.
That comment looked nicer in this editor before I posted than it looks now.
Clippy: That looks like it may be a drivers problem, if you don't have them already, get the latest drivers for your card from http://www.nvidia.com and then reboot and try again
Update needed, with the newest version you also have to specify OpenCL platform
Thank you LobsterMan! I can't believe it! It actually works now! GPU fan is definitely working harder, and it's reporting 29 Mhash/sec. Perhaps time for a GPU replacement…
Should we worry about overworking the GPU? What is a way to check on its health?
Thanks again!
Great guide. pulling about 210K khash with my 6870…. I can smell the money.
Quick question lobster, if you don't mind me asking. How much (if any) do you get per month off your hardware?
Great guide!
My quad-core Phenom II generates about 5,500 khash/s , and my Radeon 4870 generates about 84,500 khash/s , although I'm going to clock that down a little bit. Not real thrilled about having the card run at 88 degrees Celsius 24/7
I do not really know if it's "bad" for your card to be running at maximum capacity for long periods of time. In theory, as long as it's running sufficiently cool, I suppose it's ok. I don't know if in the long run it will shorten your components' life.
I don't really make a lot of money from mining anymore since the difficulty is so high, but I have made a fair bit over the previous several months since I started mining back in July/August.
Thank for the great guide mate.
But just one quick question, since the bitcoin.org and bitcoin.cz close their registration, so until I have an account with them, theres nothing I can do with bitcoin now, is this correct ?
Travex: Registrations on bitcoin.org's forum are not closed, and slush's pool is only closed for the time being. This just means that you cannot use his pool to mine for now, but you can still try to mine for yourself.
Thank you very much for putting this guide together. Following it loosely, I was able to get it working on my first try on both of my machines.
Hi,
I'm new to this, and am having trouble getting this thing off the ground. I get this error when I run the following batch file:
start /DC:\Program_Files_(x86)\Bitcoin\python\poclbm.exe --user=asdf --pass=asdf --device=0
Windows cannot find 'user=asdf'. Make sure you typed the name correctly and then try again.
I've got the the .conf file set up with user and password both set to 'asdf'. Does this need to correspond to my windows 7 logon info? What am i missing here?
Thanks so much!
Daniel
Win 7 Home
i5 M480
Nvidia GTX 420
Daniel: The syntax of your batch file is incorrect…you want a space between python and poclbm.exe; I'm also not sure if you can use underscores as spaces, but your main problem is that \ should be a space.
I also edited your email address out of your post, I’m pretty sure spammers scrape these pages for emails so you don’t really want to put yours out in the open like that.
Hi,
Thanks for the information and the python. Excellent.
I found that using -f 60 did not help my desktop responsiveness (winXP 64) - however changing thre priority on the process of poclbm.exe to 'below normal' helped a lot. With minimal loss of hashes.
Hope this helps someone.
dM
Works fine for me on my GTX 580. I get 119449 khash/s + 6827 khas/s on my cpu, but my PC is drawging 380w an hour so it's going to cost me more than i recieve in bitcoin lol.
Thanks for this, got mine running on my core2qaurd 3.4 and my geforce hd 4850 on windows 7
I'm running in to an issue that google cannot solve.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "poclbm.py", line 51, in
File "BitcoinMiner.pyc", line 120, in __init__
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '338d6e93df0423ee4d9a0e86716c9dce.elf'
Has anyone seen this?
Billd: never seen that one….you should try asking in m0mchil's miner thread:
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1334.0
"system cannot find the file specified" which obviously means I mistyped the file name. Except i typed it right, and I am in the right directory. After getting that error, i typed 'cd..' and then 'dir' and there was the file 'pocblm.exe' so what is wrong? Example:
c:\Bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222> poclbm.exe --rpuser=user --rpcpassword=pass --device=0
the system cannot find the file specified.
(types 'cd..' then 'dir')
and it displays very clearly the name of the program 'poclbm.exe'!
nevermind, the command prompt has a different command for user than the batch file.
argh, it still says cannot find file specified, yet I am certain I am in the right directory. btw, I only initiated the script after being in the correct directory so I didn't need to change directories as I explained earlier. in any case, this is very odd.
okay so how do you specify the opencl platform? and how could that possibly be related to a file not found error, which is baseless…and yet there it is…
"This should give you the specific problem that is preventing your miner from launching, and allow you to provide a more specific error message than "it doesn't open" "
irony?
Matthew: I'm not really sure… "not found" or similar errors usually mean you are mistyping something somewhere; you should go back and check your syntax and make sure that everything is in place and named correctly and then called correctly
first test on a msi notebook with 9800M GS:
It gave an additional 13Mhash/s to a poor 680Khash duo core…
time for heating some more serious hardware.
nice instructions in conjunction with JeGX monitoring tools.
Matthew: make sure the EXE file is actually in that folder. It sounds like it's not. It could be due to an issue with extraction, or the files were unknowingly extracted to a subfolder.
Alternatively, try a GUI version of m0mchil's tool here: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3878.0. I had to use it as --device=0 was actually pointing to my CPU. I didn't figure this out (wondering why Mhash/s was so low) until I used the GUI tool.
I'm currently using it to get 160Mhash/s on my 5770. I don't believe there's any performance hit in using it; if there is, it would be negligible.
Steven: Thanks for providing that link
Hi Lobsterman, thanks for linking to my GUI tool. I was one of the first people to use your guide way back in December and it really helped get me started in the Bitcoin community
Your post mentions you haven't tried the GUI - I'd encourage you to give it a try even if you have already got things running on the command line. It makes it a lot easier to manage multiple miners in a nice tabbed interface, supports several common pools out of the box, and in the next version you'll be able to view your balance from inside the GUI.
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3878.0
Here's a quick script that could replace the bat-file. This is a vbscript.
It could be put in the startup-folder, and it will run the bitcoin deamon
and poclbm.exe in the background. I've just made this little script, and
verified that it works. It will also make a couple of log files. runtime.log
will track the running time in seconds for each session. Rate.log will keep
track of khash/s every minute. This could be expanded in many ways. One idea
could be do code some interaction with the calculatorr that calculates the
likelyhood of you completing a block and recieving a 50 bitcoins. Or you could
expand on this script and make an automated ftp-upload to a web site that could
keep track of your mining efforts.
To make this working on my machine (windows 7, 64bit running ATI Radeon HD 5700,
I downloaded the drivers from here:http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx
Package Includes:
Display Driver
OpenCL Driver
ATI Integrated Driver
Catalyst Control Center
(English Language Only)
For the 64 bit version of Windows Vista and Windows 7
'Script to start bitcoin and poclbm.exe in the background (this will start mining).
'run bitcoin server
Set objShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
objShell.Run "cmd /C START /b C:\bitcoin\bitcoin-0.3.20.01\daemon\bitcoind.exe", SHOW_ACTIVE_APP, FALSE
' Delay 10 seconds
WScript.Sleep 10000
Dim starttime
starttime = Now()
Set objShell2 = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
objShell.CurrentDirectory = "C:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222"
objShell2.Run "C:\bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110222\poclbm.exe --user=myuser --pass=secret --device=0 --verbose --rate=60 >> c:/bitcoin/logs/rate.log", SHOW_ACTIVE_APP, True
Dim endtime
endtime = Now()
Dim timedif
timediff = starttime - endtime
Dim logdata, myFSO, logfile, dateStamp
dateStamp = Date()
'Write information to Text File
Dim secs
logdata = DateDiff("s",starttime,endtime)
Set myFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set logfile = myFSO.OpenTextFile("C:\bitcoin\logs\runtime.log", 8, True)
logfile.WriteLine(logdata)
logfile.Close
SET logfile = NOTHING
SET myFSO = NOTHING
Per Rommetveit: Interesting, I don't have much experience with vbs but I will have to give this a try sometime. I suppose whoever would want to use this should just put this into a text file and then rename it something.vbs ?
Put it into a file calles whatever.vbs, then put it in your startup directory. It will run automatically every time you start up the pc, it will run hidden in the background. If you want to check if you have recieved any bitcoins, then you could kill the processes using task manager, and then fire up the bitcoin client and check your current amount of bit-coins. I run this script on my pc. It could also be extended to say upload current information about the mining to a website giving various stats. I don't have time to develop that at the moment.
The error I get says:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\py2exe\boot_common.py", line 92, in
ImportError: No module named linecache
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "poclbm.py", line 3, in
ImportError: No module named pyopencl
I have no clue whatsoever on what to do about this.
Horborgl: That's….strange, are you trying to launch it like how I describe above? You don't need to have python installed on your machine to get poclbm to work
Yes, I did exactly as you said. I'm not even sure what python is. Is it possible my computer just needs a restart? I'll try restarting sometime soon, but I have way too many important things open at the moment.
If you haven't already done so, make sure you have the most recent graphics drivers and then try a reboot. If that still doesn't work, you should try posting in the official miner thread here:
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1334.0
VNC can work for CUDA when RDP doesn’t. Remote Desktop uses it’s own video “driver” I guess, but VNC just copies whatever’s in video memory and sends it to the remote client - software is still using the hardware video card’s driver - helpful for headless operation…
If you're getting "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC" make sure you put a carriage return after the second line in your bitcoin.conf file. Else it doesn't work.
mine says "No such file or directory: 'BitcoinMiner.cl' but i looked through all my files. and there it was right in front of my eyes.haha. do i have to re download it?
[...] du veta mer om hur du kan använda ditt grafikkort för att tjäna pengar kan du gå in och läsa den här artikeln. Den tar dig steg-för-steg genom allt du behöver [...]
Paxton: That is one I've never seen before, you should ask about that on the forums
Is there any way to make sure the GPU setup works? Sure, I'm getting 45khash/s with my GTX260, but how do I know it works as it should with the client? If I find the right hash, how do I know it wont "slip by"?
Perhaps a stupid question, but a question nevertheless.
Oscar: If you find a block with your miner it will tell you so, showing "accepted" along with the hash and timestamp of the found block. Shortly after it will show up as a "Generated" transaction in bitcoin. If it actually starts up and shows the hashrate, and you're not getting RPC errors or anything like that, then it is working
Thanks for the guide, LobsterMan. I had no problems getting this to work following your step by step. I'm still new and am doing exactly what you suggested and reading about what I am mining for. Since it seemed like the thing to do, I set up my GPU generating 26Mhash/s and it looks like I have several months to catch up on why I am doing this.
Thanks for this info, small question. I assume you dont have to select ‘Generate Coins’ in the bitcoin -server window? When I do it lowers the khash/s in the dos window by 25M and yet only adds 4500K in the Bitcoin window.
cwilli: "Generate coins" from within bitcoin should only be using your cpu and should have no effect on your gpu miners. If enabling coin generation in the bitcoin client lowers your poclbm hashrate you may want to make sure you are specifying the correct device numbers in your launch options.
I was getting the "IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '0303c221e52590b1c8d438ece3ac092f.elf'" error as well. The problem was the directories I had bitcoin and poclbm_py in were read-only, and the permissions weren't set correctly. I changed those two things, and it worked correctly. I'm on Win 7 64 bit.
Lobster, I'm getting an error message saying
Traceback
File "poclbm.py", line 3 in
File "pyopencl\__init__.pyo", line 3, in
File "pyopencl\_cl.pyo", line 12, in
File "pyopencl\_cl.pyo", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed. The specified module could not be found.
What do I do to fix this and make the miner work?
[...] off-world (or even in-world, it might lag you down though and we all hate the lag). Here’s a how to get your GPU up and running for bitcoin on windows (other OSes might find sources in the [...]
It is a lot easier in windows to work with shortcuts instead of batch scripts. All you need to do is drag and drop the poclbm.exe while pressing the ALT key. Windows should show it is creating a shortcut before you drop. The shortcut will start in the proper directory and you can just add your parameters to the target line in the shortcut page under its properties.
What is the best settings for HD4850?
i have only 60.000 rate. Is it normal for 4850?
in statistic i have 179.215 Ghash/s - is it normal too?
ah1n1: I don't know what the hashrate should be for that particular card, I believe there are forum posts were people have listed the max performance for each card. To find the best settings you can either check what other people on the forums/IRC have done or just play around for yourself and see what gets you the best hashrate.
This site (mining.bitcoin.cz) looks like cheat-base system, the "Estimated reward:" field is stuck between 0.01-0.02 BTC…sometimes then i refresh browser page i see 0.017 and next time…tadaaaa.. 0.006…wtf? Where is my reward-points gone?
ah1n1: that number changes because more shares are generated as the round goes on
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