ConclusionĪnd that about covers it for my series of articles on mining Bitcoins and Litecoins using Mac OS X and Apple hardware.
I verified that 3200 works well with a 57 works well with a 6870. If cgminer or bfgminer are reporting hardware errors (the HW number in the output) this indicates that you need to make use of the –thread-concurrency parameter. The last parameter I want to note is –thread-concurrency.
By removing the -d parameter so that both GPU’s are used and cranking up the -I parameter to 16 I can get my GPU’s up to around 230 Kh/s:Ĭgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -I 16 -w 64 This gets us up to around 80 Kh/s with bfgminer as well. And with bfgminer?īfgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -no-opencl-binaries -I 13 -w 64 Now we’re cooking with Crisco! Using -I 13 -w 64 on my 5770 gets me from the original 5Kh/s up to 83Kh/s with cgminer. This parameter is what really makes a difference on my OS X rig:Ĭgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -I 13 -w 64 The next parameter to focus on is the -w parameter, which specifies a worksize in multiples of 64 up to 256. Similarly I get around 14Kh/s using the -I 13 parameter with bfgminer. Let’s try with bfgminer:īfgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -no-opencl-binaries -I 13 That change alone triples the Kh/s, but from 5Kh/s to 15Kh/s honestly isn’t much to brag about. So lets try cgminer with -I 13 to see what that does:Ĭgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -I 13 On my system, 15-16 is about the best I can do. I’d start at around 10 and go up from there. With scrypt (Litecoin’s hashing algorithm) you need to specify a high intensity, in fact higher than is suggested for Bitcoin. This is not the case with Litecoin mining. If you aren’t using the PC, and you leave the intensity at “Desktop” ( -I d), both cgminer and bfgminer will eventually reach around the same performance you’d get by specifying something like -I 9. With Bitcoin this parameter does help, but honestly not a ton. So how can we get better performance mining Litecoins on the GPU? The first parameter to focus on is the -I parameter, or the intensity. As indicated in my previous article I use the –no-opencl-binaries to work around a crash in bfgminer with multiple GPU’s on OS X.īfgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -no-opencl-binaries Using bfgminer with the basic command-line parameters yields similar results. With no additional tuning my 5770 gets about 5Kh/s. Note that I am using the -d parameter to specify which GPU to use to simplify these examples.Ĭgminer -scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 For instance, if I use the following command line to mine Litecoins using my ATI 5770. This isn’t really the case with using either miner to mine Litecoins.
The miner will then tune itself and eventually reach a nice hash-rate. With Bitcoins you can basically run either miner and just specify your pool. Now a fair warning: finding a nice set of parameters for mining Litecoins with cgminer or bfgminer is far more finicky and time consuming. configure.Īrmed with a copy of cgminer or bfgminer with scrypt enabled, you can now start mining Litecoins with your GPU. If you are compiling the applications yourself, make sure to use the –enable-scrypt parameter when running. The Homebrew formulas I shared in my previous article include the configuration settings necessary to mine both Bitcoins and Litecoins. Please read my previous article on Bitcoin mining for step-by-step instructions and installation packages for cgminer and bfgminer.
In order to start using your GPU to mine Litecoins on OS X, you’ll need to first install cgminer or bfgminer.
Some see it as a doomed clone, others as the next Bitcoin, poised to take off. Litecoin is not as mature as Bitcoin and is just as volatile. Whether that trade-off is worth-while is a decision you would need to make. However, if you are “all in” on Litecoin then you can get a sizable performance increase by using your GPU to mine Litecoins.
If you’re GPU is already mining Bitcoins, using your CPU to mine Litecoins may be an obvious choice. My previous article on Litecoin mining I discussed how you can get started mining Litecoins, an alternative to the Bitcoin crypto-currency, using your spare CPU cycles.