Also, Teslas have high FP64 performance, but hashing doesn't use FP64 (or even FP32).  So, essentially a GTX 470 would perform a hair better than that Tesla part in mining.  You'd better stick with FP64 workloads with that hardware.

You need to have some kind of measurement tool inline with the power plug going into your computer.  You can guess how much your computer brings down based on manufacturer specs, but you'll never really know until you measure it.

If he's got a case like my buddy's HP, then not really.  His case is one of those smaller reverse ATX cases (opens on the right rather than the left).  He was having minor troubles with heat in his case because the thing only had one fan in it other than the PSU fan and no room to add another.  What we did was add three 40x40x20mm fans to the side inlets.  It only worked just well enough, but it worked.  When he decided he wanted a video card, I told him that he can only have a blower style card cooler, no mid-mounted fan jobs.  It has been working well for him, thus far.

+1
I'm running a pair of 170W cards and an overclocked Core i7 950 on a 700W power supply just fine.  Any 1000W power supply that follows the ATX spec will run a pair of 5870s at whatever overclock they can feasibly run at as well as all of the other components in your system, but you would've been fine using an 850W PSU as well.  I'm sure that 1000W unit you got will be more than enough.

Yes, you do need two miners, one for each card.

I'm running 2011-04-03-pre and the CUDA miner stuff is all working quite well.  Sorry for the slow reply.  I've been messing with all manner of combinations of driver versions and console commands for my 460s and came up with pretty much what I expected from the get-go.  Now with driver version 270.51 and rpcminer-cuda arguments of -gpugrid 128 -gputhreads 128, I get 128.6 MHash/s for my two overclocked 460s.  I'm still thinking that I may not mine for much longer.  It doesn't seem to be worth it on nVidia hardware while paying for electricity.

I've got a question.  Does the console view display both miners crunched together or will it display only one miner at a time?  I'm seeing lines similar to "Line: 64256 khash/s".  If it does display both miners, it would be helpful if the name of the miner was put in the front of the line, like "Primary: 64256 khash/s".

By the way, the balance button is quite nice.

+1

The problem is that the taskbar icon was getting scaled from the wrong size, anyway.  That caused jagged edges on the circle.  When Windows scales a 32-bit icon, it uses nearest neighbor scaling as opposed to bilinear, which looks horrible.  Also, the largest icon Windows supports is 256x256x32-bit, however, since Windows does scale 8-bit icons using bilinear filtering, that may be one way to resolve this issue.  Of course, with an 8-bit icon, the edges can't be alpha blended to enhance smoothness of lower resolution icons, so it would have to be a big icon.  In Windows 7 and Vista, Windows reads multi-res icons in sizes 256x256, 64x64, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, 16x16, and ignores all other resolutions even if they're present.  If you're going to do a multi-res icon, use only those sizes.  If you do only one resolution in an icon, I would suggest only using sizes divisible by 8.  Other than that, any resolution should be fine.

Also, Windows 7 and Vista support PNG compression for icons within .ico, .dll, and .exe files.  Just in case 256x256x32-bit seems too ridiculous.  Windows XP won't read that icon if it comes across it, but it should still parse the other sizes present in the file.

EDIT:  To help illustrate the problem, do this.  Run the calculator (calc.exe).  Now go to Windows\System32 and right-click calc.exe and select properties.  Look at the taskbar representation for the two programs (Calculator and calc.exe Properties).  If you have use small icons turned on for your taskbar, you should see a significant difference in the clarity of the buttons in these two.  You may also need to turn off always combine to see the properties window in the taskbar, or you could close the system32 window you had opened.  As far as I know, this issue only affects the taskbar when it wants to display a 16x16 icon and the 32x32 icon gets loaded instead.  The same thing happens to the notification tray icons in all versions of Windows, but this has been a known issue.  The taskbar crap is new since Vista.

Well, I've got 5 BTC that I can send you from my mining efforts thus far.  I'll go ahead and send that now.  I was intending to send a larger sum, but mining on nVidia hardware hasn't really paid off.  I may send more later.

Kiv intends to support your collection of RPC miners in some fashion in his mining GUI which may open up your miners to more people who would like to use a GUI with these miners.  As far as Long Polling goes, it may be useful for pools that appreciate such a connection method.


You could get more out of that CPU.  Try the -4way miner.
The GPU speed you're getting sounds about right.


Compiling the remote miner server is giving you some troubles.  Which parts do you really need?  If you're compiling only RPC miners, just turn on the relevant portions and leave the rest off.  (CMakeLists.txt)

If you don't feed the CUDA miner specific gpugrid and gputhreads parameters, it will do a benchmark of all of the available options to find the best one.  Either due to a bug or driver issues, some of your first couple of runs of the CUDA miner may be less than you could get.  Sometimes if you leave your system idle for about 60 seconds, then you get better speeds.  Sometimes, you would have to run it immediately after closing it to see the best speeds.  It's somewhat random.  If you do see one instance of it running the fastest, take note of the last pairs of numbers that show up.  For me, the best pair of numbers ended up being (128,128).  They'll show up in the order (gpugrid, gputhreads).  Otherwise, you could just run the miner yourself, constantly varying the inputs until you see the greatest average mining speed.  The first report of the hash speed will be lower than all of the others, so give it some time.  Also, for the large majority of nVidia cards, your ask rate should be larger than the default.  If you get less than 40 Mhash/s, this should be 10 seconds (10000 ms) or greater.  Everybody has a different theology for the interval between getwork requests, so if you mine in a pool, you may have to PM a pool operator for the settings that they would like you to use.  They'll need to know your hash rate.  As far as system slowness, there's an aggression setting you can raise or lower to change the responsiveness.


I haven't had the time to run it, yet.  I'll be doing that sometime within the next 24 hours.  I'm glad to test it out for you and offer any suggestions I can, since I've been toying with these miners for some time.


Yeah, I can't see how you would be able to fix this other than making a specific form for each miner.  As far as I know, puddinpop's RPC OpenCL miner and m0mchil's Python OpenCL miner yield pretty close to the same hash rate on a majority of hardware.  I don't think there will be too much of an outrage if puddinpop's OpenCL miner gets left out, but it would still be a little bit of a headache to set up hardware lists for each miner (OpenCL vs. CUDA).  The RPC CPU miner that does not have the -4way suffix runs the same code as the bitcoin client, if I remember correctly.  That one can probably be ignored, as well... maybe.  Also, CUDA has this weird behavior of making my secondary card be GPU 0 and my primary be GPU 1.  Just thought I would pass that along.

Maybe I'm missing something here.  Why would the mining rig (which isn't logged into very often) need to know how many bitcoins are in the wallet?  It just makes more.  It doesn't spend any.  Only the workstation where the spending occurs really needs to know how many bitcoins there are.  OH WAIT!  *facepalm*  I GET IT!  You're mining solo.  Otherwise, in a pool, this would make no sense.  In that case, automated transfers from the mining wallet to the spending wallet would publicly show a relationship between the two wallets, but it would be simple to set up.  As an aside, sshd is only a small inconvenience.

You've got the wrong device picked out.  If you don't see the Video device listed specifically, you've got a configuration snafu.  Try Catalyst 10.12.

nVidia drivers come with OpenCL support built-in.  Installing AMD's OpenCL SDK is not helpful.  That SDK is made for AMD cards and will only add clutter to your machine.  You're going to want to remove that.  Also, poclbm (Python OpenCL Bitcoin Miner) does not run CUDA code, it runs OpenCL code.  You'll be selecting the platform that nVidia has set up to run OpenCL code on CUDA capable hardware.  This GUI that Kiv is writing up will have CUDA support in the future, but it only uses poclbm at the moment.  CUDA and OpenCL run fairly close to the same level of performance on nVidia hardware, but I have seen about an 8% performance benefit using a true CUDA miner over an OpenCL miner.  If this GUI gets CUDA support, I'll be willing to try it out to see if I get the same level of performance.  Mind you, I've done some tweaking of CUDA parameters to get to the performance I've got.

I know on the nVidia side of things, you have to accept a EULA before overclocking with the software that they provide.  But, ... you're right, it's not clear exactly which cards you can overclock and not void the warranty until you read very carefully.  AMD doesn't need to be the arbiter of what cards can be returned to their manufacturers.  If Company A wants to warranty their card with overclocks and Company B does not, then they can each do their own thing.  People that bought Company A's cards are free to overclock and if their card melts, they can send it back to Company A.  If someone with Company B's card overclocked it and it failed, they can send it back and hope they'll replace it, but that is fraud.

Theft.....not so much.  It would be a violation of the terms of the warranty for most manufacturers.  There are some exceptions, though.

As far as CPU mining goes, you're not going to get much out of it.  You should consider a GPU.  Well, if you insist on CPU mining and this is your own personal machine, you have one possible option.  If you've got Socket 939, you might be able to find a Socket 939 Althlon X2 somewhere.  If it'll cost you more than $120 though, don't bother.

Yeah, apparently Kiv's already got that licked.  The icon already had 6 versions of the same picture in it, all at 32-bit, but I'm sure it's fine.  The 128x128 icon is superfluous, though.

Seriously, I'm going to sleep now.  I got to stop checking the board just... one... last...... time.

By existing, do you mean puddinpop's?  I'm already using that, so it'd be easy to get a head start mining with the GUI.  I'm game to try whatever you throw in, anyway.  The problem is, I'm about to log off of consciousness, shortly.


Would you have to worry about taskbars displaying icons larger than 16x16?  Also, The translucent sections I'm looking at in the icon are white with a teeny tiny opacity. (255,255,255,1)  Oh wait, I see the problem.  The 1-bit transparency plane is all set to zero.  Some of that should be marked transparent, perhaps alpha != 255.

Yeah, but here, they're pointing out XP oddities with picking icon sizes that are too low in resolution in the taskbar and too high a resolution in the system tray.  Unfortunately, I'm seeing the taskbar pick too high a resolution, which is just weird.  Well, I did see somewhere else that there was a way to send two window messages setting the icon twice, specifying the resolution in the message (Visual C++).  One was sent for the regular icon and the other was sent for 16x16.  Also, I made an edit while you were typing apparently.  I was just letting you know I'm giving up on this.  It was good to cut the boredom, ... I think.

Scott Seligman posted on Thursday, September 04, 2008 10:44 AM
Add the icon to the appropriate members of the WNDCLASSEX structure for
your RegisterClassEx call:

wcex.hIcon = LoadIcon(m_hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_ICONNAME));
wcex.hIconSm = (HICON) LoadImage(m_hInstance,
MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_ICONNAME), IMAGE_ICON,
GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSMICON),
GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSMICON), 0);

source

If you're using 20110327, then the reason you might be seeing an improperly matched icon is if your taskbar or title bars are displaying icons in sizes that are not 16x16, 32x32, or 48x48.  For example, if your taskbar displays an icon at 24x24, Windows has a funny behavior for certain icons of picking the 16x16 over the 32x32, and so on.  Fixing this would require removing the 16x16 icon out of the file, forcing windows to scale the 32x32 icon, except, Windows doesn't scale 32-bit icons using bilinear filtering.  It uses nearest neighbor, which is horrible.  It does do filtering for all other bit depths.  So... umm... yeah, you might be stuck with a funny looking icon unless your taskbar and title bar are sized appropriately for the icon.

EDIT: Oh, I think I see what your problem is.  It's not your fault, it's Windows.  Looking at the properties dialog, I was seeing the 16x16 icon in the title bar like I expected.  What I didn't expect, however, was that Windows decided that the taskbar (which I specifically set to display 16x16 icons) chose to load the 32x32 icon and scale it anyway.  Even though the title bar was right, the taskbar was wrong.  I'm kind of stumped on this one.  I'll play around with the order of the images within the icon file to see if I can get Windows to do what it's supposed to do.

EDIT x2:  Apparently, I can't seem to reorder the icons within the .ico file to get what I want, and I'm not the first to hit a brick wall.  Apparently, this has bugged someone else.
http://www.indigorose.com/forums/threads/30291-How-to-set-16x16-version-of-an-.ico-file-as-window-icon

EDIT x3:  Oddly enough, I turned of Aero and hovered over the taskbar button and both the taskbar and the popout box were definately displaying icons in the size of 16x16, but the taskbar was still using the 32x32 icon resized and the popout box used the right friggen icon.  Frustration...  I'm giving up on this one.  It seems to work everywhere but the taskbar for me.  Also, that bit about the preview pane only displaying the first image in the icon was apparently wrong.  This bug only seems to haunt one of my older icons, not that it matters anyway.