Bitcoin graphics card chart
Bitcoin mining with a CPU was once the norm,but these days it's pretty pointless as mining with a graphics card (GPU) is 50-100 times faster because they have a lot more of arithmetic processing units and they can do large amounts of bulky mathematical labor in a greater quantity than CPU's (further info about this can be found here).
Fortunately,while mining,a computer is perfectly usable: you can use your daily personal computer to full-time mine and you won’t notice any differences in your experience. The GPU is usually not used (below 15% of usage) under typical “office” kind of use (surfing the web,watching YouTube videos or movies) and dedicating the GPU power to mining won’t slow the machine down or lag it up on you. As long as you don’t start a modern 3D game you probably won’t notice any differences while working on the computer. You can even start or stop mining at any time without losing any of your progress,so part-time or “during sleep time” mining is profitable as well.
What you need is:CPU: Any CPU made after 2005 is more than enough to run the proper software for mining. Having a greater CPU won’t give any huge performance impact on mining.
MOTHERBOARD: it must have at least one PCI-E slot. Some motherboards support SLI or CrossFire. In those,you can fit two graphics cards for mining,which doesn’t necessarily have to be interconnected with the bridge. It does not matter how fast the motherboard PCI-E slot is (16x,8x,4x,2x,1x) the performance will be the same. As long there is a PCI-E slot,you can fit a graphics card for mining.
If you want to build a system specially for mining you’ll start wondering how to fit more than 2 graphics cards in it. Well,graphics cards can also be inserted in the little PCI-E slots,but these slots have to be open on the right side (if not you can cut the slot border off to make it fit but you’ll definitely void your motherboard’s warranty) or you can buy PCI-E risers (flex ribbon cables to extend the slot) and adapters (to transform PCI to PCI-E) to fit 4,5 or even 6 mining cards on a single motherboard.
MEMORY: 1GB is good enough. It does not matter what speed,timings it has or if it is DDR,DDR2 or DDR3 type of memory.
HARD DISK: any ATA SATA bigger than 30GB will do.
POWER SUPPLY: it should be a good quality power supply which meets the graphics card/s minimum requirements. The system will be under heavy load at all times,so be reasonable with it.
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