6970m Bitcoin mining
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. If you’re GPU is already mining Bitcoins, using your CPU to mine Litecoins may be an obvious choice. However, if you are “all in” on Litecoin then you can get a sizable performance increase by using your GPU to mine Litecoins. Whether that trade-off is worth-while is a decision you would need to make. Litecoin is not as mature as Bitcoin and is just as volatile. Some see it as a doomed clone, others as the next Bitcoin, poised to take off.
GPU Mining
In order to start using your GPU to mine Litecoins on OS X, you’ll need to first install cgminer or on Bitcoin mining for step-by-step instructions and installation packages for cgminer and bfgminer. The Homebrew formulas I shared in my previous article include the configuration settings necessary to mine both Bitcoins and Litecoins. If you are compiling the applications yourself, make sure to use the –enable-scrypt parameter when running ./configure.
Armed with a copy of cgminer or bfgminer with scrypt enabled, you can now start mining Litecoins with your GPU. Now a fair warning: finding a nice set of parameters for mining Litecoins with cgminer or bfgminer is far more finicky and time consuming. With Bitcoins you can basically run either miner and just specify your pool. The miner will then tune itself and eventually reach a nice hash-rate.
This isn’t really the case with using either miner to mine Litecoins. For instance, if I use the following command line to mine Litecoins using my ATI 5770. Note that I am using the -d parameter to specify which GPU to use to simplify these examples.
cgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0
With no additional tuning my 5770 gets about 5Kh/s. My CPU alone gets around 29Kh/s. Using bfgminer with the basic command-line parameters yields similar results. 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.
