Bitcoins

[C7R35]

There has been a lot of talk about bitcoins lately. My dad is even trying to use my beefy gaming PC to 'generate' bitcoins, or whatever the term is.

I honestly have no clue what bitcoins are and what they do or how to get them. All I know is they're worth a lot of money. Does anyone have any information on this stuff? My dad's been on my PC a lot lately trying to do this stuff, and I'm getting worried xD

 

[Spectre GT]

There has been a lot of talk about bitcoins lately. My dad is even trying to use my beefy gaming PC to 'generate' bitcoins, or whatever the term is.

I honestly have no clue what bitcoins are and what they do or how to get them. All I know is they're worth a lot of money. Does anyone have any information on this stuff? My dad's been on my PC a lot lately trying to do this stuff, and I'm getting worried xD

Unless you're running an ASIC rig and your GPU offers OpenCL support, you won't be very successful at Bitcoin mining at all; Your electric bill will end up costing you more than what you'd make in Bitcoins, and you're looking at frying your rig.

You have a gaming rig, not a Bitcoin mining rig; The difference between the two are they're completely different types of builds, meant for two completely different purposes.

 

[Ric]

Mining bit coins is a very extensive process. It puts a lot of demand on your parts and has the potential to ruin them, especially video cards.

Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file.

Don't try to mine solo, it's useless. It can take over 3 years for 1 mineblock if you're doing it alone.

 

[Spectre GT]

Here man, this is everything you need to know about Bitcoin mining.

http://www.maximumpc.com/bitcoin_mining_101

 

[C7R35]

My dad is a computer science major and is currently an IT detective with the police. So I figured he knows what he's doing, but I'd like a better understanding of the procedure. Thanks for the link!

 

[C7R35]

Unless you're running an ASIC rig and your GPU offers OpenCL support, you won't be very successful at Bitcoin mining at all; Your electric bill will end up costing you more than what you'd make in Bitcoins, and you're looking at frying your rig.

You have a gaming rig, not a Bitcoin mining rig; The difference between the two are they're completely different types of builds, meant for two completely different purposes.

My graphics card does have OpenCL support. I think I have OpenCL from when I installed my last drivers.

 

[Ric]

List your specs.

 

[C7R35]

List your specs.

-5 foot 8
-140 pounds
-Blonde hair
-Blue eyes


Wait.. you mean my computer specs? Oh..

-Intel i7-4770k @ 3.5 GHz 8 Core [hyperthreaded] processor
-Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz OC Edition w/ 2GB on board GDDR5 V-Ram (with an extra 2GB of shared memory, according to DirectX Diagnostics)
-ASRock Fatal1ty H87 Pro LGA 1150 Motherboard
-12GB DDR3-1600 Memory
-Like.... 6 hard drives that run from 40GB to 400GB.

They aren't the best specifications. I do have an Intel i7 Extreme (I believe it's a 3960x, not too sure) processor. If that makes a difference at all, I'll swap my 4770k with that just to play around with it.

 

[_Sushi]

-5 foot 8
-140 pounds
-Blonde hair
-Blue eyes


Wait.. you mean my computer specs? Oh..

-Intel i7-4770k @ 3.5 GHz 8 Core [hyperthreaded] processor
-Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz OC Edition w/ 2GB on board GDDR5 V-Ram (with an extra 2GB of shared memory, according to DirectX Diagnostics)
-ASRock Fatal1ty H87 Pro LGA 1150 Motherboard
-12GB DDR3-1600 Memory
-Like.... 6 hard drives that run from 40GB to 400GB.

They aren't the best specifications. I do have an Intel i7 Extreme (I believe it's a 3960x, not too sure) processor. If that makes a difference at all, I'll swap my 4770k with that just to play around with it.

You can't just swap to an i7 Extreme with that motherboard. Mining is mostly in the GPU anyway.

 

[Cyprias]

Yeah forget the CPU, they're worthless for mining. Your 7870 does about 406 Mhashes a second. If you were to run 100% all day, you'd make about 0.00018614 BTC a day, or $0.15/day. This doesn't include electricity costs which is certainly higher than what you'd make.

These days, miners are using specialized hardware called ASICs. The Block Erupter Cube can do 30,000 Mhash/s. The Xtreme Miners Lion coming out is supposed to do 7,500,000 Mhash/s. The days of GPU mining are long gone.