Litecoin Mining on Mac OS X – GPU Mining 29 Replies 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. Let your computer earn you money with Litecoin Miner, the free easy-to-use Litecoin miner. Earn Litecoin which can be exchanged for real-world currency. Works great at home, work, or on the go. For those that intend to mine with GPUs, or USB mining devices, cgminer is the program to use and can be downloaded from the developer’s website – unless, that is, you’re a Mac user, in.
My on Litecoin mining I discussed how you can get started mining, an alternative to the 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.
Let your computer earn you money with Litecoin Miner, the free easy-to-use Litecoin miner. Earn Litecoin which can be exchanged for real-world currency. Works great at home, work, or on the go.
Please read my 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 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 I use the –no-opencl-binaries to work around a crash in bfgminer with multiple GPU’s on OS X.
Bfgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 --no-opencl-binaries 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. With Bitcoin this parameter does help, but honestly not a ton. 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. This is not the case with Litecoin mining. With (Litecoin’s hashing algorithm) you need to specify a high intensity, in fact higher than is suggested for Bitcoin.
I’d start at around 10 and go up from there. On my system, 15-16 is about the best I can do.
So lets try cgminer with -I 13 to see what that does: cgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -I 13 That change alone triples the Kh/s, but from 5Kh/s to 15Kh/s honestly isn’t much to brag about. Let’s try with bfgminer: bfgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 --no-opencl-binaries -I 13 Similarly I get around 14Kh/s using the -I 13 parameter with bfgminer. The next parameter to focus on is the -w parameter, which specifies a worksize in multiples of 64 up to 256.
This parameter is what really makes a difference on my OS X rig: cgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 -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. And with bfgminer? Bfgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -d 0 --no-opencl-binaries -I 13 -w 64 This gets us up to around 80 Kh/s with bfgminer as well.
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: cgminer --scrypt -o host:port -u username -p password -I 16 -w 64 The last parameter I want to note is –thread-concurrency. 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.
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