Topic: 0.08 bounty - Newbie LTC mining questions (Read 687 times)

The -I 18 looks like aggressivity setting, it has highest impact on hashrate. Try increase it, if HW errors doesnt rise (or lower it for HW errors to fall). I have 20

pm me, you can have my help for free. just ask your questions

1) those are estimation based on the luck of that particular pool in that precise moment. the more the block the pool finds, the more you get paid. I suggest you to stay for a certain amount of time, say 24h, on a pool, and other 24h on another one to compare the actual payouts you get, not the estimated ones.

2) PPS would be the best, if it was at 0% fee. the pool decides for a fee because of the risk of paying workers even if a block wasn't found. PPLNS, or round based systems, link the amount of payout to the number of blocks found by the pool in the time window in which you send shares. there are pools which offer this methods without a fee, so, provided that you won't hop from a pool to another one too often, look for methods without a fee required.

3) didn't tried that, but I think cgminer aims at manage all your devices at a time, so it should be fine to run just one instance.

4) the number of "shaders" is a property of your GPU. "thread-concurrency" is the same of shaders, in a certain way, it tells cgminer the optimal size of work your gpu can perform. it overrides the "shaders" parameters (so don't specify both) and it should be a integer multiple of shaders. you can fine tune your gpu finding the optimal multiple.

5) sorry i don't know this. I'm a newbie too, and what I told you was what I read in some other guide here and there

Run one instance of cgminer using both GPU's at once.

Hi, gonna try and answer your #2nd Question.

When i started mining bitcoins a year ago or so through btcguild.com I played around with different ways to get paid. I found it that PPLNS was the most efficient for me, However if I were you I would definetely run each one for about 24hours to see it for yourself.

Here is what i found about PPLNS and PPS

PPS:

The PPS method offers the lowest possible variance of any pool payment system. With PPS, you are paid a guaranteed rate for every valid share you submit. This rate is calculated as follows:
(1 / Network Difficulty * 25)

In simple terms, this means each share is valued at the average expected value at current network difficulty. A fee is deducted from this rate because you are paid regardless of whether or not the pool solves blocks. The pool is absorbing the chance of "bad luck" or general variance, and offering you a flat rate.

PPLNS:

Pay Per Last N Shares groups shares submitted by all users into a "shift." A shift is currently defined as ~250 million shares. Once a shift is completed, it is considered an "Open Shift". After 10 new shifts have completed, the oldest open shift is closed.

While a shift is open, any blocks the pool finds are paid out to all open shifts (10% of the block per shift). This means that you will continue receiving payments on completed (open) shifts even if you stop mining.

With PPLNS, each open shift is paid the following:
((Block Value + Transaction Fees) / 10)

This amount is then split evenly among all ~250 million shares submitted during the shift.

PPLNS involves variance: If the pool is lucky, you can earn a lot more than normal. If it's unlucky, you will earn a lot less. In the long run (a few months or more), you can expect to earn approximately 5% more using PPLNS compared to PPS.

Hope that is a good answer.

Hi there. I have two Radeon 5870's, Windows 7 with 16 megs ram and dual core processor. I am GUI mining.

I've been mining Litecoin with cgminer over the last 24 hours using Coinotron and mine-litecoin.com

A few questions, I'll pay out 0.08 BTC (not LTC) proportionally to the questions below and if more than one answer is helpful, split it between the top 2.

1) In mine-litecoin I am seeing only .12 possible payment (estimated) despite over 100 successful shares found over 24 hours. That estimation however is higher than the actual payout, a mere 0.02 LTC for 24 hours work. Meanwhile coinotron says I could gain 0.50 LTC in a 24 hour period. Is there any reason for the discrepancy?

2) Which is better, pay per share, round based or PPLNS? Once I begin mining I find shares within 60 seconds and I continue to find shares rougly every 20-30 seconds. I don't know what reward system would be better, the  PPS is 3.5% fee.

3) Is it better to use two instances of cgminer and disable the opposite GPU or to simply run cgminer using both GPU's at once?

4) My hashrate was about 45 kh/s at first and by adjusting the thread concurrency I brought it up to 290-350 kh/s. I am very much confused still by some of the parameters in cgminer.

My current string is:
cgminer --auto-fan --auto-gpu -o stratum+tcp://coinotron.com:3334 -u radix.1 -p pass --scrypt -I 18 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8192 --shaders 1600

I have no clue what thread concurrency means or shaders (total newb, I know) but I found that using 8192 for TC I have 0 hardware errors where with my old value of about 6000 I was hitting 300-1000 hardware errors (HW:) in cgminer within a 24 hour period.

Ideally I would like to tweak this and also add in a parameter to control the temperature from going over XX degrees. I know this is possible.

5) I am looking for the elusive SDK 2.1 which seems to be resulting in 404 errors everywere I look for it. If this is the best SDK to use I'd like to find a copy. I have read that version 2.4 or 2.5 may be just as effective (which is what I am using now - 2.5)


Thank you. If your information is helpful I will ask for your BTC address and send you a small payment for your time.