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Topic: Mining bitcoins while mining litecoins (Read 1128 times)

hero member
Activity: 632
Merit: 500
September 24, 2012, 07:05:06 PM
#5
Since LTC uses CPU and BTC uses the gpu, would there be any performance loss on either side? I would think mining BTC would use a bit of cpu too?

I have done it for around 2 months back in March-April. I've stopped after moving my farm to BAMT, since there was only a 32-bit version, and going from 64-bit to 32-bit cut the hashpower in half.

Use a 64-bit OS and have different miners for LTC and BTC. I used Ufasoft for mining LTC with the CPU, and cgminer for mining BTC with my GPU. Also, be sure to start the GPU mining BEFORE the CPU mining, if not, it will takes an eternity to boot. GPU mining require CPU when booting up, but very little afterward, so that's why it can be done.
legendary
Activity: 2940
Merit: 1090
September 24, 2012, 08:22:07 AM
#4
CPU mining is really only useful before the GPU people start to take a coin seriously, so it is best used on coins they never bothered to mine or coins they have given up mining. It is a "just for fun" thing, serious miners use GPUs or even-more-specialised equipment.

Some of the ancient CPU-oriented coins might still be mine-able for example, or of course since this is just for fun anyway the recent just for fun coin BBQcoin would work. A whole lot higher difficulty but still within a range where CPUs can still get some coins is GRouPcoin, but as that is merged you might as well point your CPUs at the Massively Merged Mining project, so your hashes would have a tiny chance of getting a block on other chains too and you might even see some tiny tiny amount of bitcoin from the p2pool front end.

-MarkM-
hero member
Activity: 617
Merit: 531
September 24, 2012, 06:34:12 AM
#3
LTC and BTC mining are both done on GPUs now. The days of LTC CPU miners have gone. However there is nothing to stop you from using the GPU on BTC and the CPU on LTC. The problem is you're only going to see 10-20Kh running on LTC which is not going to be worth the energy spent.

Until a CPU only coin turns up choose either BTC or LTC.
hero member
Activity: 616
Merit: 500
September 23, 2012, 09:21:19 AM
#2
Since LTC uses CPU and BTC uses the gpu, would there be any performance loss on either side? I would think mining BTC would use a bit of cpu too?

for the most part no.

cgminer on my 7870 cards will use like 10-25% cpu.. so that slows down the ltc side a little bit.

honestly, at this point both are equally profitable on a gpu, but that depends on if you can keep the khash/sec about the same or higher than mhash/sec woudl be for btc.
vip
Activity: 1316
Merit: 1043
👻
September 23, 2012, 04:09:52 AM
#1
Since LTC uses CPU and BTC uses the gpu, would there be any performance loss on either side? I would think mining BTC would use a bit of cpu too?
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