Topic: Old Computers no OpenCl, No Cuda, GPU Mining Still possible? (Read 1217 times)

One other issue with old HW is you're likely to be stuck using old mining SW that only support old algos
Code written for a new algo for a Pascal GPU likely won't work on older generations GPUs. Older
algos are also more likely to have ASIC miners available which destroys any profitibility in GPU and CPU mining.

GPU mining needs at minimum a PCIe slot and a Cuda or OpenCL GPU. The CPU and RAM are virtually irrelevent.
Any system with PCIe likely has a good enough CPU and enough RAM to GPU mine. This is likely the most viable
option for an old system, though it means the direct answer to your initial question is likely no.

CPU mining doesn't have a hard minimum but older CPUs are less capable. 2nd generation x86_64 CPUs (ie core2)
are fully supported by cpuminer-opt. Older CPUs are impaired by the lack of advanced features like AES and AVX which
significantly improve mining performance on many algos.

In short, CPU mining is not viable on old systems but if they support PCIe they can be used as a platform for
mining with the latest GPUs. Until it died a couple of months ago I was using a P4 2.8 GHz 32 bit PC, 2 GB RAM,
1 PCIe x16, 1 PCIe x1, as a 2 GPU rig. The only other upgrade was the power supply.

Mining on laptops should be avoided unless you intend to run them into the ground. They aren't designed for heavy duty use,
inadeqauate cooling.

Hmmm, too bad I sold off my C64 ages ago.

 They DID have a couple of hard drive options.....

 (5MB on Burst isn't gonna mine even a penny worth a month though, IF you could get a miner to work on that low end of a machine).





 BTW - I've got quite a few "10 year old appx." pieces of hardware in use in my rigs - motherboards, CPUs, RAM, hard drives - but nothing near that old on GPUs, though some of the high end AMD HD5xxx and HD 6xxx series GPUs that are 7 or more years old would still be viable for mining with (very inefficiently but they would WORK).
 Some of the hard drives are probably closer to 15 years old (in design if not the specific HD).
 It's kinda funny in a way, watching you complain about "old tech" while at least one of my GTX 1070 cards pulls 380 sol/s on a Sempron 2800+ with 1 GB of DDR (400 I think but might be 333) and a 60 GB EIDE HD based system where I *KNOW* the MB CPU and RAM date from 2007 (Hard drive on that system at the moment has a date of manufacture of 2005, but it wasn't a new design at the time).

 Do keep in mind that the OP never specified ANY details about their system - some folks think anything more than "last year's model" is an "Old Computer".

 For that matter, the HD 7xxx GCN cards are about 5 years old (AMD added support for them in the Febuary or April 2012 Catalyst version) and THOSE do in fact mine quite effectively on some current coins - the R9 2xx and R9 3xx series mostly used the SAME GPU CHIPS as the HD 7xxx series, with no more than a BIOS upgrade and a small improvement in memory speed.

Who the hell would think you could use obsolete tech from 7 years to mine crypto that requires modern GPUs. 

Next question will be "how many coins can my commodor 64 mine?"

You can mine BURST with less than 1TB - you just don't make squat.

 If the machine supports SATA 3Gb/s or newer, it probably would be viable as a BURST miner.
 It MIGHT have issues supporting drives larger than 4TB if it's not fairly current (UEFI support needed for Windows, I believe LINUX can work around that limit without UEFI if you keep the boot partition small enough and at the start of the drive).

 If it only supports the older EIDE interface, don't bother - those drives never came larger than 1TB, machines that old had issues running anything over 500GB (except under LINUX) and the drives over 500GB were rare and expen$$$$ive, and ANY EIDE drive is very old and probably on it's last legs (or is a refurb with unknown lifespan left).


 BTW - we're ALL shooting in the dark here, since OP has never posted ANY SORT OF SPECS to the "old computers" in question.

I think you can mine burst coins with that computer. Burst coins can be mined in any ordinary computer. but you have to buy additional hard disk for that. 1 Tb hard disk minimum. So that you can mine 88 coins approximately in a day.Thats good know.  Then you can exchange it in a nice platform for bitcoins. Just check the price of burst coins in BTC. Just search about burst coins in this forum .

Can't mine with a GPU that doesn't support OpenCL or CUDA anyway.

 On the other hand, it IS possible to find cards for older machines (as long as they have PCI or AGP slots) that DO support OpenCL or CUDA - but the cards available are VERY low performance and kinda pricy, so no point in bothering.

 If it doesn't have PCI-E it's not worth even trying to set it up for ALTcoin mining - forget Bitcoin or any other coin that uses SHA256 for an algorythm as they're crazy-unprofitable to mine with anything but an ASIC.

Not worth it at all. Sell it and buy yourself beer and pizza.

Well if you have a time machine and go back to 2009 then you can, but today no way. But you can mine some altcoins with GPU, not sure if that would be profitable I dont know much about altcoin mining.

Unless you've managed to cobble about 50 moderately powerful GPUs together into some sort of mining monstrosity, there wouldn't be much point in trying.  Mining is technically possible, but it won't be profitable.  Your hash rate won't be sufficient.  Assuming you have to pay for electricity, you'll be burning through more cash than you'll ever make back in Bitcoin. 

I'd say that unless the nukes start flying and you happen to be inhabiting one of the areas that didn't get wiped out, there's no reason to be GPU mining anymore.  If the apocalypse comes and you survive, then sure, go for it.

Bitcoin? No way....

Well!?