New, but need a little help

[Mighty_Mac]

Hi guys, nice to meet you all. I’ve been mining for about 2 weeks now. I’m on a bit of a budget so I’ve just been using my mid-range gaming PC for mining while I’m not playing games. I have a Sapphire 6850 card that can hash 200m (220m while overclocked with MSI afterburner) while I was mining BTC on bitminter. I took what little earning i had to BTC-e. The market took a major crash from 200 down to 89usd. I decided to make a foolish/risky move and trade all my BTC for FTC. The next day, FTC took off, and I sold right before it dropped. I got back all my money and some extra. So now FTC has my attention and I’d like to mine it now.

I downloaded everything I was told and I got the FTC wallet to start mining, but I don’t think I’m doing it quite right. I’m a noob at all this. I don’t even know I’m CPU or GPU mining but it &is* working. My processor is an AMD 4130 quad @ 3.7 mhz if that matters. I kept the scantime and threads at 99, not really understanding what they are for. for speed it says "28.215 khash/sec - 99 threads. To get it to work I placed a exe.file called “minerd” into the applications folder.

So basically I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, can someone take a crack at it?

EDIT - My miner will say its mining, but my funds still say zero, and when I click on the mining program it locks up and says “not responding”. so for sure Im doing something wrong

EDIT 2 - It’s still frozen but on my account it says I have shares now at least. Is it possible to mine at 220 m/hash like I was doing with BTC?

[MrSheep]

Hello there, mighty one!

You can still mine LTC (or FTC) with your GPU - however, what you have seen in MH/s will be kH/s with LTC/FTC as the scrypt mining algorhythm is more complex. Check if your mining software supports scrypt based mining and go with that on a LTC pool then.

If your miner does not support it, cgminer is quite popular!

Regards,
MrSheep

[ShadowEW]

First off, 99 threads relates to how many mining threads (CPU) you are running, you should never run more threads than you have physical cores (or logical threads), i.e. in your case : 4.

That aside, you should try GPU mining with a pool. You can use cgminer as normal (as you would of used it for Bitcoins) but just change your conf file to point at a pool and start cgminer with the --scrypt option and you’re good to go.

Scrypt mining (as opposed to SHA-256 of Bitcoin) works out to be 1000x less. So as a rough estimate you should be seeing (before tweaking) mining speeds in the region of 180-220khash,.

I’ve skipped quite a lot, but as you’ve said you’re fairly experienced with BTC mining you should be fairly competent to work out what to do once you have a pool address and the mining running :P

So a quick roundup:
Look in the ‘Mining’ section of this Forum for a Pool.
Sign up to a pool.
Create / edit the ‘My Worker’ substituting in values you want.
Download cgminer
Create a bat enveloping cgminer.exe

Bat:
[code]cgminer -o pooladdress:poolport -u username.workername -p password --scrypt[/code]

Run the bat, have cgminer up and running / mining.
Click on the cgminer window, press the “S” key, then press the “W” key, then press the Enter Key twice.
Now you have a cgminer.conf stored in your cgminer folder with all the configurations.
You can now simply start cgminer by double pressing cgminer.exe, and you can start tweaking the conf to eek out more khash from your GPU.

Best of luck and question away and I’ll try and help ^^