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to new mac pro owners has anyone done LTC mining

philipma1957

philipma1957

macrumors 603
Original poster
Apr 13, 2010
6,412
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Howell, New Jersey
Okay I saw one today nice small gear. I wondered if anyone does coin mining.

Seems to me Litecoins would make some money for me if the new mac pro will mine coins. fire pro's can mine pretty well.

Has any one tried to do this?
 
Given that a single 6990 (release around 2-3 years ago) can do 900MH/s then litecoin will be ~700 average KH/s. not bad to be honest. I say ~700 because the GPU's in the nMP are underclocked. I am merely estimating the performance here. Poster above: what GPU did you decide to go with on your nMP?
 
I guess d700 gonna do about 1100-1200 kh/s

Interesting tho how hot and loud NMP will be.
 
I just recently built a Hackintosh (because I couldn't justify the cost of a nMP for my uses, in short). It uses two 280x GPU's that identifies as d700's in benchmarks - they have the same amount of stream processors, memory bandwidth etc, so they should be pretty equal - the biggest difference is 6GB memory vs 3 GB, but I'm not sure how much difference that makes when LTC mining.

Anyway, after some initial tests I noticed a hurdle. For best performance with cgminer (or similar mining software), it's often necessary to tweak GPU settings. This is done through a library called the ATI ADL SDK, and allows software to control the GPU's core/memory clock speeds, voltage, fans and similar. After some digging, I found out that this library is NOT available at all for OS X, which means you're very limited when mining on a mac :(

As comparison, I get just over 1000 kh/s when mining under OS X (just over 500kh/s per GPU) on optimal settings, and about 1500 kh/s (750 per GPU) when mining on the same hardware under windows after some fine tuning. Sadly, with a 50% difference I'll keep booting to windows when leaving my computer overnight until things improve on the OS X side, if it ever does.
 
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900 MH/s ... Could you give an example of how long you're running the process to gain, for example $100?
 
TjeuV said:
900 MH/s ... Could you give an example of how long you're running the process to gain, for example $100?
Click to expand...

They (both) mean kh/s not mh/s
At the current difficultly and ltc exchange prices, it's a little over $5 a day (completely ignoring the cost of electricity).

As far as serious number crunching goes, the nMP is a lemon compared to what you can throw together with cheap consumer parts. Also note what Stingray454 mentioned with regards to osx' performance - Windows and linux perform pretty much identically with scrypt loads, osx has some serious bottlenecks for some reason.
 

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Apologies for the wander off topic, but I did some calculations with using an old Mac Pro with a 5870, booted into OS X 8 to mine bitcoins at that time.

It worked out cheaper in power consumption to actually go out and buy a bitcoin… (In Windows 7 you ended up just about ahead).

But that may say more about UK utility prices than anything else!

As you were….
 
Robert Davies said:
It worked out cheaper in power consumption to actually go out and buy a bitcoin… (In Windows 7 you ended up just about ahead).
Click to expand...

When did you do your calculation?
If you had free electricity, bitcoin prices remained stable, your machine was never used for anything else, wear and tear didn't exist and the difficulty wasn't increasing exponentially, a nMP would take a lifetime (literally) to provide an ROI while mining bitcoins.
It's not anywhere near feasible, don't do it unless your speculating that exchange prices will shoot up 1000s of % (and obviously like you said, you're infinitely better just buying).
 
VoR said:
When did you do your calculation?
If you had free electricity, bitcoin prices remained stable, your machine was never used for anything else, wear and tear didn't exist and the difficulty wasn't increasing exponentially, a nMP would take a lifetime (literally) to provide an ROI while mining bitcoins.
It's not anywhere near feasible, don't do it unless your speculating that exchange prices will shoot up 1000s of % (and obviously like you said, you're infinitely better just buying).
Click to expand...

Just over a year or so back before bitcoin prices skyrocketed. It was never an investment, and I didn't even factor in wear and tear or machine replacement!

I just started out doing it to find out about bitcoins and mining, with never a thought towards 'speculating' - I decided my machine was better utilised doing other stuff! :)
 
Robert Davies said:
It worked out cheaper in power consumption to actually go out and buy a bitcoin… (In Windows 7 you ended up just about ahead)
Click to expand...

VoR said:
..a nMP would take a lifetime (literally) to provide an ROI while mining bitcoins.
Click to expand...

Just to be clear, the discussion here is about LTC (litecoins). While bitcons are a waste of electricity to farm unless you have very powerful ASIC hardware, LTC can still be farmed with a profit. With only 2 GPU's I farm one LTC about every 2-3 days, which at current exchange rate is about $25. Subtract the electricity cost, and it's still about $50 per week, assuming a fixed exchange rate. While it's not a major income, you can still make a few bucks from it. But no, you would not get a ROI on a nMP, that much is true :)
 
Stingray454 said:
Just to be clear, the discussion here is about LTC (litecoins). While bitcons are a waste of electricity to farm unless you have very powerful ASIC hardware, LTC can still be farmed with a profit. With only 2 GPU's I farm one LTC about every 2-3 days, which at current exchange rate is about $25. Subtract the electricity cost, and it's still about $50 per week, assuming a fixed exchange rate. While it's not a major income, you can still make a few bucks from it. But no, you would not get a ROI on a nMP, that much is true :)
Click to expand...

This is a super interesting post and I thank you for the insight. What sort of hash rates are you seeing to get a ltc mined that often? Im trying to figure out whar a "good" hash rate is vs what the nMP will theoretically be capeable of. Ive got one with d700s on the way and intend to do some fiddling around with ltc even just as a learning excerise.
 
NeonHeatDisease said:
This is a super interesting post and I thank you for the insight. What sort of hash rates are you seeing to get a ltc mined that often? Im trying to figure out whar a "good" hash rate is vs what the nMP will theoretically be capeable of. Ive got one with d700s on the way and intend to do some fiddling around with ltc even just as a learning excerise.
Click to expand...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I run two 280x cards in a hackintosh build. I get about 500 kh/s per card under OS X, and about 750 per card in windows, so for now I'm dual-booting to windows for mining. The d700 is probably a bit faster, I haven't seen any benchmarks for it but I'm guessing 8-900 kh/s per card under windows, but it's just a guess - I could be wrong. Would be very interested to hear from anyone that tried it.

Anyway, with a total of 1500kh/s I get about 0.4 coins per day average (it varies with luck), so it's definitely doable to mine them. Difficulty increases as time goes by, and you won't make huge profits to begin with, but it's a nice project to do for fun while at least making back a small part of the hardware cost :)
 
NeonHeatDisease said:
This is a super interesting post and I thank you for the insight. What sort of hash rates are you seeing to get a ltc mined that often? Im trying to figure out whar a "good" hash rate is vs what the nMP will theoretically be capeable of. Ive got one with d700s on the way and intend to do some fiddling around with ltc even just as a learning excerise.
Click to expand...

I suspect the d700 nMP will mine at around 1100-1200 kh/s
There's no such thing as a 'good' hashrate, you should get what the hardware gives. It's scalable number crunching, and it's relatively trivial to look at hardware specs of a gpu and know exactly what to expect.

If you're actually leaving a miner going for any length of time, use linux or windows. Experiment-wise I'd be very interested to hear feedback on temperatures.
 
Ive got a buddy whos got a gaming rig with 3X gtx 780s, were gonna try it out on his machine as well. Ill very likely sully a mac with windows for the very first time for this, and also perhaps gaming - and a mac pro no less. Should be very interesting though.

As for a "good" hashrate - i just mean good in a relative sense - to what a comparably priced expenditure might get me or what other people are deeming worth the time and effort. Knowing that ill be theoretically capable of achieving these kinds of speeds it seems like a no-brainer.
 
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NeonHeatDisease said:
Ive got a buddy whos got a gaming rig with 3X gtx 780s, were gonna try it out on his machine as well. Ill very likely sully a mac with windows for the very first time for this, and also perhaps gaming - and a mac pro no less. Should be very interesting though.

As for a "good" hashrate - i just mean good in a relative sense - to what a comparably priced expenditure might get me or what other people are deeming worth the time and effort. Knowing that ill be theoretically capable of achieving these kinds of speeds it seems like a no-brainer.
Click to expand...

nvidia gimp their devices for certain ggpu workloads, so don't expect too much - A single 780 should crunch about 300 kh/s but you can triple that with three obviously.
Windows is a fantastic OS but I understand what you mean. There's linux distros like BAMT that have everything done for you with regards to mining, but I'm unsure how well they'll work out of the box with a D700.
You won't get anywhere near a good hashrate compared to what you can build for equivalent money but you're buying the machine for other purposes I assume, mining is just a bonus and something to play with.
 
VoR said:
...compared to what you can build for equivalent money but you're buying the machine for other purposes I assume, mining is just a bonus and something to play with.
Click to expand...

Exactly. If in its off hours it can crunch numbers and make some change - Im not one to scoff at any extra amount in my pocket at the end of the month. Ive got apple care as well so Im not too worried about wear and tear: yet anyways. I do take it into account that I could just be blissfully ignorant on the matter at the moment though.
 
Mac Pro Cylinder with D700 Scrypt hashrate

Hi,

I just got the Mac Pro with D700 and I get just about 520Kh/s at intensity 13, that's 260Kh/s per GPU. Any higher intensity increases power consumption but doesn't increase hashrate. The temperature goes up to about 86 degrees.

It's a very disappointing hashrate and I'm hoping to get it to run a bit faster. I will email the owner of MacMiner and CGminer for Mac OS X to see if they have any suggestion.

There you have it :)

Alejandro
 
scottialex said:
Hi,

I just got the Mac Pro with D700 and I get just about 520Kh/s at intensity 13, that's 260Kh/s per GPU. Any higher intensity increases power consumption but doesn't increase hashrate. The temperature goes up to about 86 degrees.

It's a very disappointing hashrate and I'm hoping to get it to run a bit faster. I will email the owner of MacMiner and CGminer for Mac OS X to see if they have any suggestion.

There you have it :)

Alejandro
Click to expand...

That sounds too low, what settings do you use? The settings make a HUGE difference, so fine tune it a bit :)

I would suggest the following for the d700: --scrypt -g 2 -w 256 -I 13 --thread-concurrency 8192

You should get at least 4-500 per gpu or there is something wrong :). My guess is probably closer to 8-900.
 
I know it's very low. I have a Windows 7 mining rig with 3 R9 290X, one 7950 and one 7850, I know all about the settings and what the hashrate "should" be. The D700 is very underclocked and in the Mac you can't use the gpu-engine and gpu-memory commands to tweak it.

For what I see, this isn't a hardware issue, I think it's the drivers, or maybe both.

In any event, you are not going to buy this Mac with mining being your primary, secondary or even third objective in mind. And at this super low hashrate the GPU goes all the way to 86C with the fans at 100%.

It is what it is. The computer itself runs amazingly fast. It's a NASCAR beast.

Alejandro
 
Ah, too bad. I've already given up mining under OS X as I get about 50% higher hash rates under windows on the same hardware, and that's without even using the gpu tuning options.

From what I've heard the ATI graphics drivers are getting quite the bump in 10.9.2 (big jump in version number at least), can't wait to see what is improved / supported when it is released. Hopefully the mining performance will improve as well.
 
I'm actually getting 1.1Mh/s now.

I was using cgminer for Mac OS X but I switched to Asteroid app and now it's running as I expected, just above 1Mh/s :)

The temperature gets to just over 90C and when I change intensity one notch down, to 12, the hashrate drops to 875Kh/s and temperature drops to just above 80C.

Alejandro
 
scottialex said:
I was using cgminer for Mac OS X but I switched to Asteroid app and now it's running as I expected, just above 1Mh/s :)
Click to expand...

That's quite odd, as Asteroid is just a gui for cgminer :). I'm guessing asteroid has some preset settings for most hardware, and with those settings cgminer runs a lot better. Anyway, glad to hear it's getting decent results. Still not a great computer for mining, but at least usable :)
 
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