It’s good to see all of the new members that have joined in the last couple days. Welcome to the team.
RyTak asked me to do a brief write-up on an alternative program for bitcoin called cgminer. This software is for the more advanced user and can offer some efficiency gains. In my experience you can see around 7-10% increase in hash rate over guiminer depending on your settings. I personally have been using cgminer for a while and like it. It is a bit more complicated to setup, but if you are running a dedicated card or have a higher end gpu cgminer can give you a significant performance increase.
Basic Setup
If you are interested in mining with cgminer here are the steps you should take:
- Download cgminer (version 2.11.4) here: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/ The file “cgminer-2.11.4-windows.zip” is for windows and the file “cgminer-2.11.4-x86 64 built.tar.bz2” is for linux. This guide will be for setting up cgminer in windows.
- Unzip the file into a folder of your choice.
- Once you have unzipped the file you can run cgminer.exe from that folder.
- Enter in the details as shown here:
URL: stratum.btcguild.com:3333
Username: teksyn_yourusername
Password: 123
If everything is entered correctly the miner will begin and you will see your hash rate as well as other mining statistics.
Settings can be adjusted while cgminer is running. Here are a couple useful settings:
- Pressing G for [G]pu Management while in cgminer allows you to [D]isable or [E]nable a miner if you are using more than one graphics card.
- While in Gpu management you can also change the miner [I]ntensity. This is how much of your system resources are dedicated for mining. From my experience I have found that using an intensity of “5” works well for normal desktop usage and an intensity of “9” gives you the maximum hash rate, but utilizes all of your gpu sources, making it difficult to do any other tasks. I recommend only using an intensity of “9” while you are not using the computer or on a secondary graphics card.
Those are the basics and should get you up and going with cgminer. For more information on cgminer and its features you can see the readme file included in the download. I will not be able to provide much troubleshooting here, but maybe others with experience can help out or if you are having too many problems guiminer still works fine.
Creating a batch file
If you do not wish to enter the url, login info, and settings everytime you startup cgminer you can write a batch file to do it for you.
To write a batch file you can open notepad and save the file as yourfilename.bat . In this file you can write one line of commands to run cgminer and set your options. For example:
Start /D "c:\bitcoin\cgminer_2.11.3" cgminer.exe -o http://stratum.btcguild.com:3333 -u teksyn_username -p 123 -I 5 -d 0
This will run cgminer from the specified directory on Tek syndicate’s pool with one gpu running at an intensity of 5.
For multiple gpus:
Start /D "c:\bitcoin\cgminer_2.11.3" cgminer.exe -o http://stratum.btcguild.com:3333 -u teksyn_username -p 123 -I 5,9 -d 0 -d 1
This will run the primary gpu at intensity 5 and the secondary gpu intensity 9.
Save the batch file after you are finished editing it. Then double clicking on it will execute the batch commands and run cgminer with your settings. For more information on cgminer options please see the readme file.