Tutorial for Ethereum Mining on a Gaming PC: How to Earn Money on the Side
Seite 2: Happy Mining!
Download the ethminer mining software. We used ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 from GitHub. If you use another version of this software, please take care to check whether it does support GPU mining.
Unpack the software to a folder of your choice. There are several flags you can set to get mining started: "-G" enables GPU mining, "-M" mines with the CPU. The latter option is only helpful for quick test runs. IMPORTANT: If you have more than one GPU, you need to disable Crossfire or SLI to mine on all available cards.
It took us a number of trial runs to find the right parameters for our two RX 480s to work correctly. The following flags worked for us in the end:
ethminer.exe -G --opencl-platform 0
Ethminer will then download the necessary work units, transfer them to the graphics memory and start mining.
The flag "--opencl-platform 0" causes both OpenCL-enabled GPUs to be used. As an alternative, both devices can be called individually with the flag "--opencl-devices 0,1" but this did not work for us (Error: No GPU device with sufficient memory was found. Can't GPU mine. Remove the -G argument).
United We Stand
If you mine on your own, it is pretty unlikely that you will succeed in solving a block and thus in getting the payout. This is why it pays to join one of the many mining pools out there. A mining pool is a group of users that combine the power of their rigs to solve blocks. Payouts for these are divided among the members based on their contribution to the workload. Pools usually take a small commission and transfer ETH only when a member has reached a certain payout threshold.
We used Nanopool for our tests. This anonymous mining pool works without you having to register for it. If you want to see statistics for your contribution, you can enter your Ethereum address (see Geth) on their website. To get this to work, you need to tell ethminer your address and an email address when you start the program.
We did this with the following flags:
ethminer.exe --farm-recheck 200 -G --opencl-platform 0 -S eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9999 -O 0xYOURADDRESS/YOUR@EMAILADDRESS.COM
Last step: Making money. (fab)
