I thought it might be a good idea to have a place to hold all the settings for various cards since the testnet should be coming soon. If we could keep it in a certain format that might help as well. Make sure you include your OS, which miner you are using, your miner settings, and your hashpower. I'll try to keep the first post updated as new results come in.
Nice idea.. I am planning to buy new card as well for my old pc that's not used much.. Will dedicate it totally for Decred mining.. Some suggestions regarding which card I should buy would be helpful.
Ultimate card should be AMD R9 fury X2. It is not out yet but I think it will be soon. Only price can be problem, I assume it will cost well over 1.000$. Anyway, it's overkill but my first choice.
And if your going to put more than one card in the case I would recommend the reference version as they expel heat outside of the case (they are a little louder though).
Since I don't have any decent VGA for mining, I am thinking to get one AMD R9 380 or one NVIDIA GTX 960 because I believe that it will worth it trying a little mining at least for the first months of the project. I know that AMD R9 380 will be better than NVIDIA GTX 960 for mining but I also have to consider the electricity cost. I also prefer GTX 960 in general for working and since it's a newer GPU, it already has H.265 decoder(but I don't know if I am going to need it in the next 1 - 2 years), HDMI 2.0, it is a bit more stable in Adobe applications I think and it needs at least 50 Watts less power at full load than R9 380. I really like AMD VGAs as well but I was planning to give them a try again with Polaris coming in about 4 - 6 months and untill then mining opportunities may be less. So, should I go for AMD R9 380 (not X) or NVIDIA GTX 960? The prices for the cards I am interested are almost the same. Will R9 380 really give me much more hashrate - about x1,5 more - than GTX 960? By the way I find some blakecoin hashrates mentioned where GTX 960 hashrate is pretty close to R9 280(x). I also want to ask those having mining experience if I can mine with not much trouble with my main pc while using internet, watching videos and maybe working on programs like Adobe InDesign, with some settings maybe on the miner to stress a bit less the GPU?
You can change the intensity at which the GPU mines. So if you are going to be using it you can set it at 50% or less and it should be stable to do some other tasks. Or you can set it at 90% and your computer will be unusable. Mining uses alot of GPU resources but not much network resources.
OK that's good, I'll try to find the best % value of intensity when the time comes. Yeah I know that GPU will be working at full load of course and I won't have any integrated or secondary GPU as a workaround. For someone who might have integrated GPU or secondary "weak" ones together with their main VGAs they can use them for display and use their more powerful VGAs just for mining.
As far as I know and coming from mining other coins back in the day, yes. Basically if you have an onboard integrated GPU or secondary GPU in the bios you have to tell your computer which one you want to use for computing. Then when you run your miner you can tell GPU 0 to do nothing and GPU 1 to mine at whatever settings you want (or vice versa).