Testing Configuration and Software Setup Software Configuration

True ease of use is something that the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't really have yet though they are steadily improving on it. You'll need a couple different items up and running on one or more machines to really start with your mining experience.

The first thing you'll need is the Bitcoin client application that acts like your wallet and actually accesses your wallet.dat file. While this doesn't necessarily need to be running on the same hardware that is doing the mining, you'll need to run this to get your key information to share with the mining apps.

For your mining application, there are several options including some command-line based apps and graphical ones. For the quickest setup and configuration time we liked GUIMiner, seen above. The interface you use does not necessarily determine the kernel you use for computing the Bitcoins and which kernel you use can alter performance pretty dramatically. In its infancy the Bitcoin community ran CPU-based kernels until the performance difficulty got to a point where they were incredibly inefficient leading to the creation of several GPU-based designs.

For our testing we went with the poclbm kernel that is built around OpenCL and works with AMD Radeon HD 4000 series and above and NVIDIA GeForce 8000 series and above graphics cards. There definitely are other options out there for Bitcoin mining and many enthusiasts argue that some perform better than others across different ranges of CPUs and GPUs but in terms of popularity today, poclbm seems to be the winner.

The above image shows us actually running a pair of the kernels, one for each GPU on a multi-GPU graphics card. If you have more than one GPU in your system, whether on a single card or multiple, you need only assign a kernel to each available processor to max out your processing performance.

(Side note: because it is built on OpenCL, you can actually run this on CPUs that have compliant OpenCL stacks. However, it is not the most efficient on that class of processor by any means.)

When running a Bitcoin mining application be prepared for a lot of GPU utilization but not much on the CPU side of things.

Source: www.pcper.com