Just to learn what's up I decided to try crypto coin mining
Already have a system with two moderate graphics cards, that are getting old by gamer standards. But lets see what happens
AMD Radeon R7 200 series 2GB
Decided after some googling to mine Ethereum on Nanopool.
This was a somewhat random decision based on googling what is the best pool and what is the best coin to mine. Ethereum is at least a more well known coin that my coinbase account wallet holds so I thought that might help me not have to sign up for another wallet somewhere. Signing up for coinbase was a long involved process of verification that i don't want to repeat for fear of identity theft. Bitcoin mining seems over subscribed at the moment.
Downloading Claymore seemed pretty dodgy. Followed instructions on
https://nanopool.org/ Ethereum quickstart. Made up the the long addresses i needed. I guess they are just your own invented string. Who knows.
Readme in claymore says
For AMD cards, set the following environment variables, especially if you have 2GB cards:
GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
In Windows 10 is easy to set it permanently in Control Panel\System and Security\System\Advanced\Environment Variables.
and it says
For multi-GPU systems, set Virtual Memory size in Windows at least 16 GB:
"Computer Properties / Advanced System Settings / Performance / Advanced / Virtual Memory".
My SSD is fairly full so i set it to 16-20Gb
copied in start.bat from the config. Windows complained about running it. Wince
Start .bat says failed, you cannot mine with this GPU.
Bonaire, 14 compute units
Install Catalyst v15.12 for old AMD cards; for Fury, Polaris and Vega cards use latest blockchain drivers.
https://support.amd.com/en-us/download doesn't show catalyst
Updated drivers to 18.12
Still no dice. Searched on the DAG error and I find:
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/17694/cannot-allocate-big-buffer-not-enough-graphics-memory
It says a 2GB card is now worthless for mining. Need 6GB or more. Oh well fail. I'm not in a hurry to rush out and buy an overpriced graphics card and run up my electricty bill. This was just to learn more about what goes on in mining.
I may try a different coin/pool to see if I get the same result.
