Someone explain CPU mining?

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Bigbacon

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Jul 12, 2007
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And how it works on different CPUs? Like what makes a cpu better than another one?

I happen to look at the 3 machines I have running that also mine on the CPU and I found it odd that an older mobile 2ct/4th intel CPU was monero mining almost twice as fast as a newer Ryzen 3 3200g.

my 2700x mines about 6 times faster than the laptop intel.

So what makes a CPU better or worse than another at mining the same thing?
 
Cache helps a lot for some operations, latency is probably next after cache, and raw throughput for certain math ops (depending on what you are mining) is pretty important too.
 
Last time i mined monero it was cache size and also hevily effected by ram speed and latency
 
motqalden said:
Last time i mined monero it was cache size and also hevily effected by ram speed and latency
Click to expand...

I think both the old laptop and the 3200g have the same amount of cache. 3200g is running 3200mhz on the ram. No clue on the laptop. The laptop does have more memory though. 3200g only has 4gb and some of it is probably used for the GPU. I will be putting a dedicated GPU on this board so I won't need to use the CPU's GPU at all.
 
Last time I mined moner it was on Intel phis. They did pretty decent due to the mcdram on chip. The large cache epycs and threadrippers did well too.

As others said CPU mining is normally cache heavy
 
Sorry I think its more the lower the latency you can go on the memory the better as opposed to the speed. Also is it even profitable to mine it right now? last time i checked your profits were less than your electricity on it.
Other things to keep in mind were that the CPU clock speed was not important so you often wanted to underclock / undervolt the CPU to save on power and then tighten your memory timing as much as you could.

If you are doing it just because your CPU shows up in something like nicehash then you might want to check what you make per day and then calculate your power usage to get there . If its not profitable then simply turn off the CPU in nicehash and only mine on GPU
 
motqalden said:
Sorry I think its more the lower the latency you can go on the memory the better as opposed to the speed. Also is it even profitable to mine it right now? last time i checked your profits were less than your electricity on it.
Other things to keep in mind were that the CPU clock speed was not important so you often wanteunderclock / undervolt the CPU to save on power and then tighten your memory timing as much as you could.

If you are doing it just because your CPU shows up in something like nicehash then you might want to check what you make per day and then calculate your power usage to get there . If its not profitable then simply turn off the CPU in nicehash and only mine on GPU
Click to expand...
It is not worth it. With nicehash I get like 15kh/s on my 5950x. I believe it was mining monero at the time I tried it.
 
motqalden said:
Sorry I think its more the lower the latency you can go on the memory the better as opposed to the speed. Also is it even profitable to mine it right now? last time i checked your profits were less than your electricity on it.
Other things to keep in mind were that the CPU clock speed was not important so you often wanted to underclock / undervolt the CPU to save on power and then tighten your memory timing as much as you could.

If you are doing it just because your CPU shows up in something like nicehash then you might want to check what you make per day and then calculate your power usage to get there . If its not profitable then simply turn off the CPU in nicehash and only mine on GPU
Click to expand...

Last I checked it was not even close to profitable.

Realistically mining profits are almost solely a result of ethereum right now. Last time around there were quite a few profitable alts.
 
I figure if the thing is sitting there mining with a GPU might as well turn it on and let it do its thing. I was just trying to determine what actually made it worth it. My 2700x seems to do well enough to keep it running, the other two not so much. the laptop oddly doesn't use much electricity at all. the 3200 is abysmal at everrthing :)

the memory timings I'm sure are pretty bad on that system, it was the cheapest DD4 memory I could buy. I just needed something to use to replace the old ass X2 and X3 AMDs i have some cards running it.
 
Making: (Monero)
$3/day with 3960x
$1.30/day with 3900x
$1/day with 5800x

I am seeing over $5/day or ~$150/month but then that also varies with price of coin which has been going up for awhile.
 
Pulling in about 4.2-4.5 VRSC a day with one 3900x, one 2600x, two 5600x, and one 5800x but not selling as it's going to $15.
 
It looks like cache & number of cores are what you're looking for. Ryzen 5 3600 CPUs do pretty well with a ROI of about 12-13 months currently. Threadripper 1950x's are also an option with about a 10 month ROI on the CPU. I think the motherboards might be more expensive though. I've been finding a lot of good motherboards for $90-110 for AMD that have 7-8 PCIe slots for GPU mining but I'm not sure about the added cost of threadripper boards (probably $100-200 extra on the motherboard price).

I might try out a flexible mining rig build of a threadripper build, 32-64GB of RAM, and a bunch of GPUs. I'm bullish on Monero in the long-run and the GPUs could profitably mine ETH as usual, but I'm also curious if Firo will go up in price and so far I've been struggling to get more than 3-4 GPUs mining Firo with 1 x 3600X ryzen CPU. It seems like a threadripper, a lot of RAM, and a lot of GPUs would give me the options of easily switching between mining Monero + ETH or Firo depending on profitability.

Good list of viable CPUs here: https://vicadia.com/best-cpu-for-mining-monero/
 
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