How To Mine Any Coin Using AMD GPUs On Scrypt Algorithm

Okay so here we are again with another mining tutorial. And this time we are going to cover the most famous algorithm, Scrypt. I bet you’ve heard the names of Dogecoin, Litecoin, Vericoin (which we covered a few days ago), they are all based on Scrypt algorithm. And as we mentioned in our previous article, you will be needing another miner for Scrypt rather than SGminer, though the process follows the same trend, so head over to this article and have a brief look at what you’ll be doing, or just follow the steps to get your miner running.

Download And Extract The Miner:

For Scrypt, you are going to need the CGminer 3.7.2 (sounds same to SGminer right?), which is the latest Scrypt supported CGminer. By latest Scrypt supported i meant that there are more versions of CGminer till like 4.4 but they don’t support Scrypt algorithm and 3.7.2 is the last one that supports Scrypt algorithm. So get yourself a copy of miner either from here, or any other source.

Once you’ve got the miner, it’ll be in a .rar or .zip or similar compressed file format, so extract it somewhere on your HDD, no installation needed.

Creating The .Bat File:
Once you’ve got the miner, we need to create a .bat file that will execute the miner with our preferred set of commands. For that purpose, open up windows application, Notepad and save these commands as a “whatever.bat” file.

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://pool_url:port -u weblogin.worker -p password

We will be replacing the set of commands later on, and remember to use “all files” in type while saving the .bat file. If you’ve read our previous mining articles, you might have noticed the difference between the initial commands.

Mining On Dedicated Pool Without Weblogin:
This time we are going to try something different. We are going to mine on a dedicated pool which doesn’t even need you to register. One might then think how will the pool identify you and send you your coins? Well instead of your logins, your wallet address will do the work. For demonstration purpose we are going to use vericoin as the coin and http://pool.vericoin.info/ for the pool. You can either generate your preferred coin’s wallet/deposit address on any online exchange or simply download your preferred coin’s wallet and a wallet address will be generated for you.

Setting Up Your Miner:
Once you’ve got the wallet address for your coin (by any means), we need to edit the whatever.bat file we created earlier.

So the pool’s url along with coin’s port goes in the place of pool_url:port and my wallet address goes in place of weblogin:worker and password as defined on the pool’s getting started page changes to “x”.

Prepare For Launch!
Once the whatever.bat have been edited, your miner is all set for the first launch, so go ahead and double-click on the .bat file and see what happens.

So this time the GPU temperature as directed by the Yellow Arrow seems quite high, well quite a lot high. And it’s been always like that with the Scrypt algorithm, the numbers marked by Orange Arrow is the power generated by your GPU which also seems quite low for the temperature it produces. The thing is it depends on the block reward, the higher the block reward, the more chances of getting coins on low shares/hashrate, and similarly the lower the block reward of a coin is, the lower the coins you will get upon your hashrate. So it’s different for all the coins/algorithm, where the hashrate may and should differ.
The Red Arrow here direct towards the share rate or rather you can say work done by your miner which have been rejected or been orphaned and last but not least the Light Green Arrow, which i don’t know the name of, but if it goes higher than 0, then there is an issue with your CFG, however you shouldn’t see it go beyond 0, if you haven’t used a tweaked CFG. It’s like a safety measurement, telling you about the compatibility of your CFG with your hardware and stuff.

Checking Worker Stats:
Well once you see that the miner is up, running and mining, does it mean that your worker/miner is connected to the pool and mining coin for your given address? To check that head over to the pool’s official website and search for a tab named “Worker stats/Workers/Miners” or something similar. YOu will see a huge list of addresses, their hashrates/shares/coins etc, search your address among the list by pressing Ctrl+F, if you see your address in the list, all is good or otherwise something is wrong in your CFG.

It can take up to a few minutes for your address to show up in the list, so be patient.

And this is how you set up a CGminer on mining a coin based on Scrypt algorithm. It doesn’t mean you have to join a dedicated pool which doesn’t need you to register, there are still dedicated pools which require you to register there. It is upon you to decide which way to go, but keep in mind, that all mining setups follow almost the same trend, only a few things may differ. Be sure to take a look at the below notes and share this information with your friends having AMD GPU who want to try out some experiments on mining.

Notes:
CGminer above 3.7.2 doesn’t support Scrypt algorithm.
You can find out what to mine, as for the time, using some profitability calculator such as the one found at http://whatmine.com/
There are still quite a few tweaking commands that can be added in the .bat file, such as –temp-target, –temp-cutoff, –failover, –auto-fan, etc. Explaining all of these commands would just make the article long enough that it would become too long and boring to read. Basically, this article was written to give an idea on how to set up a miner and join pools, you can search the CFGs for your GPU online, or ask on forums, and replace/add them in your .bat file as you see fit, for the best performance.
Overclocking/Underclocking is a major factor that also affects mining performance, and once again, you can search in a search engine for/ask on forums about the best clock settings for your GPU on specified algorithms.
The performance gained, in the resulting image, was obtained by a further-tweaked CFG, but it doesn’t mean that the miner won’t run with the base cfg as provided above.
Original cfg:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://pool.vericoin.info:7777 -u VEEDExiCKfnTpeaPFSE2PtkHJgkwADQw7p -p x -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 –thread-concurrency 10240 –gpu-engine 1080 –gpu-memclock 1500 –temp-target 76 –temp-overheat 85 –temp-cutoff 87 –gpu-fan 65-80
Most of the miner works best with old AMD Catalyst drivers like 13.12, doesn’t mean they won’t run with the newest, but are best tweaked by the developers for older versions.
There are dedicated hardware for mining also, called ASIC which are far better than GPUs, but not all algorithm have ASIC and it affects the coins profitability as well.