Mining on Windows 10 - Everything you need to do

So after you build your mining rig everything seems to be done. You'll soon realize it's far form over. Building the mining rig was the easy part, now comes the hard part. Improving Hashrate, reducing power consumption, change windows settings, automate your PC to behave as you want...

In this post I want to gather all the things you should do to improve profitability and reduce the need for maintenance and constant monitoring. I'll be using Claymore but you can use other miner. I will also use my small mining rig with 2x rx580 as an example.

What you should do:

Update Windows before using it for mining
GPU Drivers
Windows settings
BIOS Mod (optional)
Underclock, Overclock, Undervolt...
Claymore and useful commands and settings
Remote monitoring your rig

So lets start going in depth into each topic.

1. Update Windows

You have just installed windows and it is running smooth. You might think it is a waste of time but with every version of windows microsoft fixes security issues and patches things so it is very important to update before starting. You don't want to loose your coins to some hacker. I know you probably are dying to see your rig mine but just hold on for a few more minutes and update.

2. GPU Driver

So until this point your image might be distorted and stretched. This is because your rig still doesn't recognize your GPU or doesn't know how to communicate with it. That's where the driver come to save the day. You have tons of drivers to choose from. Nvidia has their drivers and AMD has theirs. Since I am runing AMD GPUs I'll be talking about AMD drivers.

There are essentially tow drivers.:

AMD blockchain drivers, that were created for mining rigs: https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-Crimson-ReLive-Edition-Beta-for-Blockchain-Compute-Release-Notes.aspx
AMD Adrenaline drivers: https://www.amd.com/pt/technologies/radeon-software

I prefer the blockchain ones since they behave better in my rig but if you want to game on your rig from time to time you should use the adrenaline ones. They have a compute/graphic setting that makes the driver very good for both scenarios.

If you have drivers already installed and want to install new ones follow this video:

3. Windows Settings

This is probably the most complex topic. There are tutorials everywhere for different settings but when you starting out you don't even know what you want to change. So here is every setting you should change in windows:

First disable auto-update

Follow this tutorial

Auto-startup apps

If your mining rig crashes and has to reboot you will want the mining to restart automatically. So follow these steps.

Opens start menu (pressing the windows key)
Type run and then enter
copy the following code to the run program and press ok - sheel:startup
This will open the folder where you can put the shortcuts to apps you want to start automatically when you start your computer. You can do this by right click the app you want and select send to > Desktop (create shortcut) . Then just drag or copy the shortcut on your desktop to the folder previously opened.

Adjust for best performance, Virtual memory size, Power and sleep

I recommend to follow this tutorial that explains it better than I can. It also explains the previous 2 steps but since they you might not want to auto startup or disable upadate I decided to separate them.

Ignore shutdown failure

This video shows how to do it from the minute 3:14

4. BIOS mod (Only for AMD GPUs)

You might have heard of bios mod. It is a powerful tool but also a dangerous one. You can brick your GPU making it useless (until you learn how to unbrick, if possible). It also void the warranty of the GPU so do it at your own risk. There are BIOS available for all cards online. Do your research and with time you'll learn how to do it yourself. Most important of all save the original BIOS of EACH GPU

You can also learn to BIOS mod with this great tutorial:

5. Underclock, Undervolt...

This is a much safer way of pushing your card to the limit. I normally use it to test for a few days and if everything is ok then I mod it in the BIOS. You can use a ton of software to do this.

MSI Afterburner is a very famous one but it didn't work well with my GPUs so I used the one that comes with the drivers. Just go to AMD Settings > global settings > wattman

I cannot tell you how you should adjust your settings since it is different for every card but the basics are.

Lower GPU Core frequency (for power saving) - for mine I like 1150Mhz
Lower GPU Core Voltage (for power saving) - for mine I like 950
Increase Memory frequency (this is to improve hashrate) - Mine works fine with 2250Mhz but try carefully
Lower Memory voltage (Power saving) - mine works with 910 but try to reduce slowly to check if it is stable

If you have any question hope this video helps:

6. Claymore settings

You might have already downloaded the claymore mining or any other mining software. If you haven'y here is a link to the download: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0

I will only cover claymore since it is the program I find better suits my needs.

To run Claymore mining you need to choose a pool to mine in. A pool is a group of miners that mine together and split the profits according to your contribution to the pool (hashrate). Alone you won't be able to make profit unless you have a giant mining farm. I use ethermine.org

Then according to your pool there will be instructions to create the .bat file to run the claymore miner. In this file you will be able to also specify certain commands and settings for the claymore mining. I recomend making a shortcut to this bat in the startup folder (See the section of this post about windows settings).

For example, you can create a .bat file in the claymore folder with the following code (replacing with your own address and rigname and the pool server link and port... ignore the spacing between lines):

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool eu1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal <Your_Ethereum_Address>.<RigName> -epsw x

The -<something> are commands and there are a lot of them. Full list in readme.txt or in this link: https://howtomine.co/2017/07/14/full-list-claymores-parameters-command-line-options/

The commands I like to use and I think so should you are:-minspeed 55 -tstop 85 -tt 60,65 -mode 1

-minspeed 55 this will restart claymore miner if hashrate drops bellow 55MH/s - Since my mining rig does 61 I choose the number 55 so that if one of my GPU for some reason goes to idle and the hashrate drops the miner restarts forcing the cards to work at 100% again
-tstop 85 This it probably the most important command. You don't want you mining to continue if one of your GPUs reaches a high temperature. You could brake the rig. So this will stop mining if ate least one of them reaches the temperature 85ºC
-tt 60,65 This will set target temperature for the GPUs. In this case it will set my GPU0 target temp. to 60 and my GPU1 target temp. to 65. If you set -tt 60 all your cards target temperature will be set to 60ºC
-mode 1 this will set the mode to Ethereum mining only. If you don't set this you might get to dual mine and your developer fee might increase from 1% (ETH mine only fee) to 2% (Dual mining fee)

So these I think are the most important to set at the beginning but I recommend you read the command list and see if there is something that pleases your needs.

DevFee

When you mine there is a pool fee and a Dev fee. The Dev fe is the fee the mining software takes from your mining. In the case of Claymore mining it is 1% for Single mining and 2% for dual mining.

There are ways of fooling the software and not pay the DevFee. I don't recommend doing this. At least in the beginning. There is a lot of discussion if the fee is very high and if using these programs to not pay de fee is the good thing to do but I won't get into that.

What I can say is: Try without any DevFee hack for a while and after if you want to try to bypass the DevFee then here is the link to one I know works and has been working for a long time: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1792180.0

I understand for some people 1% is a lot for a DevFee and that it might ruin your average effective hashrate and therefore reduce your earnings quite a lot. But I also believe the developer of Claymore deserves a reward for the hard work and amazing software and updates he releases to the public for free.

Therefore, I won't share my opinion on the subject but I'll say that I have mined with and without. This way you are free to use your judgment to decide whether to use it or not.

7. Monitoring your mining rig

Congrats you have reached the last topic! Now you have everything up and running but you want to leave the house and go get some fresh air relaxed knowing it is all working. For that you have to be able to monitor your rig remotely.

In my case my mining rig is in a different house than mine and I normally only see it every one or two weeks. So you might ask how I control it.

Restarting the rig remotely

First you need to be able to restart the rig remotely so that if it crashes you can restart mining. For that you need to get a Smart Plug. I use the TP-Link HS100 that connects to your wifi and then you can using your phone cut the power and turn it back on. With this model you can also monitor power usage and consumption to calculate your power cost. Link: http://amzn.eu/9EGZGJJ

Now you are able to turn your rig off but to turn it back on you have to go to your motherboard BIOS settings screen and turn on " AC on Power Loss". This will make so that if power is cot from the plug and then regains power it auto turn the pc on, even if it was already turned off. I can't say how to do it in your motherboard but most of them have this feature. Just read the manual e find how to activate this feature in your bios.

Control your rig remotely

To control your rig remotely you have to install an app on your rig and create an account. Then from another computer you can access the rig. You could use the popular TeamViewer but I personally don't like it since it draws a lot of computing power even when not connected and we all want the best hashrate possible in our rigs.

So I use RealVNC which is much lighter and secure. It is free for up to 5 computers a 3 users. Just download it here: https://www.realvnc.com/en/

Monitor your hashrate and temperature

Then you'll need to monitor your hashrate and temperature. You could use the pool website or app but it has a huge delay so I prefer to have a separate almost real time monitor software. The one I recommend is https://ethmonitoring.com

You just install on your rig (don't forget to add it to the auto startup folder) and it sends the data from your mining rig to your account. They even have an app where you can create notifications for hashrate, temperature, offline... Most of these are paid features but even with the free version you can always open the app and check temperatur, hashrate of each gpu, fan speed and even some basic notifications like if it goes offline or if the temperature is too high.

I hope this post has helped you. I wish I had a post like this with all organized when I started mining so I decided to make it for the new miners out there.

English is not my first language so if you see any mistakes please let me know and I'll correct them if I can. Any question or suggestion for a future post let me know :)