Not going to lie, it took me some digging around being a nub myself to mining with a gpu. I had originally just been using minergate console miner which works well for cpu mining, but unless you're mining ETH or ETC your GPU goes to waste. The first few times i tried to setup ccminer or any other miner i could never figure it out. So, this short tutorial is for those who are new to mining and want to get a little more hash power out of their gpu for mining coins like Monero(XMR) which is pretty hot right now. I have a MSI gtx 960 4gb and i get about 245 H/s gpu + 100 H/s cpu.
1.) Make sure you have an address or wallet that the XMR or whatever coin you will be using can be deposited into.
- If you already have minergate then you can just have it go directly to that account
2.) Download ccminer
- This is the part where i believe i messed up the first time. Make sure you read through what you are downloading and get the specific version that states it is compatible for Nvidia cards. The majority are only set up to work with AMD. There is a bit more configuration that needed to be added to the source code to work with Nvidia. This is where i got the version that works for me. https://github.com/sp-hash/ccminer
3.) Create a new folder
- Create a folder in the location of your choice and name it (i just named it ccminer)
4.) Select all from the downloaded zip and drag it into the folder you created
5.) Open the folder and verify all contents have been transferred
6.) Right click New Text Document
- this should open notepad
- paste the following inserting your own personal wallet address where stated for minergate use your email
ccminer -a scrypt -o stratum+tcp://xmr.pool.minergate.com:45560 -u EMAIL OR WALLET ADDRESS HERE -p x
- this is for mining XMR with the minergate pool. For other coins in the minergate pool, refer to the help section on their homepage https://minergate.com/faq/what-pool-address
- the pool address is what is between the -o and -u so if you were to use another pool, that is the location in the line you would place it.
7.) Click Save As
- Name the file whichever coin you have the pool address set up to mine in this case XMR and add a .bat to the end of it (ex: XMR.bat)
- Before clicking save you MUST change the Save As File type below the file name to All Files
- Make sure it will be saving into the ccminer folder that we created then click save
8.) Now you're ready to mine...
- Close everything out just to get everything out of your way..find the ccminer folder and double click the XMR.bat file that you created. Hopefully, it will start running haha. If unsure if you're actually getting credit for your shares..open minergate console and if you have PPS set you should see the shares start coming in. It isn't instant but you'll notice. You can run the console miner with your CPU at the same time as you use ccminer with your GPU to maximize your mining.
Hope this helps at least 1 person or saves them the headache of web searches and youtubes haha