Quick Guide For Setting Up Cgminer For Litecoin

Quick easy guide on setting up a litecoin miner on the Coinotron pool:

1. Download the Litecoin wallet from http://www.litecoin.org/ and let that update. You don't really need it much for this but it's good to have.
2. Download cgminer 3.1 (it's what I use because 3.7.* doesn't work with GPU mining)
3. Register an account with coinotron
4. Login and create a worker
5. Setup the cgminer (Took it from this guide):

You’ll have to determine the optimum settings.

-I

Intensity, this you can set anywhere from 0 to 18 where at 18 your computer becomes unusable and might even freeze. For me the optimum setting is 12 when I’m at my computer and -16 when I’m not working on my computer. You’ll have to see what works best for you. The difference in hashrate is quite big, at 10 I only get 80Kh/s while at 16 I reach nearly 250Kh/s

--thread-concurrency

You can try any of the thread concurrencies within these ranges but it has to be a multiple of 64. Make sure you use the concurrency that fits your card model.

57xx cards: 2368-4096 (3200 is common)
58xx cards: 4096-8192 (5600, 7168, and 8000 are common)
5970 card: 4096-8192 (5632 or 8000 are common)

67xx cards: 2368-4096 (3200 is common)
68xx cards: 3008-6720 (4800 is common)
69xx cards: 4096-8192 (5600, 7168, and 8000 are common)
6990 card: 4096-8192 (5632 or 8000 are common)

7xxx cards 64 * bus_width_of_card_in_bits. So, for a 7950, that would be 64 * 384 = 24576; ideal values are 21712 or 24000. Find your bus width here: Radeon HD 7000 Series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

--temp-cutoff

You can set a maximum temperature if you run into problems, the default is 95 which is ok for most cards.

I prefer to run it from cmd so I can see any error might it occur. Replace -u and -p with your own username and password.

6. Start your miner: For pooled mining you have to use: c:\cgminer-2.11.3-win32\cgminer --scrypt -ohttp://coinotron.com:3334 -u rapid86.1 -p 1 --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 10 -g 1 -w 256

Make sure you change the info in this to yours so you don't mine on my account!

Picked My Coin Network What Now?

Now for me this is where it started to get complicated and really, really confusing so I will try my best to explain this. 

  Once you have picked your coin network you need to download the wallet which will store your coins, now this is important, this writes your coins to you hard drive so always back it up. Once you have downloaded and installed the wallet it will update or sync itself with the previous blocks found, now this can take an absolute age so do not worry if it takes a long time its quite normal. Once your wallet has synced with previous data you will need to add a config file to it, now this will vary for each wallet and each network you are going to use so for me to give an example is going to be very difficult. Most networks will give you a demo config file to upload to your wallet with all you having to do is add a username and password. 

It will look something like this, this is for Betacoin which uses SHA-256, ones which use Scrypt look very very different as you will have to put graphics card settings. These config files need to be placed in the correct folder, click start and in the search bar put in %appdata%\roaming and find the wallet you have installed and place the file in there

 rpcuser=yourusername

rpcpassword=yourpassword

maxconnection=50

rpcallowip=127.0.0.1

rpcallowip=192.168.0.*

rpcport=32332

server=1

listen=1

addnode=76.74.177.244

If you have decided to use something like Primecoin which uses CPU then this is nice and easy you will need to sign up to a pool ypool.net and then download a mining program. Ypool recommend jhprimeminer which is designed to be used with it and is nice and easy to setup as ypool will give you your login worker details. Once downloaded and installed all you need to do is right click on the !start.bat click edit and enter your worker details

Now...

Back to the other coins if you wish to mine these you will need to find a mining pool to sign up to and get the worker details ready to enter into the miner. For SHA-256 and scrypt I would recommend using cgminer, this is the main one everyone uses and there are plenty of guides out there for. I will trry and write a quick guide to setting up cgminer but with all different networks some using GPU's and some using ASIC's it is very difficult to get settings for everyone