Mining on a 27" iMac - is it worth it?

tomlar1977

Hi all!

I've got a medio 2011 27" iMac (i7 3,4 Ghz) with a 2 GB Radeon 6970M graphics card. When I mine Litecoins with the CPU, I get something like 40 kh, and when using the GPU, it gives me about 50, is that really all such a machine can do? I know that it is a Mobile gfx, but thought that GPU should be much faster than CPU mining? Tried fiddling with the settings in BFG Miner, but nothing gives me more than that speed (and setting the Intensity over 13 gives a lot of errors). If this is the speed, then it makes no sense at all mining, since the cost of electricity is way more than what I can get from my share of a pool!

Also, this i not a MacMiner question in general, but in the pool I'm in, the top user has a total mining speed of 671819 KH, how is this possible, is he having access to thousands of machines?

Kind regards,

Tommy

FabulousPanda

Litecoin is so well established there are a lot of people running linux rigs with a bunch of GPUs so they get good speed - if you want to CPU/GPU mine the best thing to do is pick an alt currency you think has a bright future - MaxCoin mining and Quark mining allow higher speeds for instance.

tomlar1977

Thanks for your reply - but do you know if the speed of my Mac is normal?

FabulousPanda

That is normal speed for your machine, GPU mining isn't as fast running Mac OS - if you booted up on the same machine with Linux or Windows it would be a lot faster. It's crazy but on most of the MacBooks the CPU gives about as good as the GPU!