It’s been months since we posted any tips or guides related to cryptocurrency mining. While mining is not as profitable as it used to be before there are still several coins that you can mine with profit. Use Whattomine and other mining calculators to find out which coins are profitable to mine with your graphic card.
Here we are not going to see what to mine or how to mine. But this is a quick tip on disabling GPU from your mining rig.
Most of you who are mining cryptocurrency probably know this but those who are new and just got into mining should find this tip helpful.
Disabling a GPU from miner
So when do you want to disable a graphic card from your miner? For example let’s say you have 2 graphic cards installed on your PC. You would like to mine but only looking to use 1 out of 2 GPUs. This way you can use the other card for personal use such as gaming, benchmark or video rendering works.
Or let us say you have a dedicated mining rig with 6 to 8 GPUs which crashes often while mining. To troubleshoot which GPU is causing the issue you may wish to disable a particular GPU.
Whether you are mining using Nicehash, or using standalone miners like claymore, ccminer, xmrig or xmr-stak. It’s easy to disable 1 or more GPUs from your miner and your mining software will have a specific option to do this. Let’s see how to disable a GPU or only use a specific GPU for mining.
How to disable GPU from mining
This particular tip should work with most miners. When your card is currently mining press numbers on the keyboard for example; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. It will disable the GPU from your miner accordingly. Press the same number to reactivate the card for mining.
If this doesn’t work then not a problem. We can add a syntax to your miner batch file and disable any specific GPUs from mining. The only thing is the syntax varies from one mining software to another.
Within your mining software folder you should find a readme.txt file. Open it and you should find all the commands that you can add to your windows script .bat file.
If you don’t find any readme.txt file then create a help file to find the list of commands.
For example:
xmrig --help pause
ccminer --help Pause
Save it as a help.bat file and run it. It should display the list of commands that you can add. Find the command that controls the GPU and add it to your miner.bat file.
By default your miner uses all the available GPUs. If for example you’d like to disable a specific GPU then here is how you do it.
In claymore add -di 012345 where 0 is GPU 1, 1 is GPU 2 and so on. If you want to exclude only GPU 2 then add -di 02345 which will use all other GPUs except GPU no 2.
In ccminer and other related NVIDIA mining softwares use the following command to exclude a GPU.
-d 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
You can also try --cuda_devices 0 1 2
Note: You can enter this command at the end of your .bat file and it should work. Also -di, -d, –cuda_devices is not a command to disable GPUs but to use only the GPUs you want.
So if you want to disable GPU 0 then include all other GPUs except GPU number 0.
Example: -di 12345
Hope it helps.
Here are few other tips and guides related to mining:
