CryptocurrencyGear.

com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Mining Ethereum on your Windows PC Fast – Free PDF Guide

This text version accompanies the video I made at: https://youtu.be/K3AVeIJPQUc

If you’re reading a newbie’s guide to Ethereum mining and have a GPU powerful enough to make it
worthwhile, we’re going to assume you’re running Windows so we’ll focus on mining Ethereum on that
platform.

1. Get Your Video Card Drivers Installed

AMD GPU’s: Head over to amd.com to download your GPU drivers. Go amd.com then choose “Support &
Drivers” – enter in your GPU information and click “Display Results”

1
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

You can click the Download button for the current driver or choose “Download Previous Drivers & Software”
on the right hand side which will allow you to choose older versions that are known as great drivers for mining
based on your cards such as:
R9 and older – use 15.12
RX 4XX Series – use 16.9.2 or 16.10.3
RX 5XX Series – as these are newer I’d recommend going with current driver for now

2
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Click the red download button to get started.

Nvidia GPU’s: To get the latest Nvidia GeForce drivers go to https://www.geforce.com/drivers and then enter
in your card info and click “Start Search” and then download the current version from the results.

3
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Install your GPU Drivers like you normally would (Next, next, Ok, etc.) and reboot. Afterward, you know
your GPU’s are recognized correctly if you go into Device Manager (search in Windows search bar) and you
don’t see any warning marks on your GPU’s and it shows them correctly like this:

4
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Troubleshooting tip: Some miners have had success installing all GPU’s at once and then installing the
drivers. Others prefer to install only one card, install the drivers, shut down the system and then install the rest
of the GPU’s and then just let them all be recognized by Windows (you’ll feel the system lagging, some
flickers, or brief black screens while each card is detected by Windows).
I’ve had success both ways and so if you run into an issue with one method delete the drivers and try the other
method. And if you do need to remove your drivers use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) program
from Guru3d.com to remove everything cleanly and then start over.

2. Get an Ethereum Wallet Address - Install Ethereum (or jump to Step 5 and
use MyEtherWallet.com)
You can follow Steps 2-4 to download the official Ethereum Wallet, but you do need to wait for the full
Ethereum blockchain to sync. To skip this and get going much faster, jump down to Step 5 and create a wallet
using MyEtherWallet instead.
If you’re not used to the command line (aka “DOS mode,”) it’s recommended that you download Mist, with its
friendly and familiar GUI (graphical user interface):

5
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

The Mist package contains the Ethereum wallet which you’ll need to receive any mining profits. Mist also
includes an Ethereum browser with various functions, such as messaging and a social
network andtutorials. As a tip, these tutorials and the social network are helpful learning resources. Don’t be
scared to ask the Ethereals if you’re experience difficulty with any part of this process.
To download Mist, head over to https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases and select the most recent release:

6
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

1) Select the latest release, it’ll have the highest number.

2) Scroll down to the Downloads. You can choose Mist or the standalone Ethereum Wallet.

7
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

3) Choose a memorable download folder for the “Ethereum Wallet” zip file. Extract it with a suitable file
extraction tool, navigate to the new folder the extractor creates and then locate and run the Ethereum app.

3. Get the Blockchain

The next step is to hurry up and wait, as the Ethereum blockchain downloads and syncs. It’s over 20 gigs so
this process may take a while…
When it completes, spend a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the Mist app; the interface is fairly self-
explanatory. The Mist app isn’t yet fully polished so expect a few bugs.

4. Setup your Wallet

Next, open the Ethereum wallet and generate a new account and contract based wallet. This wallet will contain
the payout address at which you’ll receive mining rewards from your pool or directly from the blockchain.

8
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

1) Add your new account, give it a memorable mining name. Store the password securely!

2) After generating the Account, add a wallet and write down or copy to a text file the unique address. This
address will start with the characters “0x”. It’s necessary for receiving ETH mining rewards!
A Note on Geth
Mist also contains Geth, a popular command line interface. You may choose to get only the latest Geth app for
your system, it’s able to perform all the functions of Mist (and more) from the command line. Geth (an
abbreviation for “go-ethereum”) allows you and your miner to interact more directly with the Ethereum
network but Geth definitely requires some programming knowledge. As you become more proficient in

9
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Ethereum mining and coding, Geth will become more useful to you, but for now this is not recommended as
the easiest path to getting started with Ethereum mining.
5. Or Skip Steps 2-4, Install a Wallet from MyEtherWallet.com
Head over to MyEtherWallet.com (Note: Please beware of phishing websites. Do not enter your key on a
website you arrived at by clicking a link. Always triple-check the domain. The real site is MyEtherWallet dot
com)

Enter a strong password and click the “Create New Wallet” button as shown below:

Download your “Keystore File” and click the “I understand. Continue.” button.

10
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Save your Private Key provided. A good practice is to open a notepad and enter in your info – password,
private key, and your Ethereum address (which you’ll get shortly), and save that text file along with your
Keystore File, in an Encrpted file (using WinRar or similar program) and then store a copy of that on a USB
drive or cloud drive and delete the individual files (storing only the encrypted file digitally).

11
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Click on Save Your Address and then select the “Keystore File” radio button and then click on “Select Wallet
File”, browse to your recently downloaded Keystore File (which starts with “UTC…”) and select it.

You’ll then be prompted to enter your password again…

12
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

And then once unlocked you can scroll down and see “Your Address” which starts with “0x…” – this is your
Ethereum Wallet address that we will use for mining. Save it to a separate notepad text file and save it on your
Desktop for easy access (Note: it’s okay to share this address as this is how people will send you Ether and
how you will receive your mining payouts, but Never share your Private Key!). Coins sent to this address can
be sent from MyEtherWallet to any other Ethereum address (on an Exchange for example, to convert to
Bitcoin, cash, etc.).

13
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

6. Download the Claymore Ethereum Miner

We are going to be using the very popular Claymore Miner. Get the current version here from Claymore’s
original Bitcointalk thread and download the current version from the Google or Mega download links he
provides (don’t use other people’s links). The current version as of the time of this writing is 9.6 and you’ll
want to get the Catalyst and Cuda version (not the Linux version).

Note, when downloading the Claymore Miner Windows may provide a warning, but if you used Claymore’s
download link can you ignore this. He is a well-respected developer who has been building crypto miners for
many years.
Once downloaded, Extract the folder to your Desktop for easy access.

7. Tweak Some Windows Settings Before Mining

• Some settings should be modified in Windows to get you ready for mining. First, you don’t want your
computer to go to Sleep as it will interrupt your mining so go into your Power Settings and set it to
“Never” turn off/sleep.
• Next you want to modify your system page file and manually set it to 16384 MB (this is 16GB).
• To minimize the disruptions to your mining and settings you may want to also disable Windows
Updates. If you feel more secure leaving them on, you can do so and just understand there are very
frequent updates that sometimes reboot your system without you’re involvement and therefore stop
your mining.
• If you are running Windows Defender or some other anti-virus program, add an exception to it so that
it does not flag the Claymore mining executable “EthDcrMiner64.exe” as a virus or try to
disable/delete it.

8. Join a Mining Pool and Configure your Mining Bat File

The next step is to setup pool mining, as solo-mining is unlikely to make you any Ethereum unless you have a
warehouse full of GPUs. Your first step will be to choose an Ethereum mining pool. There are plenty to choose
from but we recommend Nanopool or Etheremine. The home page or help section of a mining pool site most
likely contains instructions on how to mine on their pool using the popular Claymore miner.
Directly on the home page of Ethermine.org you’ll see a section called “Stratum mode using Claymores
Miner”
Open your Claymore miner folder on your desktop and right click on the text file called “Start” and choose
“Edit”
Then go to the Ethermine site and highlight and copy all the text in the first box under “Then start your miners
by…”

14
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Depending on your location, you want to connect to the closest server to you and update the server string of
text for the server “eu1.ethermine.org:4444” to the most appropriate stratum server for you based on your
location from the list provided in the second box above.
I’ll update mine for the US East Coast, so inside your Text file you should now have:
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 us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal <Your_Ethereum_Address>.<RigName> -epsw x

Now replace “<Your_Ethereum_Address>” with your Ethereum Wallet address (which starts with 0x…) so
copy that from your other text file and paste it here. Then replace “<RigName>” with any name you would
like to create for your miner. We’ll use “MiningRig1” for our example, so you now have:
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 us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal
0x46064Df3e898488B19bC985A0973be51698bD6bb.MiningRig1 -epsw x
Now save your file as Batch file with the bat extension. Choose File > Save As and then in the box, choose a
name for it and then type “.bat” after the name, and in the Save as type box, make sure you select “All Files”,
and then click Save. Congrats, you now have a batch file ready to mine! Create a shortcut for the new Bat file
and send it to your desktop. You can then delete the text file version of the file.

9. Start Your Miner!

15
CryptocurrencyGear.com Beginner’s Guide to Mining Ethereum On Your PC

Double click your Bat file to start the miner. The miner will start, run the setx commands to set those
environment variables, initialize each of your GPU’s, build the DAG file on each of your GPU’s and start
hashing away. Let it run for about 20 seconds and then click “s” to have it show your Hashing speed. You can
use that back in the calculator again to determine a more accurate representation of your earnings.
To monitor your earnings on the pool, go back to Ethermine.org and up at the top paste your wallet address
into the Address window and click the Check Status button:

I hope you have found this guide useful! If you run into any issues or have questions, please comment below
and we will try to help. Note, we are not covering more advanced steps of mining such as overclocking and
undervolting, bios flashing, remote access and monitoring, or Dual mining. If you are interested in taking your
crypto mining to the next level from here, sign up at Crypto Mining Academy, where I go into massive depth
and detail at every step of this process in a comprehensive course. Happy Mining!

Ian a.k.a. Techman34 (on the Ethereum forum) or contact me at

techman34@cryptocurrencygear dot com.

16