While CPU mining through the dogecoin client is a good start to grabbing a few dogecoins, it really doesn’t compete with mining with a dedicated graphics cards(GPU) instead.  With a CPU you may get a few hundred coins a day, a GPU with the current difficulty of around 350 you can get thousands or even hundreds of thousands, depending on the card.

Just a little warning before you start: Like CPU mining, GPU mining is very intensive on the computer.  I would not recommend running very high settings unless you have adequate cooling.  Both may reduce the lifespan of your computer components as well, if you are running the mining program 24/7, so keep that in mind when deciding whether or not you want to mine.

GPU Mining with CGMiner

As commenter SoShibe suggests, those with NVidia cards may want to check out cudaMiner instead.  So this tutorial may not apply to you.  But those with ATI cards will want to check this out.

If you haven’t already signed up for a mining pool, be sure to do so, as instructed here. We will use this information to further configure CGMiner.  You may wish to sign up for a second pool if you want a backup incase the first pool goes down.  This way you will continue to mine even if the first pool is unavailable.

1. The first thing you will want to do is download a program called CGMiner. CGMiner only supports GPU mining in versions up to 3.7.2.(3.6.0 used in tutorial but it should be nearly the same).  So make sure you don’t download anything newer than this.  For general downloads, you can find them here. For the recommended download for windows, you can find it here.  

The official links for these downloads are down, I have added my links here:

cgminer-3.7.2-windows.zip

The program may be flagged as a virus by your antivirus program, but its not.  Its because some of the tools used to build it are commonly used in malicious programs.  You can see more information about this here and here. If chrome blocks it, you will need to go to your downloads page and reconfirm that you want to download it.

2. After you download the proper version of CGMiner, extract it to a directory.

3. Open up the location that you have extracted the files and look for a file titled “example.conf”.

4. Open it with notepad or a text editing program. You should see something like this:

5. To get started quickly, We can strip the file down, because most of the configuration probably won’t be correct for you.   Important:  We also need to add a line to tell it to use the proper method for mining dogecoin. “scrypt” : true,   (Delete everything and copy and paste this if you want):

{
"pools" : [
 {
 "url" : "http://url1:8332",
 "user" : "user1",
 "pass" : "pass1"
 }
],
"scrypt" : true,
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

If you have backup pools, keep additional locations so that you can configure those as well.

6. Now lets edit this to have our own pool information (this assumes you already signed up for a pool, described here) to the file:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://www.suchcoins.com:3333",
"user" : "weblogin.WorkerName",
"pass" : "workerPassword"
}
],
"scrypt" : true,
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

6. When finished, save the file and close it.

7. Rename the example.conf file to cgminer.conf.

8.  You should now be able to start mining.  Simply launch cgminer.exe in the same directory as the config file, and you should get something like this:

The defaults for CGMiner should be pretty safe, but be sure to monitor your GPU temperature.  If it goes over 80C for a long period of time, I’d recommend stopping the program and reading about the advanced settings for CGMiner so that you can reduce the strain on your graphics card.  For example, you might want to check out “intensity” and “temp-target” for starters.  The same goes for getting the most out of your cards for mining.  There are several settings you can tweak for getting more performance out of your cards.

In general though, I really wouldn’t recommend mining 24/7 with any older graphics cards.  If it is more than a few years old, chances are that the dogecoin you will mine won’t be worth the electricity costs and possible damage to your computer, unless you are running it on very safe settings.  But if you want to give it a quick try and see how it all works, just make sure you are running at safe temperatures and it shouldn’t be any more straining than playing an intense 3d game.

If you want to get serious about mining, you may want to think about picking up a new graphics card, check out my automatically updating list of good graphics cards for mining.

You can also check out my guide on building a dogecoin rig for just 1000 dollars.

I myself run 3 7950s and get around 50000-70000 a day.

Check out the advanced guide to CGMiner here.