Can I use one graphics card for games and one for Bitcoin mining, without losing performance?

I have a GTX660 right now, but I bought an R9 290x recently. I was wondering if I can leave both in my pc and use one (the GTX660) for Bitcoin mining and one (the R9 290x) for everything else (mostly games).

Is this even possible?
Will it decrease gaming performance to run a miner on a separate card?

The rest of my specs:
i7 3820 @ 3.60 GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz
Asus 2011 P9X79 Pro
Windows 8 pro

I bought the new card for gaming, but if it would be possible to do this with my old card without losing performance that would be great.

Kevin

Posted 2014-02-20T20:14:17.147

Reputation: 153

Surely you want to mine something other than bitcoins? Also check this out concerning your choice of the GTX for mining.

– John T – 2014-02-21T05:13:11.120

Can i know how u done it please ? i have an gtx 970 and gtx 560 and i want to mine on the 970 and play games and run my pc on the 560, i mine ethereum on win8 using ethminer provided by coinotron.com – MDub – 2016-06-06T09:22:47.153

Answers

With the advent of ASICs, Bitcoin GPU mining is no longer profitable. I would recommend mining a Scrypt coin such as Dogecoin or Litecoin. (You can then trade it in for Bitcoin on an exchange, if you prefer.)

To answer your original question, yes, you can use one card for mining and the other for actually running the computer.

Tony

Posted 2014-02-20T20:14:17.147

Reputation: 1 104

1I have one Nvidia card mining Dogecoin and it is overclocked with interactive mode disabled so it is being used as much as possible with no negative effect on my usage. Then for my main card which drives my dual monitors, I am using an AMD video card which is not mining. – Scott – 2014-02-21T00:30:42.240

I'm pretty sure both cards have to be the same make and model for your motherboard to recognize them so that both would work at the same time.

badgids

Posted 2014-02-20T20:14:17.147

Reputation: 11

1No that is not necessary, only for SLI/spitfire. You can put two graphics cards in one pc without that and they will both work, just not together. – Kevin – 2014-02-20T22:45:34.203

Kevin is correct. You can have different make and models of video cards on the same machine. I have an Nvidia ad AMD card running at the moment. – Scott – 2014-02-21T00:28:49.810

Yes you can

I use a gtx 460 (as the main card) and r9 280x as alt coin mining card. (bitcoins... ha ha impossible)

Just install amd drivers for the mining card, and use a dummy plug with the r9.

also some cgminer special commands are needed in order to make it work nicely..try googling a lot until you find the answer for the cgminer command line... can't remember at the moment

Ilkkis

Posted 2014-02-20T20:14:17.147

Reputation: 11