Windows very slow while mining

Question

I'm using my main desktop for casual mining.

Windows 10 i7. 16 GB RAM. GTX1080 8GB. 20MHs.

When I'm running Geth and Ethminer, CPU is at 2-3%, GPU is at 100% (obviously). The entire desktop experience (light casual browsing) including mouse movement becomes very slow. This didn't happen when I had a Radeon RX480, where I can mine and use the desktop at the same time, without seeing a perceivable mouse lag.

Is there a way to tell the NVidia driver to save some some juice for Windows, or tell Windows to not run the desktop in hardware accelerated mode?

Thank you

Answer 1

Based on this Reddit thread, you can control the GPU usage for mining when using Claymore. Note that Claymore has a DevFee where it mins to the developers wallet now and then.

There are 2 parameters for control ethi controls the Ethereum intensity and li for turning on low intensity mode. From my experiment, the 2 params seem independent.

When using -ethi 6 -li 14 GPU Usage came down ~55% mining to ~11.5 Mhs, but I have no frame drops when watching Youtube or Netflix.

Update: keeping ethi at the default value (8) and just simply lowering li seem to also not introduce any general OS lag in my system. Thus, what I have is: -ethi 8 -li 10. GPU is ~70% and mining goes up to ~14 Mhs.