Claymore’s Zcash (ZEC) AMD miner has been updated a couple of times already since the release of the initial version from some days ago. The number of optimizations and hashrate improvements with pretty much each major update has been tremendous, bringing back to life many of the old AMD Radeon GPUs such as 7950/7970 or the 280X, some of the most popular mining video cards for the last few years. The latest release, already a major version 6 brought more fixes and optimizations in terms of performance. As one would expect Nvidia is left behind once more, even though there were some signs that recently it was starting to catch up to the levels of performance of AMD GPUs, it is now yet again significantly slower. So owners of Nvidia-based mining rigs might want to switch to some other alternative for mining at the moment after the latest performance boosts from Claymore. Do have in mind however that Claymore’s Zcash miner does come with a 2.5% dev fee, below is a list of major changes and updates of the miner after the initial release:

Version v7.0:
– improved speed by about 15-25% (depends on card model). About 230H/s on stock 390X.
– added “-benchmark” option.

Version v6.0:
– improved speed by about 20-25% (depends on card model). About 180H/s on stock 390.
– “-i” parameter values are 0…4 now, default value is “-i 4”.
– fixed issue with mixed cards.

Version v5.0:
– improved speed by about 30-50% (depends on card model). About 145H/s on stock 390X.
– improved support for Catalyst 16.x and 4xx cards.
– reduced CPU usage.

Version v4.0:
– improved speed by about 20% (depends on card model). Up to 100H/s on stock 390X on “-i 2” mode.
– added “-retrydelay” option.
– added “-nofee” option.
– various bug fixes.
– changed coloring.
– EthMan: added “View miner console” command.

Version v3.0-v3.1:
– improved speed by 20-30% (depends on card model). Up to 80H/s on stock 390X on “-i 2” mode.
– improved stability.

Version v2.1:
– added “-i” option for adjusting mining intensity and CPU usage.
– improved speed for high intensity mode (“-i 2”), about 60H/s on stock 390X, 50H/s on stock 280X.
– since nicehash cannot upgrade their ddos protection, now “-allpools 1” is required for this pool.

Version v2.0:
– improved speed by 5-15% (depends on card model).

Version v1.1:
– added Linux version.
– fixed issue with rejected shares after devfee mining.
– remove “-allpools 1” option if you use it and mine on miningpoolhub, suprnova, coinmine or nicehash pools.
– added “XnSub” support for Nicehash.
– fixed bugs.

– For more details and to download the latest Claymore’s Zcash AMD GPU Miner…

• New Fixed Windows Binary of the ccMiner 1.5-git Fork by SP for Maxwell
• Updated Miner Control Tool Packages for AMD and Nvidia
• Updated Windows Binary of the ccMiner 1.5.75-git Fork by SP for Maxwell
• T-Rex 0.15.3 Nvidia Miner With KAWPOW Support for RavenCoin (RVN)
• Updated ccMiner 0.9 with Support for Quarkcoin and Animecoin
• Download sph-sgminer 4.1.0 with Fuguecoin GPU support for Windows
• New T-Rex 0.8.2 Nvidia Miner With Dedal Support and Fixes and Improvements
• New SRBMiner-MULTI Miner 0.4.5 With Support for Epic Cash (EPIC)
• Windows Binaries for the cpuminer-opt 3.3.7 CPU Miner
• NiceHash Now With Added Support for SiaCoin (SC)
• WildRig Multi 0.11.6 Beta is Becoming Even More Useful Multi-algorithm Miner
• Pascal Coin (PASC) Halving in About a Week (Block #420480)
• Decred (DCR) Mining on Nvidia with Getwork Over Stratum
• Updated CGMiner 4.3.5 with GridSeed and ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC Support
• New XMRig 5.9.0 Miner With New RandomKEVA Algorithm Supported
• JCE Cryptonote CPU+GPU Miner for AMD-based GPU Mining Rigs
• CryptoDredge 0.11.0 Nvidia Miner Now Faster and with X16R/S Support
• New NBMiner 29.0 With Support for The New KAWPOW PoW Algorithm
• Updated Miner Control 1.6.4 Pack for Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti
• T-Rex 0.15.x Nvidia Miner to Also Support the KAWPOW Algorithm
• New z-enemy 2.5 Nvidia GPU Miner With Support for the KAWPOW Algorithm
• Ravencoin Miner v2.3 for Mining Ravencoin (RVN) Using the X16r Algorithm
• Official bfgminer 4.2.0 branch with ZeusMiner Support Now Available
• New SRBMiner-MULTI CPU and AMD GPU Miner 0.1.2 Beta With kangaroo12 Support
• New lolMiner 0.5 AMD and Nvidia OpenCL Multi Equihash GPU Miner