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There are already a number of miners available for Nvidia GPUs that support the Equihash 150,5 algorithm used by BEAM, however there aren’t that much available to AMD miners and there is pretty much just one being actively developed at the moment – lolMiner. The lolMiner is a closed source Equihash GPU miner available for Windows and Linux and focused on AMD GPU, though it also works with Nvidia GPUs, in order to get support for BEAM’s Equihash 150,5 algorithm you need to go for the newer 0.7 alpha version with alpha4 being the latest. The latest version of the miner should work with 3GB VRAM GPUs, though there could be some issues if using Windows 10 on your mining rigs.
The performance you can expect on AMD’s RX 580 GPUs is about 11-12 Sol/s, pretty much the same that Nvidia GTX 1060 can deliver on Equihash 150,5. If you have older AMD HD 7970 or R9 280 you can get slightly less at about 10 Sol/s and on AMD VEGA you should be able to get up to about twice that hashrate, so performance is quite good on AMD. The fastest miners for Nvidia GPUs however are doing better than AMD GPUs, like about 30 Sol/s on GTX 1080 Ti for example, so have that in mind as well.
– To download the latest lolMiner 0.7 alpha4 miner for Windows or Linux…
A few days ago we’ve covered the beta SIA pool from Nanopool, and now there is a second more interesting SIacoin mining pool open for public already available called Siamining. Nanopool is still in beta and apparently has some delays with payments, along with high minimum limits and uses PPLNS payment system, while the Siamining pool does seem to be out of beta already and offers more interesting terms, especially for smaller miners. The Siamining Siacoin pool uses a PPS (Pay Per Share) payment system with a slightly higher fee of 3% (to cover for the higher risk for the pool) and does payments every 6 hours. So no need to wait for a very high minimum balance (2000 SC minimum) or to wait for block confirmations before you get your SC payments sent to you, there is also a Long Polling support to minimize stale shares. We have been testing the pool for about a day already and it does seem to be working quite well already, so we do recommend that you check it out, especially for smaller miners.
Meanwhile we have also done some benchmarks using the Siacoin Go Pool miner (source) that uses OpenCL for mining SC on different AMD and Nvidia GPUs (the miner supports mining on Nvidia using OpenCL) and you can fidn the results below. Do note that Nvidia is generally slower than AMD in terms of performance with OpenCL, however the new Pascal Nvidia GPUs such as GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 manage to do quite well in terms of hashrate. When you factor in the very good profitability mining Siacoin it is worth checking it out, especially if you are wondering shoudl you continue mining Ethereum with the current low exchange rate and high difficulty when there are already some good alternatives such as SIA.
Siacoin Go Pool miner hashrate:
– GTX 1080 – 1945 MHS
– GTX 1070 – 1466 MHS
– GTX 980 Ti – 1220 MHS
– GTX 970 – 803 MHS
– GTX 950 – 385 MHS
– GTX 750 Ti – 301 MHS
– RX 480 – 872 MHS
– R9 280X – 849 MHS
– R9 290x – 1116 MHS
Alternatively you can go for dual mining Ethereum and Siacoin using the latest Claymore Dual Miner with ETH in the main focus and SC as a secondary crypto coin to fully utilize the resources of the GPU you are using. Just a reminder that the dual miner is only for AMD GPUs, so for Nvidia GPUs you still need to go for the SIA Go miner that you can download below (64-bit binary for Windows). A word of warning, the Siacoin miner is pretty heavy for the GPU, so be careful with the temperatures and power usage if your focus was lately on mining Ethereum that does not stress the GPU that much unlike other algorithms. The Siacoin Go Pool miner easily hits the TDP limits of the GPU while mining, so make sure your video cards are cool and that your power supply can handle the load.
– To download and try the Siacoin Go pool miner for AMD and Nvidia GPUs…
We have already covered the performance of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs for mining Ethereum, so it is time to see how the GPU performs with other popular algorithms. We have already mentioned that the RX 480 apparently has some issues running sgminer (at least under Windows), so we were not able to run tests with many of the currently popular algorithms, but it seems that many people missed that part. The good news is that there is now an updated version of the NiceHash Miner that apparently adds support for GTX 1070/1080 and RX 480. So we have downloaded it and ran the built in benchmark and you can see the results above as well as the fact that some algorithms still have issues apparently hence the 0 MHS results, but it is much better than before. We have noticed that the sgminer that is being packaged and used for RX 480 now has some pre-built binaries for Ellesmere (RX 480) included. So even if you are not planning on using the NiceHash Miner on Windows, you still might get the sgminer-5-4-0-general from the bin folder and use it on Radeon RX 480.
Here is a chart comparing the performance of a reference design AMD Radeon RX 480 from ASUS in the other algorithms apart from Ethereum to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, namely a Gigabyte WindForce OC model and a reference design Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 from ASUS. The benchmark did not produce results for NeoScrypt, WhirlpoolX and Blake256r14 as you can see, so it seems that some algorithms may still have issues running on RX 480. Also do note that the RX 480 has been around for just a few days, so there have not been any specific optimizations for the new Polaris architecture that it uses and further performance increases might be possible. The X11 Evo algorithm is not yet supported by the sgminer for of NiceHash, so there are no results as the dedicated miner is having trouble runnign on the RX 480 on Windows (we have not yet tried Linux).
The pleasant surprises are in Blakecoin and the X-based algorithms where the result of the RX 480 beats with a bit what the GTX 970 manages to provide in terms of hashrate. Unfortunately in the others the GTX 970 turns out faster than the RX 480 for the moment and the AMD card can definitely use some improvements in algorithms such as Lyra2REv2 and Quark for example. The GTX 1070 however manages to provide a significantly higher hashrate compared to the RX 480 and with a lower power usage than the AMD card. Again the RX 480 could get some tweaks and fixes and it definitely needs some and will most likely manage to catch up to the GTX 970, but reaching the GTX 1070 is probably too much to expect.
We should not forget that the GTX 1070 is a significantly more expensive GPU than what the AMD Radeon RX 480 sells for, but still we did not expect doubled or almost doubled hashrate provided by the GTX 1070 in most algorithms. It seems that the benchmark results we get for crypto mining and the ones when using the RX 480 for gaming are pretty much the same (apart from memory intensive mining algos such as Ethereum) where the new AMD card manages to be on par or a bit faster than a GTX 970 in some of the cases.