Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

X11 Mining Profitability Skyrocketing on NiceHash

20, Mar 2016

what-to-miner-x11-profitability

Some very good news for the very few owners of the first batch of iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC miners, but also for GPU miners as well – X11 mining profitability on NiceHash has skyrocketed in the last hours and is still keeping high. Selling X11 hashrate on NiceHash has been the most profitable long term choice since the beginning of this month and the preferred choice for the 50 lucky owners of the first batch of iBeLink X11 ASICs. Today however we are seeing the X11 profitability more than doubling compared to what it was just a few days ago.

Now, some people are considering that X11 is already a lost cause for GPU mining, but it is too early for that as there are still very few X11 ASIC miners available and with high profitability increase like the one at the moment you should take advantage even with GPUs, let alone to miss the opportunity if you have an ASIC miner in your hands. The next batch of iBeLink X11 ASICs is expected around mid-May and even then the number of available units will most likely be small as compared to what we have seen with LTC ASIC miners fooling the market when they first appeared. So if you are not mining Ethereum or Decred with your GPUs you might want to check the profitability for X11 for your GPU mining rigs, and even if you are mining ETH or DCR you might still check if this X11 peak will not be more profitable on the short run.

– If you want to check your current X11 GPU/ASIC mining profitability on What to Mine…

GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC Firmware

17, Mar 2016

gentarkins-mod-102

We were not among the ones to preorder the last ASIC mining hardware that KnCMiner has sold to users, the Titan, but recently we have obtained some KNC Titan Scrypt ASICs to play with. The first thing you will notice is that even the latest official firmware of the devices version 2.0 is still pretty basic and the hardware is buggy, especially the earlier batch 1 devices. So we started looking for an improved version of the original firmware that would allow us to get the best out of the KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC and we have ended up discovering GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan firmware.

knc-titan-miner-status

This modified firmware provides users with an improved and more functional interface and more importantly a safer to use and capable of providing you with the optimal performance and power usage that your Titan cubes can provide you with. This of course comes at a price, you need to purchase a full license for the modified firmware that is currently sold at $75 USD for the controller and if you have an additional devices you can purchase extra licenses for $35 USD each for each controller (key for activation only), not for each cube. There are also additional discounts available for volume licensing for purchases of 10 or more licenses for large miners with more devices available.

knc-titan-advanced-options

We have just started using the latest version 1.0.2 of GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC firmware on the hardware we have obtained and as you can see on the screenshot both cubes we have attached to the controller have some issues with some of the chip dies and DCDC power units. You can see the difference in how the advanced settings page looks like for both the stock and the custom firmware. The power usage for example on the custom firmware reports more accurate power usage numbers and when you take into account the power efficiency of the PSU you can get pretty accurate power consumption numbers for the actual power used at the wall. There are number of additional protection mechanisms built in as well as optimizations to help run your mining hardware stable and with less issues on the long run. The Energy Saver is also something new and very interesting feature that supposedly can help you find the optimal settings for each die and thus help you get lower power usage while retaining optimum performance.

We have just started using GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan firmware and so far we like the improvements and extra features we see from the latest stock firmware from KNC, in a few days we are going to be sharing more from our experience as well as doing a more detailed review. Meanwhile if you have some KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC miners and you are using the stock firmware you might be interested in checking out this custom firmware, especially if you are having some issues with your devices or have more than one miners.

– Visit the official website for GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan Firmware for more info…

WD PiDrive HDD for Raspberry Pi-based Crypto Currency Nodes

15, Mar 2016

westerndigital-pidrive-hdd

The HDD manufacturer Western Digital has introduced the WD PiDrive, a 314GB 2.5-inch hard drive with USB interface dedicated to be used with Raspberry Pi mini computers. This is the perfect choice for users that want to use RPi as a dedicated node for a crypto currency such as Bitcoin that already has about 65 GB of data for its blockchain. Finding a large and reliable storage solution for Raspberry Pi has not been an easy tasks as USB flash drives and SD cards do tend to wear out much faster than HDD and SSD drives and thus users are having issues with data reliability. The WD PiDrive HDD for Raspberry Pi should easily solve the issues by providing large enough capacity for storing blockchain data as well as making sure your data will remain reliable for much longer time. The price is also affordable for such a solution, the WD PiDrive is currently being sold for $31.42 USD / 34.28 EURO, so while more expensive than a small SD flash drive or USB stick it is unmatched in terms of price compared to a large capacity SD or USB stick. We also like the naming of the device that is tied with the capacity it offers as well as the targeted platform, so it is all around PI.

– For more details about the 314 GB WD PiDrive HDD engineered for the Raspberry Pi…


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