Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

New More Powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Now Available

4, Feb 2015

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A little while ago we have discussed how you can build a low power dedicated Bitcoin or Litecoin node using Raspberry Pi. This however has raised some concerns due to the limited resources and processing power as well as the use of an SD flash card for storage of the big blockchain. Also the RPi has been used quite a lot with various ASIC miners to make them independent from a computer and allow them to run with only a direct Internet connection with the mining software installed on the Raspberry Pi board. The good news is that there is now a new faster and more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B available for the same affordable price (about $35 USD) that will handle the load associated with running a crypto currency node on it than on the previous RPi. The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B features a faster 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU that is supposed to provide up to about 6x the performance of the previous model, 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM or essentially 2x the memory of the old model and offer full backwards compatibility with with Raspberry Pi 1.

The only drawback that still remains is that the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B still relies on SD flash card as a storage option and in the case for use as a dedicated crypto currency node this could turn out to be a problem on the long run. The blockchain of Bitcoin is already over 30 GB in size and will continue to grow, so you need larger storage and a more reliable one. If you are looking for similar to Raspberry Pi solution with better storage options that would allow you to use a HDD or even better an SSD drive, then you might want to check out the very similar projects Banana Pi and Banana Pro that feature a SATA port for storage connection. These are dual-core solutions with 1 GB of RAM, so faster than the now older first RPi, but probably not as powerful as the new model. Of course there are also many other alternatives to Raspberry Pi, including more powerful ones in terms of performance and with additional extra features. The RPi however is still one of the best solutions in terms of price/performance/features ratio and that is really important when talking about using it for projects such as running a dedicated crypto currency node for example.

– For more details about the new more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that is already available…

Bitcoin and Litecoin Exchange Rate Going Up

26, Jan 2015

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After a pretty long period of keeping low prices Bitcoin and Litecoin may have started to finally recover to a higher levels, currently the BTC exchange rate is back to over $300 USD and LTC is above $2 USD. Definitely good news for people with small mining operations or using cloud mining services that were worried about their investments that were at risk with the possibility of contracts getting terminated. A quick look at CEX.IO however shows that cloud mining there is still unprofitable even at the current prices with the automatic settings to turn on cloud mining when it is again profitable. At the same time however we are still seeing a trend for the network difficulty of Bitcoin to go down and for Litecoin to keep at pretty much the same level after getting down significantly lately. With the current prices we are expecting to see some mining operations getting back online after being stopped due to the low exchange rate, especially mining operations that are working on the mine and sell immediately model. We’ll have to wait and see how things will go from here on…

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Coming Soon to Replace GTX 750 Ti

15, Jan 2015

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There are already a lot of rumors over the internet, including some leaked photos, specs and gaming performance results of a new Maxwell-based GPU coming from Nvidia next week – the GTX 960. The final specifications of the GTX 960 are not officially announced, but according to the information available the card will come with 1024 CUDA cores, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs, 128-bit memory bus or essentially half of the specs of the GTX 980. The expected power usage is around 120W or around double that of the GTX 750 Ti with an expected end-user price of about $199 USD ($149 for the 2GB GTX 750 Ti). So with just $50 USD more you could be able to get a new Maxwell-based GPU that could as well provide twice the crypto mining performance of a GTX 750 Ti GPU and if this is indeed true when we see the final card and the actual performance it offers it will be quite an interesting alternative to GTX 750 Ti for mining rigs. That of course is still in the form of speculations as we don’t have officials announced product and specifications, but our expectations based on the leaked data so far suggest that about twice the performance of GTX 750 Ti is possible. We are going to be keeping an eye out for the announcement of the new GTX 960 graphic processors from Nvidia expected next week and are going to be trying out a card as soon as we manage to get our hands on one of these to see what kind of performance will it offer for crypto mining. So stay tuned for more information when it becomes available.


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