Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Get Up to 30 MHS from Mining Ethereum on AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs

22, Jan 2021

It is time to dust off those old AMD Radeon R9 290/290X and Radeon R9 390/390X GPUs with 8G VRAM you may have lying around and wondering what to do and make them mine Ethereum (ETH) with full power and some nice profit as well. The Hawaii and Grenada GPUs that these Radeon video cards use feature a 512-bit wide memory bus and that is more than welcome for mining Ethereum, even if they are already pretty old. You can be getting about 29-30 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) with these, although they are more power hungry than more recent GPUs that offer the same performance it is still worth it with high mining profit we have at the moment.

With Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs there is a bit of a catch in order to get 29-30 MHS Ethash mining hashrate with about 150-200W of power usage per video card (with optimized video BIOS for lower power usage). It is only possible to do it under Linux as the AMD video drivers for Windows 10 do not feature support for Compute Mode for Hawaii GPUs and you can get only 14-15 MHS, but the Linux drivers do and you get 29-30 MHS. What you need to do is to make sure you have up to date video drivers and that you are using the latest version of PhoenixMiner in order to be able to fully utilize the Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs for mining Ethereum (ETH).

If you are not very good with Linux you can make your life much easier with a dedicated crypto mining operating system such as HiveOS. HiveOS simplifies getting a mining rig with AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs ready for mining Ethereum (ETH) with the full 29+ MHS hashrate. Again, in order to be able to get the optimal mining performance for Ethereum on these Hawaii GPUs you need to stick to Linux, Windows is not an option for the full performance and HiveOS just makes it easy. Do note that for HiveOS you can use the promo code CMB10USDPROMO that will give you $10 USD in your account balance!

– To Download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.5b Ethash AMD and Nvidia GPU miner…

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock Ethereum Mining Rig

20, Jan 2021

The recent craze on GPU mining for Ethereum and the resulting Nvidia RTX 30 series shortage as well as pretty much anything else with decent mining performance for Ethash is in full on mode. Still, we have managed to get our hands on a few Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs and built a 6x GPU mining rig using them for ETH mining, so below we share some interesting things including the Ethereum mining hashrate we got and the optimized settings for the RTX 3070 and more specifically the GameRock series from Palit that we have used. As you can see from the photo above the GameRock is a bit flashy in terms of design due to the large RGB lighting surface. A feature which might be of interest for a gamer, but is totally not required by a miner as it makes no different whatsoever in terms of performance. Still, the good news is that the cooler of the GameRock GPUs from Palit is with a large surface area and does a great job in keeping things cool and the fans are also dual ball-bearing ones and perform really well. If you are currently using a traditional lighting system, such as fluorescent tubes or metal halides, upgrading to high hat lights should be a top priority if you want to reduce electricity costs.

A single optimized Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPU can do a little over 60 MHS with ease with a little tweaking with the help of the MSI Afterburner software. At TDP of just 55% or almost half of the standard power usage these video cards manage to perform really well as far as Ethereum (ETH) mining is concerned with a bit of overclock for the video memory as well – +1100 MHz. The lowered power usage results in lower GPU performance, but RTX 3070 is more than capable of utilizing the fast GDDR6 memory it has with a 256-bit wide memory bus fully to get you about 60.6 MHS mining the Ethash algorithm. No need to overclock or underclock the GPU, though for further power usage optimizations you can also try lowering the operating voltage of the GPU a bit, though not really required (can probably save up to about 100W of power usage for the whole rig).

So, with cooling fans set at 75% and a TDP of 50%, GPU -500 MHz and with +1100 MHz for the video memory you get extra cool and power efficient GPUs mining at over 60 MHs with a total power consumption a little shy from 1000W at the wall (can depend on the PSU efficiency) or a bit over 360 MHs for a 6x GPU mining rig using Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock video card usually reserved for legit cash games with high specs. The screenshot for the hashrate is with the use of the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c and mining Ethash on NiceHash…

The only thing that might be better than the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3060 Ti (in that price/performance range), however the 3060 Ti are even harder to obtain due to their slightly lower price and the same mining performance for Ethereum (ETH). The reason being that RTX 3060 Ti features the same GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, but has a slightly stripped-down GPU. That however does not interfere with Ethereum mining as the GPU on the RTX 3060 Ti still manages really well even with 1000 CUDa cores less. Do note that the RTX 3060 is not that goof of an alternative as unlike the 256-bit memory bus that the Ti has, the regular non-Ti version has just 192-bit memory bus and the hashrate does suffer from that, so no 60 MHs on the non-Ti models!

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c Ethash miner software…

Bitmain Antminer T19 Bitcoin ASIC Now Up for Pre-Order

1, Jun 2020

Bitmain has made available another SHA256 ASIC from their Antminer 19 series available for pre-order – the 84 TH/s Antminer T19 miner. In terms of power efficiency and hashrate the new T19 series device sits a little below the Antminer S19, sold at almost the same pre-order price, but starts shipping near the end of next month and not in September like if you pre-order S19 now. Antminer T19 offers 84TH/s hashrate at 3150 Watts of power or with other words 37.5 J/TH power efficiency and it comes with a built in power supply like other high power usage miners. With older ASIC mining hardware getting obsolete after the recent Bitcoin halving more miners will need to replace their old miners with new ones that are readily available and offer better power efficiency and hashrate… and that does not mean the ones with the fastest hashrate and highest price.


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