Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Ethereum Mining Performance for Nvidia GeForce GTX 950

28, Mar 2016

nvidia-geforce-gtx-950-msi

When talking about GPU mining with Nvidia-based GPUS for crypto currencies there are two models that usually come in mind – the GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 970. When talking about Ethereum mining however Nvidia mining rigs do not do that well compared to AMD-based rigs and while the GTX 970 does pretty well at about 20-21 MHS the GTX 750 Ti is performing terribly, so it is not suitable for ETH mining. A good choice for GPUs that have only 1 GB of video memory or do not perform well for mining Ethereum is to go for mining Decred (DCR) at the moment, so you have good alternative. But if you are currently building a low powered multi-GPU mining rig at the moment with Nvidia-based GPUs the card of choise will most likely not be the 750 Ti anymore, you should go for the slightly more expensive GTX 950.

msi-gtx-950-ethereum-mining

The GTX 950 is doing much better for mining Ethereum as compared to GTX 750 Ti, you can expect to see somewhere around 10 MHS from the 950 and it has been like that since the beginning (no performance drop like on some AMD cards). The reference design GTX 950 has a TDP of 90W as compared to 60W for the reference design GTX 750 Ti, but it also offers higher performance and is usable for Ethereum mining at 10 MHS. So a 6 GPU mining rig using Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 video cards should come at about 600W of total power consumption at max load and giving you about 62 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (Ethereum does not use the most power hungry algorithm). The GTX 950 does pretty well for other mining algorithms as well, you have alternatives available like DCR and will still get good performance and profit. Here is a comparison between GTX 750 Ti doing around 500 MHS with the latest ccMiner fork from tpruvot with Decred support (the faster 64-bit version) versus around 645 MHS for GTX 950, these numbers are from the publicly available miner. So do consider going for GTX 950 instead of GTX 750 Ti if you are building an Nvidia mining rig now and GTX 970+ is not an option at the moment.

FutureBit MoonLander USB Scrypt ASIC Miner

28, Mar 2016

futurebit-moonlander-usb-scrypt-asic

The FutureBit MoonLander is an ASIC Scrypt USB stick miner made by jstefanop on Bitcointalk that is based on a single Alcheminer AlcheMist Scrypt ASIC chip. A small SCrypt-based ASIC miner intended to provide a hashrate between 0.4 and 1.2 MHS with a power usage of about 5W per megahash. The device is user overclockable with voltage adjustment available via a variable resistance potentiometer on the board and clock setting via the software miner. Using the device directly plugged into a USB 3.0 port you should be able to push it somewhere close to a Megahash with the available 4.5W of power, for more you will need a powered USB HUB capable of providing more power to the USB miner and probably active cooling. We have purchased a single unit in order to be able to try it out and see how well it performs, so you can expect our first impressions and test result from the FutureBit MoonLander very soon.

FutureBit MoonLander Specifications:
– Scrypt Hasrate: 400 KHS to 1.2 MHS performance
– Power Usage: about 5 watt per Megahash
– Voltage Adjustment: fully customizable core voltage range from 0.7 – 1.1v
– Power Efficiency: really efficient 5v->core voltage stage with about 95% efficiency
– Heavy duty/over speced parts were used to ensure wide range of operation (this thing can put out 20amps if you wanted to push it that far)
– Status LEDs for power, TX and RX transmission
– Uses latest bfgminer 5.4 for control and mining
– Will work with all Mac OS, Linux, and Windows based PCs

The price of the FutureBit MoonLander USB Scrypt ASIC miner is $39 USD plus shipping and you can order directly form jstefanop over at Bitcointalk or get it via some of the official resellers while they have units. There are two US resellers – Asicpuppy and HolyBitcoin and there is one reseller for Europe – Bitshopper.

Do note that these USB Scrypt ASIC miners won’t make you rich mining Litecoin (LTC) and even ROI won’t be very fast at the current moment, they are not meant for that. The FutureBit MoonLander is a handy little device that is affordable enough for people that want to experiment with Scrypt mining for fun. With that said however if you point the miner at some Scrypt altcoin with low network hashrate and difficulty, mine some coins and then sell them at the right moment you can still do pretty good.

– For more information about the FutureBit MoonLander USB Scrypt ASIC miner…

What Features are Missing from the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner

25, Mar 2016

ibelink-dm384m-2

The iBeLink DM384M is the first to market X11 ASIC miner and while it is a pretty good product, there are still some things to be desired. In terms of hardware the X11 ASIC miner offers a solid build and reliable performance making it pretty capable for mining in a data center even in not so favorable conditions even when the environment temperature is not the best. The power usage is at a good level for the high performance it offers of 384 MHS for X11 mining, but the noise level makes it inappropriate for home miners. Temperature wise the situation is good thanks to the powerful server grade cooling used to keep the miner operating stable as you can see from these thermal images of the device in operation. Pretty much what is missing in terms of hardware is the presence of thermal sensors and fan control available for the users, the first is not hard to implement considering that the built-in controller of the miner is a Raspberry Pi. Fan speed control and failsafe could be trickier to implement as it would also need to be able to ignore users settings if the conditions require it and even to shutdown the miner in case a fan fails. Not to mention that implementing fan speed control and monitoring would not be very usable without the miner having thermal sensors, but the current implementation with server grade fans is good enough and should provide long and reliable operating with adequate cooling.

ibelink-pool-control-software

On the software side however there is much more to be desired, even though the basic web-based functionality you get is a pretty good starting point. we have already mentioned the device uses a Raspberry Pi controller with a modified version of the MineNinja software to provide a web-based frontend to the cgminer 3.5.6 backend. The web frontend provides a lot of numbers to the users, but they do not always seem to be correct, especially in terms of the actual hashrate you are getting from the device, so you need to look at the pool reported speed. Furthermore the web-based control lacks some very basic features such as password protection for access control or the ability to use a different pool mining strategy than the default failsafe one that is available. With big and powerful ASIC miners we often see that the web-based control software offers only pool failsafe options, but no load balance strategy for example. So while this will be fine if you are mining a high difficulty coin, if you go for a low difficulty and hashrate one throwing your full hashrate you will quickly raise the coin difficulty a lot. The cgminer backend does come with support for different pool strategies, so the problem is in the functionality available in web-based interface. Unfortunately for the moment the source code of cgminer or at lest the driver for the device is not yet publicly released, so we cannot have support built in other miners and web frontends. So for the moment the iBeLink DM384M is best for use with high difficulty X11 coins…


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