Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

SFARDS SF100 ASICs Coming Soon, But Too Expensive

3, Aug 2015

sfards-sf100-miner

The SF100 Dual-Miner ASICs from SFARDS are expected to start arriving in mid-August 2015 to the most eager miners that have ordered some fromt he first batch of devices, or at least that is what the manufacturer is claiming on their website. The SF100 BTC and LTC Dual Miner has been listed briefly on the official SFARDS website with a price of 8000 RMB (about 1288 USD) last month and is since labeled as Out of Stock. This price however seems to be for larger quantities, some other websites have since listed single units of the SFARDS SF100 miners for pre-order and their prices are for example $1699 USD on AliExpress, ~$1700 USD on Asic Trade and $1999.99 USD on ZoomHash or with other words significantly higher than what was listed on the official website. Note that these prices are for the ASIC miner only and you need to add the shipping cost, extra import taxes and then you would also need at least good 1KW power supply for the miner, so the total price will easy go over $2000 USD. Even if these prices are higher because of the limited number of available units in the first batch they are way too expensive to consider them as a good investment with the current market conditions. Not to mention that we are yet to see if the miners will be able to perform as promised by the manufacturers in terms of performance for both mining SHA256 and Scrypt algorithms separately and at the same time. Another thing that may not be very much in favor of the late availability of the SF100 miners is the expected Litecoin Block Reward Halving from 50 to 25 coins by the end of August…

Mining with a 8X GPU GeForce GTX TITAN X System

21, Jul 2015

nvidia-8x-titan-x

Here is something interesting that is not originally intended to be used as a GPU mining rig, but for a powerful compute oriented machine – an 8x GPU AsRock Rack Barebone populated with eight Nvidia GeForce GTX TITAN X video cards and two 14-core Intel Xeon processors. These powerful rackmount systems are designed for use with Nvidia Tesla cards for high-performance CUDA applications, but you can put in GeForce cards as well such as the TITAN X and have them all running at PCI-E 3.0 x16 speeds (no SLI support is available).

So we took one of these interesting systems and ran a quick test with the latest ccMiner to see what kind of performance we are going to get for crypto currency mining. It was out of curiosity as the system is not intended to be used for GPU mining – the whole things is just way too expensive to probably ever see ROI let alone make some profit from mining. Interestingly enough the 8x GPU configuration requires the use of Windows Server or compatible Linux distribution, with Windows 7 or 8.x we were having trouble making all 8 GPUs work properly (Error code 43 on the 8th card). Apparently there is a solution to make all 8 cards work fine under these consumer versions of Windows as well, all you need to do is some registry modification and you should be fine.

nvidia-8x-titan-x-performance

As you can see from the screenshot the system runs fine with a total hashrate of about 190 MHS mining Quark (98 MHS total on X11 and 25MHS total on Lyra2RE) on all eight GeForce GTX TITAN X GPUs. This means that a single TITAN X card gets you about 24 MHS for mining Quark-based crypto currencies and ll of the cards manage to provide optimum performance. Notice that the fans are turned all the way to 100% for best performance, because otherwise the cards are easily hitting the thermal limit with their fans running on auto at about 50-60% and as a result they throttle down and you loose performance with the GPU frequency dropping down to 1000 MHz. Again this is not a system designed for crypto currency mining, but for compute applications, we were just curious how well it will perform for crypto mining and it does a great job with some tweaking. Of course since the whole thing is designed to be in a server room the noise level is not relevant, though it is quite high as expected thanks to the 8 GPU fans and the other 8 chassis cooling fans that are 24W each when running at maximum RPM.

Maybe if GPU mining picks up to a large scale level like it is happening with Bitcoin mining and is profitable enough we might be able to see solutions like these used, but for now these are limited to businesses using them for high-performance CUDA applications. Think along the lines of 3D design, visual effects rendering, medical imaging, energy exploration or scientific simulations etc.

Trying Out the New AMD Radeon R9 Fury X for Crypto Currency Mining

1, Jul 2015

amd-radeon-r9-fury-x

The latest high-end GPU from AMD, namely the Radeon R9 Fury X, that has been just recently announced has managed to provide performance high enough to be equal to the competition in the form of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti… at least hen we are talking about using video cards based on these GPUs for gaming. We already did some benchmarks to see how fast the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is for mining, so it is time to see if the Fury X will be able to compete with these results like it does for gaming. An interesting advantage that the Fiji GPUs used in the Fury X video cards is that they come with HBM memory and both the video memory and the GPU are water cooled. In theory this means that you get lower temperatures and silent operation and the Fury X does manage to provide that. One more thing that you would normally expect from a water cooled GPU is to have a lot of potential for overclock, but unfortunately this does not hold true for the Fury X or at least not with the first card out on the market at least. We barely managed to squeeze out just about 75 MHz extra from the GPU and there is no option to overclock the video memory for the moment.

amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-quark

So off to do some tests with some of the popular and more profitable algorithms for mining lately, we have used the latest sgminer along with some of the optimized forks available for different algorithms such as the one optimized for Quark and Qubit. Note that there are not yet specially optimized kernels for the Fury X or settings that work best, so we were trying to use ones that we are familiar with already from the 280 and 290 series from AMD. So some of these worked really well, while others not so well and the generally available OpenCL kernels did provide quite disappointing results actually…

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Results:
– X11 default: 6.778 MHS
– X11 Wolf0 Mod: 8.123 MHS

– X13 default: 5.614 MHS
– X13 Wolf0 Mod: 7.176 MHS

– X15 default: 4.69 MHS
– X15 Wolf0 Mod: 6.335 MHS

– Quark modified: 22.37 MHS
– Qubit modified: 21.15 MHS

– Neoscrypt default: 147 KHS

– Lyra2RE default: 287 KHS
– Lyra2RE Pallas Mod: 450 KHS

As you can see the results are a bit disappointing at this point, everything apart from the Quark and Qubit performance using the modified 280X kernels where the performance is really good and similar to that achieved on the GTX 980 Ti. Other modified/optimized kernels such as the ones for the X algorithms from Wolf0 or the Pallas mod for Lyra2Re do increase the performance a bit, but it it still disappointingly low. In fact on some algorithms you can expect to get worse results with Fury X than with a 280X for example, so we need to find better settings and maybe get optimized kernels especially for Fury X in order for that card to be viable for crypto currency mining. The only thing it is good for at the moment is for mining coins using the Quark and Qubit algorithm with the modified kernels, but then again buying a GTX 980 Ti instead could be the wiser choice for generally better mining performance for any algorithm supported… at least for the moment.


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