Archive for the ‘Mining Software’ Category

New NiceHash Miner Legacy 1.8.0.1 With Updates and Fixes

20, Jul 2017

With the release of their version 2 of NiceHash Miner there are two different versions of the software available now. The old branch version 1 is now called NiceHash Miner Legacy and it is intended for more advanced users while the new NiceHash Miner 2 is for people that are new to crypto mining and just want an easy to use GUI. NiceHash Miner is essentially a profit switching mining tool that chooses the most profitable algorithm based on your mining hashrate and sells your hashrate for that particular algorithm.

NiceHash Miner 2 does not contain third party miner software, it uses the miners being developed in house by NiceHash such as excavator for example, while the NiceHash Miner Legacy still relies on the best performing third party miners for some algorithms. The Legacy version includes miners from Claymore, EWBF, Tpruvot and others in order to maximize performance for particular algorithm. This does however make it a bit more complicated for setting up many different miners thus the advanced users target.

– To download and try the latest NiceHash Miner Legacy release 1.8.0.1 from GitHub…

Excavator Miner 1.2.10a With Performance Improvements

12, Jul 2017

We just gave a try of the latest NiceHash Excavator 1.2.10 alpha miner (source) that includes new algorithms and some performance improvements from NiceHash. It has been a while since we have played with it last, so there are some changes that we wanted to try out. Excavator supports both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and works with some of the more popular mining algorithms, though performance wise it may not be the fastest on all of them.

Nvidia CUDA supported algorithms: equihash, pascal, decred, sia, lbry, blake2s, daggerhashimoto
AMD OpenCL supported algorithms: daggerhashimoto, equihash, pascal, sia, decred

More notable is the performance improvement from the latest ethminer for Nvidia GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 GPUs that has also apparently been implemented in Excavator, so you might want to try that as well and see what results you are going to get if you are mining coins using the (Ethash) Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm such as Ethereum and others. Below you can find a 64-bit Windows binary that you can download and try will all of the supported algorithms, just modify the sample config files provided. Do note that Nvidia supports two more algorithms that have not yet been implemented on AMD GPUs!

– To download and try the latest Excavator 1.2.10a miner for 64-bit Windows…

New Optimized Ethminer for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPUs

27, Jun 2017

There is a new development version of the ethminer 0.11.0 (source) available that brings CUDA performance improvements especially optimized for GTX 1060 GPUs. People are reporting a couple of megahashes increase in the performance of GTX 1060 GPUs over what they are getting with the same settings from Claymore’s ETH miner, some slight, but less performance improvement is observed in GTX 1070. Unfortunately it seems that the performance optimizations submitted by David Li don’t do much good for GDDR5X GPUs like the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti.

Feel free to test it on your Nvidia mining GPUS and report what and if there is some improvement in the hashrate over your previous settings. If you do make sure you try different value for the --cuda-parallel-hash command line flag (default value is 4), but you can experiment with 1, 2 and 8 and see what works best for you. Again the highest benefits are apparently observed on GTX 1060 GPUs as the performance optimization is apparently targeted at them, though some other GPUs might still benefit a slight boost as well. You can download and try the Windows binary compiled from the latest source below.

– To download and try the CUDA optimized new ethminer 0.11.0 for Windows…


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