It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
While GPU mining still does work better on AMD-based graphics processors using OpenCL, the latest versions of the CUDAminer software intended for use on Nvidia-based graphics cards has gone through a good performance optimization and it makes mining with CUDA a good option if you have some spare and unused Nvidia GPUs. The fact tha there are still shortages of the Radeon R9 280X graphics cards on the market – the all-round best performer for Scrypt GPU mining makes the alternative to mine coins with Nvidia GPU a decent alternative. Of course the price/performance ratio of an Nvidia GPU versus and AMD GPU for mining is still in favor of AMD graphics. You can expect to get about 550-560 KH/s from a stock (non overclocked) Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics card, while the same performance is easily achievable with a much cheaper stock AMD Radeon R9 280X card. If you however have a watercooled 780 Ti and overclock it well, you might be able to reach hashrate close to about 900 kHash/s according to the author of the software. Regardless, if you already have a CUDA-capable graphics processor why not put it to some mining work to get some extra crypto coins, it also makes for a good option to try out new pools or alternative cryptos…
One of the best things about the CUDAminer software is that it automatically detects the best settings for your graphics card, so that after yo run it the software can squeeze out the maximum mining performance automatically for you. This takes the guesswork and a lot of time spent for testing different settings, though you can still do that if you wish to fine tune things. One of the still missing important features from this miner is the failover pool switching to backup pools in case of a problem with the current mining pool. CUDAminer already has support for scrypt mining with N=1024 (LiteCoin and many, many other scrypt clones like DOGE for example), scrypt-jane mining (Yacoin and several clones), scrypt mining with larger N (VertCoin) and the recently released MaxCoin mining (SHA-3 i.e. Keccak256). So you will be up to speed even with the latest alternative crypto currencies such as VertCoin and MaxCoin that have generated quite some buzz in the last few days. Below you can download the latest binary for windows of CudaMiner or you can compile it yourself from the (source).
Update: CudaMiner is now an old and non supported anymore miner for Nvidia GPUs, you should switch to the more recent and supported ccMiner instead in order to get better support, including for newer mining algorithms and coins, as well as faster hashrates for your Nvidia-based GPU mining rigs!
– Download the latest CUDAminer 2014-02-28 Nvidia GPU mining software…
If you are mining Scrypt crypto currencies such as Litecoin or maybe DOGE, then you are most likely using cgminer as a mining software or something that relies on cgminer as a backend. The author of cgminer (Con Kolivas) however seems to have decided to continue support of cgminer only for ASIC mining for SHA-256 cryptos such as Bitcoin and version 3.7.2 is the last one for cgminer to support GPU mining for scrypt crypto coins. Furthermore the windows version of the last cgminer to support GPU mining has been removed from the official download location, you can however download cgminer 3.7.2 with GPU support for windows here.
More importantly, there are already some alternatives that are based around the original source code of cgminer 3.7.2, but add extra features and offer improvements that are not found in the original software. One such version based on cgminer 3.7.2 is Martin “Kalroth” Danielsen’s cgminer 3.7.2 that he calls cgminer 3.7.3 in order for the users to be able to differentiate between the original and his version. In cgminer 3.7.2 kalroth (cgminer 3.7.3) he has made changes to the visual interface to make it more user friendly and functionality that can help you squeeze a bit more performance out of your GPU mining hardware. Some of the notable differences include support for multiple pool load balancing, implementation for idle state for GPUs when there’s no work, two additional modes for controlling intensity – xintensity and rawintensity for additional performance, faster failover pool switching back delay and interface improvements such as uptime status or percentage of rejected shares and so on. Definitely something to try and see if you like this version of cgminer better than the original 3.7.2.
– You can download cgminer 3.7.3 karloth with GPU mining support for Windows OS here…
CPU mining is already completely pointless if you are going to be mining for Bitcoins or another SHA-256 crypto currency, the same goes for Litecoin and other Scrypt currencies. You however may need to test something, like a pool or anything else and may not have a handy GPU or an ASIC to test with, so a CPU miner could still be handy. Below you can download the latest version of the Pooler 2.3.2 CPU miner for Windows with ready bat files for Scrypt and SHA-256 mining. You only need to insert the right settings for the pool and worker and can start testing…
– You can download Pooler 2.3.2 CPU miner for Windows (Scrypt/SHA-256) for Windows here…