Archive for the ‘Mining Software’ Category

New lolMiner 1.63 With Improved Kaspa (KAS) Mining Performance

23, Nov 2022

There is a new lolMiner 1.63 release available for anyone using that mining software, and it is an especially useful update for anyone out there that might be currently mining Kaspa (KAS)… and if you are not yet mining KAS, then you might want to consider starting to mine Kaspa it with your GPUs. The project has great underlying technology with more in the works and has already started generating buzz around crypto miners and traders, not to mention that it has the potential to become the next big Layer 1 crypto that can actually be mined with GPUs and that is something we kind of need lately… getting back to the roots of crypto. Anyway, our advice is to check Kaspa (KAS) out now if you still haven’t done so, or you might be sorry later on that you missed the early opportunity. If you are not too sure yet, you might try also Triple Mining ETC + KAS + ZIL or any other Ethash/ETChash crypto with Zilliqa and Kaspa on the side. This way you will be mining less KAS, but it will be just extra without losing any of the mining hashrate for the other coins, or with just a very slight drop (dependent on your power limiter settings as well).

Back to the mining part and the mining software, the latest lolMiner 1.63 there is a slight improvement in performance and energy efficiency that can help you get even more performance out of your Nvidia mining GPUs that are already mining KAS. Increasing the power limiter with just a few percent over the settings you use optimally for ETH/ETC mining could also help in getting some extra hashrate as well, either for single mining KAS or for Triple mining it. There are also some fixes that might should make the miner running better and giving you less problems as well. The upgrade to the latest version 1.63 is a must for anyone mining Kaspa (KAS) and recommended for people mining other crypto cons with it. Below you can read the full changelog of the latest release of lolMiner.

lolMiner 1.63 Changelog
Changes
– Improved the Kaspa only mining performance on Nvidia Turing, Ampere and Ada GPUs by about 3.5%. (1)
– Significantly improved the Kaspa only mining energy efficiency on Nvidia Turing, Ampere and Ada GPUs by 7-11% depending on the actual model.
– Values given to --dualfactor parameter will now be value checked and rounded / capped to working values.

(1) Can be higher in case the card was power limited before.

Fixes
– Fixed a bug causing the miner to show a crash message when lolMiner was ended via ctrl+c
– Fixed a bug causing lolMiner not to start Kaspa mining on Nvidia GPUs when the Nvidia OpenCL installation on the system is broken.

– To download and try the latest release of the lolMiner 1.63 mining software…

How About Dual Mining and Triple Mining ETC + KAS + ZIL

16, Nov 2022

Dual-mining or mining two different crypto currencies at the same time is a good way to optimize the performance and profitability of your GPU mining hardware, especially at times like now when the profitability from mining is low. Zilliqa or ZIL has added a new level of the traditional dual mining where you normally mine a GPU coin and a Memory coin on the same GPU, because it is mined for just a minute every two hours. This way you can dual-mine ETC + ZIL without losing almost any of your hashpower for the second coin, but also you can add a third coin in the mix, a GPU-heavy coin and thus try to even further improve your profitability. Dual-mining is also possible on some ASIC miners as well such as the iPollo series of ETC/ETH miners where you can mine an Ethash or ETChash crypto coin together with ZIL, thus getting an extra 30% higher profit compared to just normal mining.

Kaspa or KAS is an interesting and still highly unnoticed project that is just recently starting to gain attention not only form miners, but from investors as well. A couple of days ago we have discussed how you can start mining Kaspa (KAS) and since then the coin has pretty much doubled in trading price and was going up in a market conditions where most other crypto coins were going down. So, if you still haven’t checked out Kaspa (KAS) and its very fast block times and transfer on-chain, then you should do so as it will become even faster in the near future. Also, do not miss your chance to mine some coins now as well and make some really nice profit in the future!

We are not going to focus on KAS now, here we are going to be talking about Dual-Mining ETC and KAS as well as Tripple-Mining ETC + KAS + ZIL. Etereum Classic (ETC) uses the memory heavy Etchash algorithm while Kaspa (KAS) relies on the kHeavyHash algorithm for mining which is a GPU heavy one, so they are a great combo together for dual-mining and adding Zilliqa (ZIL) on top of these two makes a great mining threesome for optimal performance and profit. You can of course use not only ETC, but other Ethash or ETChash crypto to pair up with KAS and ZIL for triple mining, so the choice is up to you. To answer your question before you ask, yes, we are currently mining ETC + KAS + ZIL on our Nvidia mining GPUs.

We are going to focus on using lolMiner for dual-mining and triple mining here (latest version 1.62), although other miners such as Gminer and Bzminer for instance also support dual and/or triple mining and the procedure there is similar, although the command line to run the miner might be different. Currently we like the stability and performance of lolMiner the best as far as Kaspa mining is concerned, but feel free to use a different miner if you prefer it over lolMiner. The examples below use the Ezil.me mining pool for Dual mining ETC + ZIL and the WoolyPooly pool for mining KAS, other mining pools should work, but may require a bit of a different configuration settings. Do not forget to replace ETC_WALLET, ZIL_WALLET, KASPA_WALLET and WORKER with your own wallets for the respecitve crypto currency as well as the name or number of your machine as worker.

ETC + KAS Dual Mining:
lolMiner.exe --algo ETCHASH --pool eu.ezil.me:3333 --user ETC_WALLET.WORKER --dualmode KASPADUAL --dualpool pool.eu.woolypooly.com:3112 --dualuser KASPA_WALLET.WORKER

ETC + KAS + ZIL Triple Mining:
lolMiner.exe --algo ETCHASH --pool eu.ezil.me:4444 --user ETC_WALLET.ZIL_WALLET.WORKER --enablezilcache --dualmode KASPADUAL --dualpool pool.eu.woolypooly.com:3112 --dualuser KASPA_WALLET.WORKER

Now, although we are showing you dual and triple mining configurations, it is really pointless not to take advantage of the triple mining option as it will only benefit you even more as ZIL mining hardly affects the mining performance of the two other coins and the extra profit it will bring you is definitely worth it!

So, with the above settings the miner will try to maximize the ETC mining hashrate and fill in the available GPU resources with some KAS calculations, thus you will be getting pretty much the same hashrate for ETC and about 1/4 to 1/5 of the usual KAS hashrate compared to KAS only mining. On a rig with 6x RTX 3080 GPUs that do 570 MH/s ETC only or 5500 MH/s KAS only we are getting around 565 MH/s ETC and around 1400 MH/s KAS hashrate in triple mining plus an extra up to 30% profit from the mined ZIL in triple mining mode (without the ZIL in dual mining only). On different GPUs your results may vary of course, especially on slower video cards, but the extra hashrate and profit should still be worth it.

In terms of the mining settings, you need to just return the GPU clock to its default value if you were downclocking it for ETC/ETH mining previously, the memory clock and the power limit levels should remain the same as for ETC/ETH mining. You could of course increase the power limit in order to get some extra hashrate for KAS, but that will also lead to increased power usage as well. The idea is to keep the ETC/ETH mining settings including the power limit, so that you would actually get more mined with the same power usage as if you were just ETC mining for instance.

How to Lock Nvidia GPU Clock and Power Limit Under Windows with Nvidia-smi

22, Sep 2022

The Nvidia System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) is a command line utility, based on top of the Nvidia Management Library (NVML), intended to aid in the management and monitoring of Nvidia GPU devices. It has a number of useful commands for mostly monitoring the status of your Nvidia GPUs, but there are some commands that can be useful for miners as well. There are two commands that we’ll be discussing here now that can be useful to help you optimize your mining performance and while here the focus is for use under Windows, the nvidia-smi tool is also available for Linux and can be used there as well. We’ll be learning how to lock the operating frequency of an Nvidia GPU to a certain fixed value as well as how to control the power limit of that particular GPU as well and how these two commands can complement each other well in order to optimize the performance and energy efficiency of a mining rig based on Nvidia GPUs.

Fixing or locking the GPU frequency to a certain level or the power limit on an Nvidia GPU with the nvidia-smi tool on Windows requires you to start a “Command Prompt” window, but make sure you do so with Administrator privileges, otherwise you will not be able to change anything as you would not have the required permissions. The nvidia-smi tool should be included in the Path, so no need to run it from a specific location, though you might want to run it from a Batch (BAT) file in order to automate it with the start of a miner for instance. Since it requires Admin privileges you cannot set the Batch file to be executed as Admin by default, but if you make a Shortcut to the BAT file you can set the Shortcut in Windows to be ran as Administrator and that would do the job.

To set the GPU clock on Nvidia GPU using the nvidia-smi tool you need to use the -lgc parameter. So, for example to set the GPU clock to 1050 MHz you would need to run nvidia-smi -lgc 1050 as on the example screenshot above. Do note that this will be the GPU clock that your Nvidia graphic adapter(s) will be running at ONLY if they are allowed to by their power limiter at the moment, but more on that in a moment.

To set the GPU Power Limit on Nvidia GPU using the nvidia-smi tool you need to use the -pl parameter. So, for example to set the GPU Power Limit to 120W you would need to run nvidia-smi -pl 120 as on the example screenshot above. When set the Power Limit is fixed regardless of other options of the GPU.

In our example above we have set the GPU clock to 1050 MHz and the Power Limit to 120W for a mining rig with 6x Nvidia RTX 3070 GPUs, but as you can see from the NBMiner screenshot here the operating frequency is lower than the set value while the Power Limit is also reported 119W instead of 120W, but small variation here is normal. Well, the thing is that at 120W of power usage as per our limit here the said GPUs are just not able to function with such high GPU clock, but if we increase the power limit a bit more the video cards will be able to operate at 1050 MHz clock without a problem. So, what you need to make sure you do is to match well both of these parameters in order to get optimal performance with optimal power usage…

If you set the power limit to let us say 150W, but the GPU clock limit is at 1050 MHz the video cards will just consume around 130-135W and not the full 150 Watts. The trick here is to first see what GPU clock you need for the optimal performance of a certain video card, like for example the RTX 3070 (depending on the make and model and operating conditions) can require somewhere between around 850 and 1050 MHz GPU clock to give you 60 MHs of Ethash mining hashrate with 120W-130W of power usage as maximum. You just need to play around with your specific hardware a bit and see what works best and then you can automate the settings for optimal performance and power usage via the batch file you use to run your mining software.

– Some ideas on how to Monitor and Control Your Nvidia GPUs While Mining with nvidia-smi…


top