Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock Ethereum Mining Rig

20, Jan 2021

The recent craze on GPU mining for Ethereum and the resulting Nvidia RTX 30 series shortage as well as pretty much anything else with decent mining performance for Ethash is in full on mode. Still, we have managed to get our hands on a few Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs and built a 6x GPU mining rig using them for ETH mining, so below we share some interesting things including the Ethereum mining hashrate we got and the optimized settings for the RTX 3070 and more specifically the GameRock series from Palit that we have used. As you can see from the photo above the GameRock is a bit flashy in terms of design due to the large RGB lighting surface. A feature which might be of interest for a gamer, but is totally not required by a miner as it makes no different whatsoever in terms of performance. Still, the good news is that the cooler of the GameRock GPUs from Palit is with a large surface area and does a great job in keeping things cool and the fans are also dual ball-bearing ones and perform really well. If you are currently using a traditional lighting system, such as fluorescent tubes or metal halides, upgrading to high hat lights should be a top priority if you want to reduce electricity costs.

A single optimized Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPU can do a little over 60 MHS with ease with a little tweaking with the help of the MSI Afterburner software. At TDP of just 55% or almost half of the standard power usage these video cards manage to perform really well as far as Ethereum (ETH) mining is concerned with a bit of overclock for the video memory as well – +1100 MHz. The lowered power usage results in lower GPU performance, but RTX 3070 is more than capable of utilizing the fast GDDR6 memory it has with a 256-bit wide memory bus fully to get you about 60.6 MHS mining the Ethash algorithm. No need to overclock or underclock the GPU, though for further power usage optimizations you can also try lowering the operating voltage of the GPU a bit, though not really required (can probably save up to about 100W of power usage for the whole rig).

So, with cooling fans set at 75% and a TDP of 50%, GPU -500 MHz and with +1100 MHz for the video memory you get extra cool and power efficient GPUs mining at over 60 MHs with a total power consumption a little shy from 1000W at the wall (can depend on the PSU efficiency) or a bit over 360 MHs for a 6x GPU mining rig using Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock video card usually reserved for legit cash games with high specs. The screenshot for the hashrate is with the use of the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c and mining Ethash on NiceHash…

The only thing that might be better than the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3060 Ti (in that price/performance range), however the 3060 Ti are even harder to obtain due to their slightly lower price and the same mining performance for Ethereum (ETH). The reason being that RTX 3060 Ti features the same GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, but has a slightly stripped-down GPU. That however does not interfere with Ethereum mining as the GPU on the RTX 3060 Ti still manages really well even with 1000 CUDa cores less. Do note that the RTX 3060 is not that goof of an alternative as unlike the 256-bit memory bus that the Ti has, the regular non-Ti version has just 192-bit memory bus and the hashrate does suffer from that, so no 60 MHs on the non-Ti models!

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c Ethash miner software…

Trying Out the Autotuning Function of Braiins OS+ on AntMiner S9

31, Mar 2020

One of the most interesting features of the brand new Braiins OS+ firmware for Antminer S9 ASIC miners is the auto-tuning functionality that automates per-chip overclocking in order to maximize performance for the available power and temperature conditions in order to increase the performance of your available miners. Since we already had a couple of S9 ASIC miners that used older release on the Braiins OS we did a quick and easy upgrade offer SSH to the latest Braiins OS+ release and decided to do a quick test of the auto-tuning feature. We remind you that the OS+ version is not completely open source and “free” like the normal Braiins OS, but it is the one that features the auto-tuning option. Braiins OS+ has a 2% developer fee built-in as a means to help further development, but thanks to the auto tuning feature you should be able to squeeze some extra performance to cover the fee and still be better than manual or stock settings.

We started our testing by disabling the temperature control and forcing the fans to operate at 100% all the time in order to ensure that the cooling performance will be at maximum level all the time for these air cooled S9 miners. Then we have set the PSU power limit to 1500W and started waiting for the automated script to do its magic in finding what the optimal settings would be for all of the chips in the ASIC miner and what will be the final hashrate we are going to be getting in a while from this stock 14 THS SHA256 ASIC miner. Do note that you are not actually required to specify a power limit of the PSU that the autotuning algorithm can take into account in order to maximize the TH/W produced by the mining device, but that can help to ensure that you will not have problems caused by the miner reaching the limits of the PSU you are using.

The result after leaving the auto-tuning to run a while on the miner showed the following result: 16.5-16.6 THS hashrate within the set power limit of 1500W and operating temperatures of the chips trying to stay below 90 degrees Celsius with the cooling fans operating at 100%. We should also note that even though the firmware may do per-chip optimizations for best results, the web-based interface does not provide you with detailed per-chip information, you still get a somewhat summarized hash chains information. We are not sure how long it may take for the auto-tuning to finish or of it actually finishes or tries to find optimal settings when operating conditions change… it is just not well documented for the moment, but it does seem to be working pretty well based on our first experience using it. Of course depending on a lot of conditions the results you will be getting from the auto-tuning feature may vary from miner to miner, so do not expect to see the same improvement on all of your available S9 miners!

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…

RandomX Mining Performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Processor (64C/128T)

25, Feb 2020

AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Processor is the latest and highest-end workstation CPU from AMD offering staggering 64 cores and 128 logical threads to the user or with other words really massive performance if you can manage to take advantage. The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU does not come cheap at a retail price of about $3990 USD it is really expensive, so most definitely not for everyone and unfortunately not the best choice for mining if you want to pay back for it mining crypto at the moment. Nevertheless we managed to get our hands on one of these monsters of CPU power and the first thing we did was to run some RandomX CPU benchmarks in order to see what level of performance we are going to get. You can read our first impressions and results below…

We have started our RandomX testing on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU with the latest XMRig 5.7.0 that was just recently released and we managed to get all 128 threads at 100% and a hashrate of almost 40 KH/s. Performance wise great result, but still earning you just about 3 and something US dollars per day mining Monero (XMR) that uses the RandomX algorithm, making it pretty pointless to use that particular processor for mining. Mining ARQma (RandomARQ) got us 198 KH/s hashrate, for LOKI (RandomXL) the hashrate was 46.6 KH/s and for WOWnero (RandomWOW) the result was 49.1 KH/s when using the latest XMRig miner. Trying out the latest XMR-Stak-RX got us a bit higher hashrate at 41.3 KH/s for RandomX and the latest SRBMiner-Multi miner did perform even slightly better with 41.8 KH/s as hashrate mining Monero (XMR).

All of the miners for RandomX did manage to properly load all of the available 128 logical cores on the 3990X processor, but be aware that not all CPU miners out there and all algorithms may be able to take full advantage of so many CPU threads for mining. An example of a miner that had trouble automatically using all 128 threads is the PEGNet (PEG) miner at the Orax Pool that did put a load on only half the logical threads available or with other words only 64 threads instead of the full 128. Trying to manually fix the issue by increasing the number of sub miners to 128 from the automatically detected 64 unfortunately does not help to take full advantage of all 128 logical cores that the processor offers.


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