Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

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

1, Jul 2015

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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.

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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.

A Quick Look at the DigitalX Mintsy Mining Contracts

4, Jun 2015

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The DigitalX Mintsy service has been available for a bit already (currently in beta), but we haven’t checked it until recently when we decided to register and give it a quick look. It essentally combined multiple services into one with some nice features and also some integration with the Cryptsy crypto currency exchange. What you get at Mintsy is a service where you can mine with your own mining hardware, you can sell your hashrate ot rent from other users for mining various algorithms or you can purchase a contract for mining hashrate to mine SHA256 or Scrypt-based crypto currencies or with other words cloud mining. It is all integrated into a clean and useful interface with a user friendly wizard intended to help bnot so advanced users to get started. So far, so good… things do really look like promising, or at least until you take a deeper look and do some math.

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We are going to be focusing on the Mintsy Contracts which are essentially giving you cloud mining hashrate for a limited time – 1 month, 3 months or 6 months. The contract price includes all fees, so you do not pay anything extra for maintenance for example, but still the process are a bit higher than you would consider them profitable and worth investing into. Here is a quick example, if you buy a SHA256 mining contract for 100 GHS with a 30 day duration you would have to pay $19 USD for it, but with the current market condition mining for Bitcoins you would be earning just about 0.0317 BTC or about $7.2 USD at the current exchange price. Longer term contracts and for more hashrate do seem a bit better in terms of return of investment, though they are riskier, but you would still end up a bit short on what you have paid and that is if the market conditions remain as they are at the moment. The good thing is that you have the ability to mine in a pool and a coin of your choosing and soon there will also hopefully be a market for contracts where you should be able to sell them to other users if you decide to get out earlier. The situation with the Scrypt mining contracts is slightly worse, so the return of investment there and the risk is even higher.

It is up to you to decide where to invest and how much if you are interested in mining contracts, but for the moment we do not plan to go for any of the mining plans offered by Mintsy. As for using their mining pools or using the rig renting or leasing functionality, there are also better and more advanced services focused on either of these available that we would prefer.

Crypto Mining Performance of the New Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

1, Jun 2015

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Nvidia has just announced their new GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU, a model that should take the space in between GTX 980 and the Titan X both in terms of performance and in terms of price. The GTX 980 Ti is essentially a slightly stripped down version of the Titan X GPU with slightly less CUDA cores that are 2816 here and with a bit less TMUs – 176 units. The other significant difference in comparison with the Titan X is that the GTX 980 Ti comes with 6GB of video memory instead of 12 GB. The recommended end user price of the new GTX 980 Ti GPUs is $649 USD so it is significantly better priced as compared to the Titan X and considering that it should be showing a very similar performance it sounds like an interesting product not only for gaming, but for crypto mining as well.

nvidia-gtx-980-ti-hashrates

So we are taking for a spin a single Nvidia GTX 980 Ti to compare it to the the GTX 980 and the Titan X GPUs using ccMiner 1.5.45 SP-MOD. Note that we are not using the latest version of ccMiner in order to compare the results in terms of hashrate on the other GPUs that we ran a bit ago. We’ve compared using the latest ccMiner as well and there is notable performance increase in some algorithms such as Quark, but for most others there is no significant difference. Just as a reference the GTX 980 Ti using the latest ccMiner 1.5.51 SP-MOD manages to provide a 23230 KHS hashrate for mining Quark, but as we’ve said there is not much of a difference with other algorithms. Other than that as you can see from the results the GTX 980 Ti GPU is very close in terms of performance as compared to the Titan X and much faster than the GTX 980. So if you are looking for a new high-end Nvidia GPU for gaming and crypto mining when not using your PC, then the GTX 980 Ti does seem like a great choice…


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