Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Nvidia GTX 980 Performance Improvements With The Latest ccMiner

24, Nov 2014

nvidia-geforce-gtx-980

Back in September with the release of the new Maxwell-based NVidia GPUs, the GTX 970 and GTX 980 we did some performance testing of the GeForce GTX 980 hashrate using the available at that time ccMiner and CudaMiner miners. Today, a bit over two months later we’ve decided to check how hings have progressed in terms of performance improvements of the various crypto mining algorithms with the latest optimizations available in ccMiner. We’ve used the just posted Maxwell-optimized ccMiner 1.5-git ccMiner fork from SP to get the performance results from the same GTX 980 GPU running at stock frequencies (overclocking can further increase performance).

gtx-980-hashrate-improvement-table

There is no surprise that there are some significant performance improvements in various crypto algorithms that have been achieved using various optimizations, but to our surprise there ware a few algorithms that did perform worse. The results we got from Groestl, HEFTY1 and JHA were a bit lower with the latest ccMiner than what we got in terms of performance back in September. Some other algorithms also don’t seem to have very big performance improvements such as Keccak, Luffa512 or NIST5, but the more popular and still profitable to mine algorithms do come with nice improvements. You can thank for the increase in performance to all of the developers that continue to work actively and optimize the performance out of which SP and tpruvot seem to be the most active lately, djm34, tsiv as well as others who have contributed code and also Christian Buchner and Christian H. – the creators of the ccMiner in the first place. Their code contributions and efforts in releasing their work publicly deserve some appreciation from the miners who are using Nvidia GPUs in order to keep them motivated. Below you can find the official donation addresses where you can send some coins for a beer or more to the each of the developers:

tpruvot
BTC: 1AJdfCpLWPNoAMDfHF1wD5y8VgKSSTHxPo
DRK: XeVrkPrWB7pDbdFLfKhF1Z3xpqhsx6wkH3
NEOS: NaEcVrdzoCWHUYXb7X8QoafoKS9UV69Yk4
XST: S9TqZucWgT6ajZLDBxQnHUtmkotCEHn9z9

SP
BTC: 1CTiNJyoUmbdMRACtteRWXhGqtSETYd6Vd
DRK: XdgfWywdxABwMdrGUd2xseb6CYy1UKi9jX

djm34
BTC: 1NENYmxwZGHsKFmyjTc5WferTn5VTFb7Ze

tsiv
BTC: 1QD25HSCF8EAxUTYj2XsXZNGBi7RvQ21p8
SPR: SfSEcVQGhbXvPQ2hkTj3vxSd9PEZA12efa

cbuchner
LTC: LKS1WDKGED647msBQfLBHV3Ls8sveGncnm
BTC: 16hJF5mceSojnTD3ZTUDqdRhDyPJzoRakM

Trying Out the Hashie Bitcoin Cloud Mining Service

20, Nov 2014

hashie-bitcoin-cloud-mining

Hashie is a new Bitcoin cloud mining service that we’ve been keeping an eye on, it has been available for a bit over a month already, so we’ve decided that it is time to give it a try. The website is registered on October 9th and apparently the service operators want to operate the service anonymously and keep a low profile, like many other similar services, though this does rise some concern among users that are considering to invest in such a service. This is precisely why we gave some time before actually trying out the service ourselves. The main page of the service is pretty basic and does not give a lot of information about the service, you need to register in order to properly check it out and see all the features available to you. What we like is that the service operators seem pretty active in developing the service and have been adding new features all the time, though some of them do need a bit more work to be really good and optimally useful for the miners. We’ll be talking about these in a bit as well as covering what else is needed to make the service better based on our experience and opinion, but so far what we are seeing is very promising.

amhash-hashrate-current-price

Up until today the service offered their Generation 1 miners for customers at a price of $4.90 USD per 10 GHS with $0.002 USD per GHS daily maintenance fee with some additional price discounts for volume purchases that can bring down the price per 10 GHS down to $4.51 USD. Today the service however announced their partnership with the AMHash mining farm that is apparently operated by ASICMiner and RockMiner and has started offering cloud mining contracts from that service provider. The old Generation 1 contracts are still available, however the new AMhash ones are are priced lower at 0.0012 BTC per GHS and have a lower daily maintenance fee of $0.00163 USD per GHS. Both contracts are unlimited and continue until the mined coins are more than what you need to pay for maintenance fees with instant activation. The Hashie service also offers 10 GHS free miner for everyone that registers to test the service, however until you purchase some cloud mining hashrate you are not able to withdraw any of the mined coins from the free miner. The minimum purchase you can go for is 20 GH and the payments are made with BTC, in order to purchase hashrate you need to send the coins you your account’s wallet – only 3 confirmations are required before you can spend the BTC for hashrate.

hashie-market-offers

The service has a market where you can put for sale your hashrate if you want to sell it to get cash faster, there are already some offers available, however there is a bit of a problem with the market at the moment. You are not able to purchase just a part of the hashrate put on sale by a user of the service, you need to buy it all, so this makes it harder to actually use this feature. Also the new AMhash cloud hashrate is not yet trade-able on the Market, only the Generation 1 is. The good thing about the market is that you might be able to get a better price per GHS, especially when purchasing bigger amounts of hashrate. Again, buying on the Market requires you to already have the needed amount of Bitcoins available in your account’s wallet and you can of course not only buy, but also sell your purchased hashrate should you decide so. You also have the option to Rename, Merge and Split your miners as every purchase you make becomes a separate miner instance and you can also use the Auto-rebuy functionality to automatically reinvest some of the earnings in more hashrate.

hashie-interface-my-miners

The service has daily payouts, but they are not automatically sent to your Bitcoin wallet, just credited to your service account and you can withdraw them after that if they meet the minimums set. The minimum withdraw amount is 0.0012 BTC and there is a 0.0002 BTC fee that will be subtracted from the amount you decide to withdraw to your Bitcoin wallet. The thing that is not so nice is that you actually don’t know how much you will earn on a daily basis, there is no estimation provided by the service, you need to wait for the daily payout to be executed to see how much you have earned for the previous day. This means that you do not get earnings credited when a block is solved, this happens once every 24 hours automatically and you need to check the Transactions log after that to see how much you have mined with your hashrate available. The good thing is that there is a detailed information in the transaction log on how much was actually mined and what were the electricity fees you have paid etc., so it is quite useful and detailed. It would’ve been nice to also get a statistics for things like mined this week or month, since the start etc. to make it easier to keep a track of your ROI as this is important for miners.

So far we like what we are seeing as functionality of the service and it seems to work pretty well, though the functionality does need some more improvements to make it even better it does seem like a cloud mining service to keep an eye on. We are going to continue testing it and reporting our experience as time goes by, but so far things are looking promising and the price per GHS and the maintenance fees does seem to be one of the best currently available, especially with the new AMhash contracts just introduced. If you just want to check the service out you can register and claim your free 10 GHS miner, it is quick and completely free to do it and then decide if you should invest in more hashrate. We started like that, then bought some Generation 1 hashrate and now we are also going to be purchasing some AMhash cloud mining hashrate as well to see how it goes. As usual when considering to invest in cloud mining services do not put all of your investment in just one place and never spend more than you can afford to loose.

– For more information and to try out the Hashie Bitcoin cloud mining service with 10 GHS free…

How to Raise the Power Target Limit on GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980

9, Nov 2014

gtx-980-msi-afterburner-power-limit-max

Earlier this year we have published a tutorial on how to raise the Power Target limit on GTX 750 – the first Maxwell-based video card. Now it is time to provide an update on how you can raise the maximum power limit of the new Maxwell GPUs – GTX 970 and GTX 980. The thing you need to do and the tools required are pretty much the same, however you need to use more up to date version of nvflash that supports the new cards. Also as compared to GTX 750 where many of the cards do not have additional PCI-E power connectors with GTX 970 and GTX 980 you also need to raise the limits of the PCI-E lines as well in order to allow the card to take advantage of the full increase in TDP you can set. And if you wonder why you would need to raise the power target limit for standard pretty low TDP values set for most GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 cards – it is quite simple – more overclock resulting in more performance and higher hashrate. The standard TDP levels set in the video BIOS of the new Maxwell cards are pretty much fine for the default operating frequencies and the default boost frequency, but are not enough to realize the full overclock potential of GTX 970 and GTX 980. With a little increase in the TDP limits and proper cooling many of the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 based video cards are able to hit and keep a boost frequency for the GPU at about 1500 MHz or even more.

gtx-980-disable-driver-device-manager

Back with GTX 750 we used a tool called Kepler BIOS Tweaker and you can still use it for basic TDP limit modifications for the new cards, but now there is a new version of that tool with official Maxwell support. It is now called Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker and the latest version for the moment is 1.36. If you are already familiar with the Kepler BIOS Tweaker tool, then you should not have any problems using the new tool. You also need to use a new version of the nvflash tool for saving the original and flashing the modified video BIOS on the video card, we have included the required files in the package below. Alternatively you can also use the latest version 0.8.0 of the tool GPU-Z to save the video BIOS as previous versions had issues when trying to save the BIOS file of GTX 970 and GTX 980 video cards, unlike the version of nvlfash that we’ve had to use for DOS for the GTX 750 modification. Now you can use a modified windows version of nvflash for easier saving and flashing of the video BIOS without worrying about getting a certificate error, the only thing you need to do before saving or flashing the video BIOS from windows is to first disable the video card driver from Device Manger.

How to backup your current BIOS with nvflash:
nvflash -b backupbios.rom

How to flash the modified BIOS with nvflash:
nvflash -6 modifiedbios.rom

maxwell-ii-bios-tweaker-tdp

The easiest way to figure ut what values you need to modify to increase the TDP limit of your particular GPU is to use a tool such as MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X for example that gives you a slider to increase the Power Target limit. You need to note what is the maximum value in percent available for your BIOS and then look for the field with that Max value in the Power Table panel of the Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker tool. This will show you the total card TDP value, the one you need to increase, but not the only value you will most likely have to increase. In our case the 100% (standard) TDP limit of a GTX 980 GPU is set at 180W with a maximum user selectable value of 225W, however there is a bit of a catch here. The top three fields above the total TDP value are respectively for the PCI-E slot power (66W by default) and the first and second PCI-E power connectors on the card (75W each). You cannot modify just the total TDP value and not also increase the separate power lines maximum as if you do not the BIOS will still limit the power that the video card uses to the combined maximum of the PCI-E slot and the two additional PCI-E power connectors. So if we want to increase the total maximum TDP of the video card to 275W (+153%) as the maximum user selectable as in the example above, then we would also need to increase the first and the second PCI-E standard power limits by adding 25W more to each and this way we would be able to get to the desired maximum set for the card total TDP. We are not modifying the 100% value of the total TDP to 275W, but instead leave the default 180W TDP value there, so that we can increase the maximum (Max value) with Afterburner or Precision X if we need to, but if we don’t the card will still have the standard 180W TDP limit.

Do note that in order for the increase of the maximum TDP level to have some effect on performance you would also need to overclock the video card by increasing the GPU and video memory frequencies. As we have mentioned with a good cooling (even the stock one can do just fine with increased fan speeds) you should be able to reach a maximum boost frequency of 1500 MHz or even higher with most GTX 970 and GTX 980 cards. In fact you might be able to hit such high OC frequency even without increasing the TDP level, however if you start hitting the standard TDP level of the video card the boost frequency will drop down. In order to be able to high the maximum stable boost frequency of the video card and keep the card working at it you will have to increase the TDP level, so that the GPU will have enough headroom. Do note that not all crypto mining algorithms will utilize the maximum available TDP level, so for some of them increasing the TDP level may not be required at all.

– To download the tools required to modify he TDP limit of your GTX 970 or GTX 980 GPU…


top