Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Checking Out the Current ZeusHash Cloud Mining Profitability

3, Nov 2014

zeushash-current-profitability

Now that ZeusMiner has announced that they are cancelling the Volcano and GEN III chips and focusing on their cloud mining platform ZeusHash we decided to do a check on its profitability. Taking as a base 1 MHS Scrypt hashrate with a price of $15.99 USD with $0.059 USD per MHS maintenance fee and 1 GHS SHA-256 hashrate at a price of $0.889 USD and $0.003 USD per GHS daily maintenance fee. In the table above we calculated what is the current estimated earnings and what are the actual earnings from ZeusHash for the last 24 hours and then have subtracted the maintenance fees from the total earned amount. We have used the current LTC price of about $3.58 USD and BTC price of about $326 USD to estimate the actual earnings as the maintenance fees remain in USD. As you can see from the table above with the current low prices of LTC and BTC over 60% of your mined coins go towards the maintenance fees, making your actual profit a small part of what you have actually mined. When you do the math and calculate the ROI time with the current market conditions the end result is not pleasing – close to a year and a half if the difficulty does not increase and the prices remain the same.

Update: A few hours after we have published this article ZeusHash maintenance fee for Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate has been lowered from $0.003 USD per GHS down to $0.0023 USD, so we have reflected the updated price in the table above. With the new lower fees the percent you need to pay as fees for the Bitcoin rate is below 50%, making the investment in Bitcoin mining hashrate seem like the better choice of the two. Normally you’d expect that to be other way around considering that ZeusMiner is making LTC ASIC miners and their BTC mining hardware comes from partners.

– For more information about ZeusHash and their cloud mining prices and services…

New Lower Prices for the Hashlet Digital Miners

30, Oct 2014

gaw-miners-hashlet-prices

GAW Miners have recently announced some really interesting big plans about the evolution of their mining platform, but here we want to focus on something that is already available – their new prices of the various Hashlet Digital miners. The Hashlet Prime is no longer available for sale directly from GAW, however you can still get your hands on some Primes through the Hash Market at the ZenCloud service at $36.64 USD per MHS as the lowest price at the moment. Now, paying so much for 1 MHS worth of Scrypt mining hashrate does not seem very reasonable at the moment, however with the Haslet Primes you get some interesting options to engage you allow you to mine more than 1 MHS normal hashrate can generate for you per day. The other Scrypt mining Hashlets that pay out in BTC as well as the Hashlet Genesis that mines directly for Bitcoin have new prices and we are going to take a look at how much they cost and what profitability you can expect to get should you decide to invest in them.

hashlet-actual-daily-earnings

As you can see from the chart above with the current low BTC and LTC prices, the maintenance fees do take away quite a lot of the coins you should have mined resulting in a low actual profit. Using the latest data for the mined coins by the different Hashlets for the previous day we can see that the Hashlet Genesis and the Multi Hashlet seems to be the most profitable Hashlets at the moment. It seems the Waffle Hashlet actually caused a loss for the miner for the last day based on the performance results it shows. Of course the daily earning numbers do vary and the results can be different each day, and the Hash Market where users sell their Hashlets can also provide some interesting deals in terms of lower price than the official ones.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 OC vs GTX 980 Hashrate Results

24, Oct 2014

gigabyte-gtx-980-970-gpus

Last month we have done some initial GeForce GTX 980 crypto mining benchmarks with the announcement of the new Maxwell GPUs from Nvidia. Now we got our hands on a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming video card (GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD ) and have decided to run some tests to see how well it will fare against a standard reference design GTX 980 again from Gigabyte (GV-N980D5-4GD-B). The reference design GTX 980 we’ve used is running at stock frequencies, including the boost one and the results below are with the card not additionally overclocked, even though it can take quite an increase in the frequency. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming card however is factory overclocked to a really high frequencies as compared to the stock ones and there is not that much left for the user to add, though some extra overclocking is also possible. The G1 Gaming card from Gigabyte also comes with the company’s Windforce cooler that proved to be a very good and silent cooling solution even when you overclock. Also the GTX 970 model is with a factory increased max TDP level to go along with the overclock the 100% of the power limit actually represents 250W instead of 145W or 165W. This leaves a lot of headroom for more power hungry crypto mining algorithms, even though in our tests not a single algorithm was able to hit 100%. The closes we got was about 90% of the increased TDP reached with the groestl algorithm most others were keeping in the 60-70% of the 250W TDP limit.

gtx-980-970-ccminer-hashrate

The results you can see in the table above are achieved with the ccMiner release 1.4.5-tpruvot using Compute 5.2 compiled binaries. This might not be the single best performing fork of ccminer available, however it is probably the one with most comprehensive support for various crypto algorithms (we tested with all of the supported ones) and with support for Compute 5.2. Some other forks might be able to provide slightly better hashrate on a specific algorithm, but the idea here was to do a comparison between a reference GTX 980 and a factory overclocked GTX 970 to see what you can expect in terms of performance. The results are pretty interesting as the factory clocked G1 card is getting very close to a stock GTX 980 and with some extra user overclock it might even achieve the same results. Considering the fact that the GTX 970 is still much better priced than the GTX 980 we can easily conclude that the GTX 970 and especially GTX 970 G1 Gaming from Gigabyte is a really good choice not only for gaming, but also for mining crypto currencies.


top