Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

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.

First Impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner

15, Nov 2022

We got a hold of a nice little golden iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner and decided to play around with it to see why so many people like these small home-oriented high-hashrate and low-power ASIC miners with support for the Ethash and ETChash algorithms. You might be able to score a good deal on used iPollo V1 Mini now that these devices are not that profitable like they were during the time when you could mine Ethereum (ETH) with them and they can still come in handy in the next bull run or meanwhile if you mine some Ethash or ETChash coins meanwhile. The nicest thing is that they are very compact, not that noisy in general and very power efficient compared to what a GPU mining rig would use to give you the same hashpower. And they do come with WiFi adapter built-in, so once you set them up they are easy to move around the house or apartment as you would only need to plug them in a power socket in order for them to start hashing, no need to use network cables, although you can still if you want to.

Now, let us start with a little clarification as iPollo does offer two sets of V1 ASIC miners, one is described as ETC Miners and have the word Classic in their product names. These are iPollo V1 Mini Classic (130 MH/s at 104W) and iPollo V1 Mini Classic Plus (280 MH/s at 270W) with both devices having a design memory of 3.75 GB out of which the available memory for use is 3.6 GB. This means that these devices can mine Ethash or ETChash coins that have up to a 3.6 GB DAG size. There is also the iPollo V1 Classic (1550 MH/s at 1240W) with the same memory limitation available, but that one is big and noisy and not very suitable for home mining anyway.

The other ETH Miner category is similar in terms of hashrate and power usage or more efficient, but these devices do come with more memory available. The design memory is 6.0 GB of which the available memory for DAGs is 5.8 GB, meaning that you can mine even Ethereum (ETH) forks such as ETHF or ETHW that have DAG size of over 5GB already. Ethereum of course is no longer available for mining since it has switched from PoW to PoS. But if you get the iPollo V1 Mini (300 MH/s at 240W), the model we are looking at and testing here, or the more efficient iPollo V1 Mini SE Plus (400 MH/s at 232W) or the smaller iPollo V1 Mini SE (200 MH/s at 116W) you should be safer on the longer term on what you would be able to mine many more Ethash or Etchash coins passing the 4GB DAG size in the near future. There is also the iPollo V1 (3600 MH/s at 3100W), but just like the similar Classic counterpart this one is big, noisy and quite expensive for the regular home miners anyway.

As you probably already guessed, after checking that the device works fine, we opened it up. The iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner is quite compact and comes with an external 12V power supply with a maximum rating of 360W (2 lines rated at 180W each) with two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors coming out of this passive Huntkey PSU. You need to plug in the two 12V power lines into the miner that has a power usage of 240W and that should be fine for the wires and the miner. The 6-pin PCI-E power connectors are normally rated at 75W, but good quality ones are able to handle 100W or more usually. There could be problems however if you try to use a 6-pin PCI-E power connector for a 150W or more as it usually starts to overheat and burns up due to being significantly overloaded.

The power supply is quite good, although it gets hot when mining it is very efficient and provides stable power to the miner. The power usage we have measured with the stock power supply is around 50W for the miner while getting ready to mine and around 244W at the wall when mining begins. Connecting a 1000W Platinum rated Corsair power supply resulted in 249W of power usage while mining (4-5W more due to the extra 5V line power consumption the Corsair has).

Due to the compact size of the miner the manufacturer Nano Labs has decided that they could use two small 60mm size fans with high-rpm to provide the cooling for the miner. And while these fans do their job very well, at maximum RPM they are quite noisy (around 7000 rpm), though with the fan control and normal operation they go down to a sub 5000 rpm and the noise is much more acceptable. With the maximum speed of the two cooling fans you are going to be getting around 64 dBA noise level while with them running normally with the miner operating at around 50 degrees Celsius and the fans at around 4800 rpm the noise level measured is around 52 dBA and that is much more acceptable, though still not very silent. The two fans used are from a Chinese manufacturer called Ebonda and are rated at 0.8A at 12V. We are of course going to try and optimize the cooling and see if this miner can be made more silent, but that will follow in another post.

The cooler of the miner is a large aluminium copper block that seems like a server type heatsink, but does not seem to be a standard sized one… the mounting hole distance, the protruding copper block and not centred placement of the screws make it seem like a custom design. Would’ve been nice if you could just mount a good tower-based CPU cooler to make cooling easier and less noisy, but that would not be an easy task – certainly not as easy as juts replacing the heatsink and fans. The miner itself consists of two boards with a pin header connection between them. The bottom one is the control and power board and the top one is the hashing board with a single large ASIC chip. BTW after disassembling the miner with replaced thermal compound using Arctic MX4 thermal grease we’ve seen about 1 degree Celsius drop in the operating temperature of the miner.

The Nano Labs V66H ASIC single chip is apparently capable of 300 MH/s Ethash/ETChash hashrate with a power usage of around 200-ish Watts of power usage, no exact specs of the chips. These are easy to scale with big hashrate miners if you just increase the chip count. Though apparently efficiency could be further improved judging by the specs of the Mini SE and Mini SE Plus miners that provide even better power efficiency. Nano Labs’s iPollo Ethash/ETChash ASIC chips might not be the most power efficient in the bunch, but they do seem to perform quite competitively and the 6GB of memory is a plus as well. Not to mention that these miners do come with support for dual-mining with ZIL, so a little extra profit added by that as well, a profit that may allow the devices to successfully compete with higher hashrate products with lower power usage such as Jasminer X4.

The iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner comes with a simple and easy to use web-based interface for monitoring and control of the device, there is also the iPolloTool software for Windows that allows for easier setting up and monitoring of multiple miners at once. The average reported hashrate we are seeing for the iPollo V1 Mini is around 300 MH/s with an operating temperature at around 50 degrees and fans at around 4800 rpm. At 244 Watts of power used and with 52 dBA noise. So, the claimed specifications are pretty much what you should expect to get in real usage.

The miner supports both ETChash and Ethash mining and dual-mining with ZIL as well. There is however a catch with the dual mining support, the latest dual-mining firmware is not yet available on the official firmware upgrade package yet, but you can download firmware version 0.76.96 from RabidMining. There does not seem to be support for Nicehash mining on the iPollo out of the box, although NiceHash just posted how to enable support for mining with iPollo. The 6GB memory onboard allows for a decent future-proof capability of the device (be careful with the 4GB models!). It takes about 4 minutes for the miner to get ready to mine ETC once you boot it up, so quite quick on that front compared to Jasminer X4 where you will need to wait about 20 minutes.

There is a user fan control option available with both manual and automatic modes available for the user to configure. And there is also a Wireless network setup in the web-interface that you need to use to connect your device to a WiFi network. The first time you run it needs to be connected with a network cable so that you can setup the Wifi, after that it will just connect to the wireless network you set it up to use automatically. There is unfortunately no control for operating frequency or voltage available, so no user options available for trying to optimize the device for better power efficiency or faster hashrate for example. The available logs in the web interface are not very usable as although there are three different logs available for you to monitor through the web interface neither one of them is the cgminer output for the actual mining process (the device uses a modified cgminer as mining software).

So, all in all, the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner is a nice compact home miner for anyone interested, it works well, pretty versatile and performs as expected… there is of course more functionality to be desired, so room for further improvement. If you are looking to get one of these look for some sub $1000 USD deals.

– For more about the iPollo V1 Series of Ethash/ETChash ASIC miners…

Trying to Further Optimize the Jasminer X4 1U ASIC Miner

5, Nov 2022

We’ve been playing around with a Jasminer X4 1U Ethash and ETChash ASIC miner for a couple of days now and we have some more things to share with you if you are interested in the device. We’ve already covered some interesting findings and possible tweaks for the Jasminer X4 1U ASIC miner here, but we continued further trying to optimize the miner and see if we can squeeze a bit of extra performance from it. Our next obvious step was to disassemble the hashing board with the ASIC chips…

Removing the aluminium cooling heatsink, a single piece for the whole board, revealed the eight Jasminer X4 ASIC chips on the hashing board along with a controller chip and two memory modules. And a ton of thermal grease that needs to be cleaned and replaced before assembling the whole thing back again. Only the controller chip is not covered with thermal grease, instead it uses a thicker thermal pad for contact with the heatsink. All of the chips did have a good contact with the heatsink, so supposedly no expected issues with thermal transfer and cooling here. So, our hopes of getting a bit of thermal improvement by replacing the thermal compound with a better one would probably end in vain, but since we still have to replace the thermal interfacing material we’ll do it.

Cleaning up the whole thing properly does require some time and effort as due to the size of the crystals on the Jasminer X4 ASIC chips it is like cleaning 8 CPUs of computers. And you need to make sure you are careful not damaging anything, though the cleaned-up board and chips do like quite good. We are reusing the original thermal pad for the controller chip as we do not believe it is necessary to replace that one with a more efficient one anyway.

The main controller chip on the hashing board is a Trion T120 FPGA along with two DDR3 memory modules right next to it (no, that is not how 5GB of memory looks like!). This is the controller chip for the Jasminer X4 ASIC chips that is being used on the hashing boards, the miner does have a second FPGA controller chip with separate RAM chips on the main control board that hosts the software and web interface of the miner, there however we find a Xilinx Zynq chip.

Here is a single of the eight Jasminer X4 ASIC chips in a 45×45 mm package (678 square millimetres die size) with 1TB memory bandwidth, 5GB of memory and a hashrate per chip of 65 MH/s with each of the chips having 384 computing cores and 384 on-chip dies according to the manufacturer with a 512-bit bus width, an operating frequency of 800 to 1 GHz and a power consumption of 23 Watts.

We’ve used the Arctic Cooling MX4 thermal compound to cover the chips before reassembling the hashing board with the aluminium heatsink. It is a decently priced high-performance product that we like to use along with Noctua’s NT-H1 due to their great price/performance ratio, and there does not seem to be much point to try and use more expensive solution anyway. When applying other thermal compound make sure to put a little more on the memory chips as there the gap with the heatsink is a bit more compared to the one of the ASIC chips.

We’ve compared the hashrate and operating temperature of the Jasminer X4 1U ASIC miner before changing the thermal compound and after doing so, leaving the device to hash for more than 10 hours in order to get a good average of the operating temp and hashrate. Do note that this is our already silent modified unit with replaced fans and firmware, so your device might report a temperature range and not a single number. The before and after results are very similar, pretty much the same average hashrate and just 1 degree Celsius difference, so there is really no need to play around with the thermal grease as it will not give you much of an improvement. We also did a power usage measurement before and after at the wall, the results there were not much different as well – 266.1 W before and 265.7 W after the thermal grease replacement.

The next thing we wanted to try out here was to use a different power supply than the one the Jasminer X4 1U comes equipped with. There are three obvious reasons to replace the PSU – to see if the 300W of the stock one might be a limiting factor, to use a silent power supply and to possibly get a lower power consumption. We’ve connected a 1000W Corsair HX1000i power supply (Platinum efficiency rating) to the ASIC miner in place of the stock PSU and unfortunately the results were not really that encouraging. You get a silent power supply as the HX1000i runs passively at sub 300W of power usage, but the power consumption measured at the wall was 263.7 W or just 2 Watts less compared to the stock PSU.

The other thing we wanted to check with the more powerful power supply was if the Jasminer X4 1U would be able to run at 250 MHz operating frequency with the new thermal interface material in place and more than enough power. Unfortunately, our miner continued to dislike the 250 MHz operating frequency returning a lot of errors trying to hash and thus effectively operating at a fraction of the actual performance you get at 225 MHz where everything runs stable and without errors. So, the fact that at 250 MHz the mining device uses almost 300 Watts of power measured at the wall does not mean that the stock PSU is not able to handle that. And we do not think that the cooling of the ASIC chips is also an issue here for them not be able to run properly at 250 MHz.

Jasminer X4 does come with a very good thermal grease already applied, so no need to replace it. The stock 300W PSU is also really good in terms of efficiency and is not limiting you running the miner at higher clocks. The only thing is that the stock power supply is quite noisy and you might want to modify or replace it if you are making your miner into a silent one like we did with ours. It seems that Sunlune already did very well with the hardware side of their Jasminer X4 ASIC miners, both in terms of efficiency and performance. What they could work a bit more on however is the software side as their devices do not currently support dual-mining ETH/ETC-based coins along with ZIL, something that could easily bring the miners an extra 30-40% profit. The lack of this feature means that a competitor with dual-mining support already available can easily provide the same profitability with a cheaper device that has lower hashrate and/or is not as power efficient as the Jasminer X4.


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