It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
The Geforce GTX 750 Ti video cards based on the new Maxwell architecture from Nvidia have generated quite a lot of interest among the users mining crypto currencies thanks to their very good hashrate per watt of used power. And after we have tried a reference GTX 750 Ti board that does perform pretty well and overclocks decently to provide some extra hashrate we are now moving to trying out different non-reference design video cards based on the GTX 750 Ti. Out goal is to find the best choice for overclocking and gaining the maximum possible performance for use the GPU for mining crypto currencies. So we took a Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti (N75TOC-2GI) video card for a spin to see what we can get out of that board…
The default Scrypt mining performance with CUDAminer was about 273 KHS, or slightly more than what we got with the reference card at stock frequencies of about 265 KHS. The two advantages of the Gigabyte board were the presence of an external PCI-E power connector and the much better cooling solution compared to the stock cooler. However we have found out that the TDP limit of the Gigabyte was still set at 38.5W in the video BIOS, though with the Power Target limit removal method you can get much higher limit set and avoid the Power Target functionality limiting your performance.
Overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti card to +135 MHz for the GPU and +700 MHz for the video memory brought the Scrypt mining performance to about 303 KHS (the maximum stable clocks for mining), however we were hitting the TDP limit. So we have increased the TDP limit to 65.5W by modifying the video BIOS and flashing the modified version on the Gigabyte board and the result we got with the same overclocked frequencies was up to 322 KHS. Unfortunately the Gigabyte board did not allow for higher GPU frequencies that +135 MHz or to increase the GPU voltage higher than the default value. And while 322 KHS with a silent operation and 42 degrees C of the GPU is not a bad result at all, we are going to be checking out other different GTX 750 Ti boards to see if we are going to be able to get a bit more hashrate than that. So stay tuned for more updates on that…
It seems that cloud mining crypto currencies is booming lately and more and more new and interesting services giving you the opportunity to purchase Bitcoin mining hashrate in the cloud are appearing. We are going to be looking at one new such service that we just started testing a day ago – PB Mining, so we are going to be sharing our first impressions from the service and in the following days we’ll keep you updated with more details and interesting findings as we continue to use it. You should know that there are different types of services that offer you cloud mining hashrate, and you should approach them differently based on what exactly they are offering you. For example one of the most popular such service called CEX.IO has an exchange where users trade hashrate and the current market price is based on the users trading. The advantage of that method is that you can both mine and trade at the same time and maybe get some extra profit, the disadvantage is that the price per GHS is higher and the risk of price fluctuations is higher, making it not so attractive for long term investment. On the other hand, the new service offers a different approach – they are selling you long term contracts for 5 years of mining. So essentially you are going to be renting a BTC mining equipment for 5 years and all of the mined coins will be sent to your Bitcoin wallet every week for the duration of the mining contract. This is essentially a long term investment in Bitcoin cloud mining service and the good thing here is that the price per GHS is more than two times lower (0.0107 BTC per GHS) compared to what CEX is selling at the moment on their exchange (~0.0240 BTC per GHS).
You can quickly and easily register at PB Mining and purchasing some hashrate and starting to mine with it can take just few hours. For the moment this service is not that automated and feature rich as you might want it to be, but on the other hand it is very easy and simple to start using it. When you are registering you need to provide your Bitcoin wallet address that will be used to send your weekly earnings, make sure you type it right as you will not be able to change it afterwards (probably edit functionality will be added soon) along with other profile details in your account. As soon as you register you will need to deposit some Bitcoins that you will use to purchase cloud mining hashrate with, the price is 0.0107 BTC per GHS and you can purchase from 1 GHS up to 500 GHS at a time (0.0107 BTC – 5.35 BTC) at a single order, though you can make more orders after your first one. We started our testing with the purchase of 1 GHS hashrate and after we have sent the Bitcoin transfer to the provided address it took about 3 hours for our purchased Bitcoin mining hashrate to appear in our account, but it could take up to 12 hours according to the service provider.
After our hashrate has become active and our 1 GHS started mining BTC we have waited for 24 hours to see how much Bitcoins we are going to have mined for 1 day. Since our first 24 hours ended a bit after midnight this Sunday you can see that we even have our first weekly payment sent and received in our BTC wallet, so we can confirm that the service is really paying every week as well. The image above can give you an idea about how your profile details look, simple and easy, though a bit more functionality like editing the details you have entered upon registration would be nice. For example after some time you may need to change your wallet address, after all here you are paying for a 5 years contract. But since the service is still quite new, we expect to see some improvements happening soon, the important thing for now is that it seems to be running very well and problem free and we like that. We suppose that there are already about 1500 people that have registered for it and the currently available hashrate reported by the service statistics shows that there are currently about 24.314 THS available out of which there are 14.4 THS still available for sale.
We are sure that you are already asking is it worth to go for long term Bitcoin cloud mining investment and the answer is yes. And to the question if it is better to go for dedicated ASIC mining hardware for BTC or to purchase cloud hashrate the answer is a bit more tricky. If you are able to buy a Terahash size ASIC miner at the moment and get it immediately, then you should do so as it will be cheaper than renting for 5 years cloud mining hashrate. However if you are not able to pay and get the hardware immediately as is most likely the case with almost all people, then investing in cloud mining is a good alternative. With cloud mining services such as PB Mining you can purchase a lot of GHS and they will immediately start mining for you, even if you may have to pay something like 50% more than for a dedicated Bitcoin ASIC that you will however pre-order now and will have to wait for some time to get it.
Now we are going to do some calculations to see what you can expect to get in terms of mined BTC from the Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate that you can purchase at PB Mining. On the image above you can see an estimation of what earnings are expected for a day with the current BTC difficulty with 1 GHS mining hashrate – 0.0001607 BTC for 24 hours in ideal conditions. Our 1 GHS cloud mining hashrate has so far generated for us a total of 0.0001624 BTC, so we probably had a bit of more luck in finding blocks at the pool. And if we do a long term calculation for the possible break even in time for the purchased hasrate and we set a 20% increase of BTC difficulty on each retarget (a moderate value closer to the latest few diff increases) we have ended up with about 180 days or half an year. This means that the rest of our 4.5 years of the mining contract duration we are going to be earning Bitcoins after completely getting back in just 6 months what we have invested at the beginning. This does not sound bad at all, though the return of investment time could be a bit higher with higher difficulty increases every 12 or so days. This is pretty much the average ROI time that most of the good cloud mining services should be able to offer, making this an interesting service to try out and invest into some GHS that will be mining for you on the long run. So far we are pretty happy with the service and what we are seeing and already getting back in return, and we’ll keep you updated on how things progress as we continue using it.
– For more information and to try out the PB Mining Bitcoin cloud mining service…
Today we’ve decided to finally do a measurement to see how much power does a Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC use both at idle (not mining), at stock 180 GHS and at overclocked 200 GHS mode. We’ve been using Bitmain AntMiner S1 miner for a while now and have already shared our best settings for overclocking AntMiner S1 to 200 GHS as well as some very interesting thermal images that what gets hot and how hot actually gets on the AntMiner S1 board. We are going to be measuring the power consumption (at the power socket) with the help of a very good 80 Plus Gold certified Power Supply (Seasonic SS-400FL) that is able to deliver about 90% efficiency at maximum load. This means that the actual power usage of the ASIC miner is 10% less than what our measuring device shows and the other 10% of power are being lost during the conversion essentially in the form of heat dissipated by the PSU. What you are paying for is the actual power measured by the device we are using for the tests of the power consumption.
The idle power we have measured was 75W (67.5W + 7.5W). This is the power usage that you can expect from the device as soon as you power up the AntMiner S1, it takes some time to start up and to connect to the Internet in order to get work from the pool and the power usage during that time is about 75W. Also should your ASIC miner loose connection to the Internet or the pool it is configured to mine at gets down and there is no backup or the other pools are also not available the device will consume 75W of power doing essentially nothing.
What you will be more interested in though is the power usage of the Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC when it is working and mining for Bitcoions. At the default frequency of 375 MHz of the Bitmain chips used in this device and a hashrate of about 180 GHs you can expect a power consumption of about 407W (366.3W + 40.7W). And if you overclock the device to 393.75 MHz as per our guide here you are going to be getting 20 GHS more hashrate at the cost of a small increase in power usage. In 200 GHS overclocked operating mode Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC will use about 422W (379.8W + 42.2W). So if you haven’t overclocked your Antiner S1 yet, then you should and our overclocking guide will ensure you get low HW error rate, lower power consumption and stable 200 GHS of hashing performance.