Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Checking How Profitable is Scryptcc Cloud Mining Actually

20, Feb 2014

scryptcc-income-calculator

The scryptcc cloud mining service is pretty much the first more serious Scrypt cloud mining service appearing on the market and it has already drawn some attention to it. While the service is still in beta, some things are left unknown for the users and there are some bugs to fix and the people behind the service are not acting very fast on these unfortunately, things look promising and the mining process seems to run stable and be reliable enough for investing in some KHS to give it a try. But the big question here is how profitable actually is to rent KHS there? According to the scryptcc Income Calculator you can expect to break even in something between 90 and 180 days and the time varies often when you check the results from the calculator. The problem with the Income Calculator is that it uses static values assuming that everything remains as it is at the current moment – KHS price, crypto profitability etc. and that may not be true over a long period of time such as half a year for example. Still you can get some sort of a general idea on what to expect.

litecoin-difficulty-mining-calculation

We decided to do some calculations on our own however. According to the calculator our total investment for buying 234 KHS at the moment is going to be 0.33799896 BTC ($212.94 USD), so this is the amount fo coins we need to mine with the rented hashrate. The daily income we can expect from the 234 KHS is 0.00173981 BTC, and if we are going to be mining with 234 KHS directly litecoin we are going to earn 0.07341 LTC per day with the current Litecoin difficulty. If we convert the 0.07341 LTC to BTC at the moment we get 0.00184793 BTC, so if they are mining directly LTC they will be loosing money (they probably mine DOGE or similar more profitable than LTC alternative crypto). So by using the scryptcc cloud mining service you will be better of than having a mining rig at home mining directly LTC, because you will not have to buy the hardware, set it up, pay electricity bills and deal with the heat. It might not be as profitable as mining DOGE or another more profitable than LTC crypto, because they do subtract some percent from what you are earning as a maintenance fee, but you don’t have to do anything yourself either. So things are looking pretty good so far…

Testing GeForce GTX 750 Ti Maxwell for Alt Crypto Mining with CUDAminer

19, Feb 2014

nvidia-geforce-750-ti-reference-board

We have already ran some tests of the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPU based on the new Nvidia Maxwell architecture for mining scrypt-based crypto currencies such as LTC and DOGE with the help of CUDAminer (up to 265 KHS). The results it is giving, along with the low power usage of the card are making it an interesting option for people that are interested in mining crypto currencies with Nvidia GPUs. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti also shows good overclocking potential for even higher performance (up to about 300 KH/s) on a reference design board. After looking at some non-reference design boards such as ASUS GTX750TI-OC-2GD5 that has additional PCI-E power connector and much better cooling we considered that even higher performance could be achieved, however after checking some reviews of these cards it seems that the Power Target maximum on these cards is still 100%. This simply means that even though the card is clearly designed to handle serious overclocking, the power limiter will not allow you to go beyond the TDP rating of 60W, so as a result it seems that these cards are not overclocking much better than the standard reference boards.

yacoin-crypto-mining-maxell-cudaminer

We have also tested the performance that the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti Maxwell cards can offer in some other crypto currencies supported by CUDAminer that do not use Scrypt algorithm, but instead rely on different approaches – SHA-3 (Keccak), Scrypt-jane, Adaptive N factor Scrypt. The performance we got with them was also quite good, though overclocking the card did not help as much these as with Scrypt. Below you can find out what our results were with the different crypto coins we have tried that use the above mentioned alternative algorithms. Note that we are still trying out different configurations in order to get the maximum performance out of the GTX 750 Ti for these alternative crypto currencies, so any suggestions for settings to try with are welcome. As suggested we overclocked only the GPU for the latest results to the maximum of +135 MHz, without clocking the video memory as apparently for these algorithms it does not make sense (downclocking it down with -502 MHz does not seem to affect performance significantly). We are going to update the results if/when we get a better performance with the settings we find to work best for the specific algorithm and crypto coin combination. You are also welcome to request us to test with other coins that are supported by the CUDAminer software.


YACoin Scrypt-jane mining performance with:

cudaminer.exe -a scrypt-jane -o stratum+tcp://yac.coinmine.pl:9088 -u yourworker.1 -p password -L 4

Mining YACoin that uses Scrypt-jane has proven a bit tricky with CUDAminer as apparently it did not want to work properly with our custom settings for the kernel settings we used for Scrypt, the only way to make it work was to use the autotune functionality of the miner, otherwise we were getting errors. This means that we could not try our best performing kernel configuration T5x24 on Scrypt-jane here. After trying some suggestions for CUDAminer and YACoin and adding lookup gap with -L 4 (the best performing lookup gap setting for GTX 750 Ti) we got around 1.7 KHS out of the card. Overclocking the GTX 750 Ti to +150 MHz GPU gets us up to about 1.78 KHS of hashrate for mining YACoin (T74x1 automatically selected, so far has the best performance, as setting manually kernel does not appear to work properly).


VTC Adaptive N factor Scrypt mining performance with:

cudaminer.exe -a scrypt:2048 -o stratum+tcp://stratum.vertco.in:8080 -u yourworker.1 -p password -i 0 -l T5x24 -C 1 -H 2

For VTC mining that uses Adaptive N factor Scrypt algorithm with the T5x24 configuration and manual settings got us about 125-129 KHS hashrate with the GTX 750 Ti running at stock frequencies. After overclocking the Maxwell to +135 MHz GPU the performance increase has boosted our hashrate to about 135-137 KHS.


MaxCoin Keccak mining performance with:

cudaminer.exe -a keccak -o stratum+tcp://maxpool.1gh.com:17333 -u mGeS2LBCTJvz1Mb4Hfzt5fU1C9C1tYrxuY -p password -i 0 -l K1000x24 -C 1 -H 0

For MaxCoin mining that uses Keccak (SHA-3) algorithm we could also use the K1000x24 kernel configuration and manual settings and that got us about 62000 KHS hashrate with the GTX 750 Ti running at default clocks. Overclocking the GTX 750 Ti to +135 MHz GPU has increased a bit the hashrate to about 72600 KHS.

Meanwhile the author of CUDAminer has released an updated version of the miner software, though it is not yet specially optimized for the new Maxwell architecture you might want to update to it as it has some fixes and improvements. Furthermore there is a mention about upcoming BlakeCoin (BLC) support, so it will be interesting to see what kind of performance the GTX 750 Ti will be able to offer for BLC mining (Blake-256 algorithm) where the typical hashrate is about 3x the one you get when Scrypt mining.

Additional Information for the Scryptcc Scrypt Cloud Mining Service

18, Feb 2014

scryptcc-scrypt-cloud-mining-service

Times quickly goes by and we have already used the scryptcc cloud mining service for a few days and can share more about our experience with it. So far we are left with somewhat mixed feelings, on one hand the service itself works find and stable, every 10 minute session you are getting your earnings from the purchased cloud hashrate available in your Balance from the purchased hashrate. On the other hand there are some annoying bugs that are not being fixed and the support knows about them as we’ve reported them a few days ago, as probably other users of the service also did the same. The Break In Time continues to vary quite a lot, changing based on the current profitability of the crypto coins being mined by the service. In general it is normally hovering about 180 days, but we’ve seen going down to 90 days and going up to 230 days at times.

scryptcc-things-needing-fixes

One of the most annoying bugs that the the guys behind the scryptcc service haven’t resolved yet is related to trading when you want to trade all of of the available BTC for KHS, the rounding apparently sometimes gives wrong result and you need to manually edit the value for the trade to be executed. We’ve noticed and reported that issue soon after we started using the service, but it hasn’t yet been resolved. On the trade page the trading chart is also not working properly and the last date on it is 17th January, another bug that the support is aware of and hasn’t been fixed yet. There are other small issues we’ve stumbled with as well that we have reported and that haven’t still be resolved. The excuse we get is that they are still in Beta and will fix it when they can – not very professional response and approach, and though these are no serious issues they can get annoying and can drive you away from the service, especially if another better similar service appears as there is currently no viable alternative available for scrypt could mining.

So far scryptcc has sold about 152000 KHS (152 MHS) worth of Scrypt hashrate to users from their available mining hardware and have available on the market about 48000 KHS (48 MHS) left on the trade market. This is their second batch of 100 MHS hashrate. We are mining hardware getting released for sale by the service providers at a price of 0.00144444 BTC per KHS, and we expect that after the available hashrate gets traded the price may start to get up, unless there is a third batch of 100 MHS. So far the trading is not that active as in order to sell some hashrate you need to set a price lower than 0.00144444 BTC per KHS, but this should change as soon as the big sale order gets completely traded. The idea to buy now and not go for the long expecting ROI, but instead mining some coins then selling at a higher price your KHS after a week or two is also an interesting option to consider.

scryptcc-my-cloud-hasring-rate

So far we’ve been reinvesting into KHS all that we have earned from mining and our cloud mining hashrate is currently 237 KHS, up from the 232 KHS that we’ve purchased initially a few days ago. What we don’t like is that so far you can only fund your Balance with BTC and your earnings form the purchased Scrypt mining cloud hashrte are also being payed to you in BTC. It would’ve been nice to have the option to use LTC as well, saving you the trouble to go through an exchange. Another thing that we do not like much for the moment is that there is no statistics or information about the crypto currency that is currently being mined. Some sort of a news and updates section would also be nice, there is a forum, but there is not much activity there yet not only by users, but by the team behind the service as well. There is chat functionality built into the website, but there are not timestamps for the messages, so you have no clear idea how old they may be when you open it up. We know the service is still new and in Beta, but we as users of the service want to see that things are actually happening and improving as we continue using it, and so far we are not seeing that happening yet. Maybe the team is busy with the backend or the hardware, however this does not mean that they should not put effort into improving the frontend of the service and the user experience in general. Still we are positive that things will move in the right direction, even though they appear to be a bit unprofessional at the moment, so we’ll give a bit more time before drawing conclusions.

– For more information and to try out the scryptcc cloud mining service yourself…


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