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PiMP or Portable Instant Mining Platform is a dedicated Linux-based mining distribution intended for GPU and ASIC mining without the need to rely on Windows. PiMP is designed to be easy to deploy and use, it can be installed on a USB flash drive, so you do not necessarily have to use a hard drive on your GPU mining rig, though you can install it on SSD or HDD as well. The latest version of PiPM is designed for AMD GPUs only as well as Scrypt ASIC miners such as Gridseed and ZeusMiner, and you can also use other popular SHA-256 ASIC miners. In terms of GPU support you can mine not only Scrypt (Already pointless for GPU mining), but also Scrypt-Jane, Scrypt-N, Quark, X11, X13, X15, Keccak, Skein, Groestl, Qubit, HEFTY1, JHA and NIST5. As you can see not all of the latest and GPU algorithms are yet supported, but the most commonly used and supported ones are available in the distribution.
And while the latest version of PiMP is still only available for AMD-based GPU mining rigs, there is already work being done for the addition of a version of the Linux mining distribution intended for miners using Nvidia-based GPUs (you can try the already available KopiemTu for Nvidia). There is also work being done on an ASIC only version designed for PCs as well as for Raspberry Pi controllers to be used as mining controllers for ASIC miners. So we are looking forward to seeing these versions as well and meanwhile you can check out the AMD/ASIC version that is already available. Here we are more of a Windows miners, however we do like to try out new things as well and check out Linux-based mining distributions like PiMP as well as use RPi as a mining controllers as well and we like what we are seeing so far with PiMP.
– For more information and to try out the PiMP Linux mining distribution yourself…
Lately there is much talk about power efficiency of various mining algorithms and with the summer here people with GPU mining rigs are looking for algorithms that use less power and thus the video cards run cooler and quieter. We are starting a series of tests with GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPU first and then we are also going to move to other popular video cards for mining crypto currencies such as the Radeon R9 280X for example.
On the photo above you can see the power usage of the GTX 750 Ti video card in idle as well as the idle power usage of the whole system we are using for testing; below you can find the specifications of the hardware. Note that one of the power meters measures only the power usage of the video card (the power meter is attached to the power line going to the card directly and all power going to it passes through the meter, so it does not take into account the PSU power efficiency) and the other one is for the whole system measured at the wall (the actual full power consumption) taking into account the efficiency of the power supply (extra power wasted as heat during the conversion).
The systems we are using for the tests include:
– Palit GeForce GTX 750 Ti StormX OC 2GB video card
– Intel i3-4130 dual-core CPU at 3.4 GHz
– Asus H81M-A Motherboard
– 2x 4GB A-DATA DDR3 1600 MHz Memory
– 1TB Seagate 7200 RPM Hard drive
– 500W Cooler Master Power Supply
We have used ccMiner for our tests, the latest fork with Fresh algorithm support and we have measured the power usage of the GPU only as well as of the whole system with all of the supported algorithms by that particular version of ccMiner. Do note that if mining for Scrypt for example you will be getting higher power usage, but this is already pretty pointless to be done with GPUs with so many Scrypt ASIC miners already deployed. The results we’ve seen on the GTX 750 Ti are pretty interesting; it seems that the most power efficient algorithms are Fugue256 and HEFTY1 with the new Fresh algorithm following close by with the same power usage as Qubit. The worst performing crypto algorithms on GTX 750 Ti are the Groestl-based ones and the X-ones are pretty much in the middle. Do note however that these are the results measured on GTX 750 Ti, the situation with AMD with the same algorithms may differ significantly and we do plan to run some tests to check the situation there as well, so stay tuned for more very soon, probably tomorrow.
Since there were some questions and people doubting our measurements, we have repeated the tests with another power meter connected to measure the power going only to the video card and the results are pretty much the same as with the previous meter in terms of power usage as you can see on the photo above. Do note that the Palit GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card that we have used for testing does not have an external PCI-E power connector available, so all of the power going to the video card is from the PCI-E slot. So in order to measure the exact power used by the video card we have used a powered PCI Express x1-x16 USB 3.0 Extender. This extender does not use USB 3.0 interface, just a USB 3.0 data cable for the transmission of data between the PCI-E slot on the motherboard and the video card (no power is transmitted over that cable). Instead the power provided to the video card all goes through the 4-pin Molex power connector on the extender’s board. Also do note that the power measured is coming directly from the power supply, so this measurement for the power usage of the GPU does not take into account the power efficiency of the power supply (loses of power during the conversion from 110V/220V to 12V) and depending on the power supply there will be about 10-20% of extra power lost as heat during the conversion. This power is measured by the second power meter that does measure the full system’s power consumption at the power socket however.
Mining Rig Rentals Adding Support for New Algorithms
28, Jun 2014
The service offering users to sell their hashrate or rent mining rigs MiningRigRentals has added support for some new algorithms such as the new X15, as well as for Groestl, Nist5 and Keccak. Of course the service offers the quite popular at the moment X11 and X13 mining rigs as well as Scrypt, Scrypt-N and Sha-256, Blake-256 though these can also be found on other alternative services. If you are mining for coins or are willing to sell your hashrate in the service make sure that you are using the latest miners that offer the highest possible performance that were released in the last few days. Currently there are still not many rigs available for renting for the new algorithms, but since the interest in these is increasing we are probably soon going to see more rigs available for rent.
– For more information about the Mining Rig Rentals service for renting crypto mining rigs…