BEAM (Equihash 150,5) Support is Now Available on NiceHash

31 Jan
2019

NiceHash hasn’t added new algorithms for a while now with ZHash being the last new addition in early December last year, so it is interesting that they have added support for BEAM now. This is both good and bad news for some people as the profit for selling your BEAM (Equihash 150,5) hashrate on NiceHash might bring you nice direct profit in BTC, but for the people mining BEAM directly is is not such good news as the hashrate has increased significantly and thus the difficulty is higher as well and less coins are being mined. Pool owners with BEAM support might be interested in checking out the BEAM NiceHash support specs in order to make sure that their pools will be compatible with hashrate coming from the service.

We have already tried some of the popular mining software with NiceHash and it seems that there are no problems connecting and using Bminer and Gminer on Nvidia GPUs does seem to work without problems (remove the SSL option from both miners), however the latest lolMiner for AMD does not seem to support NiceHash mining at the moment in its latest version. The algorithm that BEAM uses is Equihash 150/5, so other miners supporting that algorithm should in theory be compatible with NiceHash as well, though there is no guarantee for that.

New Braiins OS Cobalt Release With Manual Fan Control Available

30 Jan
2019

The Braiins OS is an alternative opensource OS for Bitcoin ASIC miners and more specifically for Antminer S9 and DragonMint T1 with support for AsicBoost. The initial release was not that easy to install and use, but looked very promising, but in December last year the second major version named Braiins OS Cobalt was made available and it made things much easier for everyone to switch from the factory firmware. The initial Cobalt release however was missing a crucial feature as we have noted and that was manual fan control as by default the automatic control was keeping high operating temperatures and fans spinning at lower RPM. This has been fixed in the new second release along with some more useful features and improvements worth upgrading to the new release or switching from the stock firmware. If you want to read the full list of what is new in the latest Braiins OS Cobalt release.

In the latest version you have the option to use either Automatic Fan Control or set Fixed Fan Speed. In automatic mode you can set the desired temperature and the fan controller will try to keep as close as possible to that temperature by varying the fan speed. The fixed speed mode is set in percentage and the fans will operate at the set value regardless of the temperature, so you need to be careful with this mode, though setting at 100% target fan speed should be pretty safe. Do note that the operating temperature depends not only on the cooling fans of the miner, but also on the ambient air temperatures and other factors.

Another new interesting feature is the new frequency scaling mode that is essentially an overclocking multiplier allowing you to set an overclock by a constant factor for all of the miner chains at once over the overclock settings you may have individually set already. Overclocking is easier in the new release as you are able to lower the temperatures by manually controlling the fan speeds now thus getting more headroom for overclocking. When overclocking also make sure that not only the cooling can handle things, but also the power supply you are using is sufficient enough as well, especially if you start increasing the operating voltages as well and not only the frequencies.

– For more details about the new Braiins OS Cobalt release for S9 and T1 ASIC miners…

JCE Cryptonote CPU+GPU Miner for AMD-based GPU Mining Rigs

29 Jan
2019

When we are talking about Cryptonote (Cryptonight) miners for AMD GPUs our preferred miner is SRBMiner due to the large range of supported variations and features, however there is a good competitor available and that one is called JCE Cryptonote CPU+GPU miner. The JCE miner is a closed source software available as a binary for Windows only (for the GPU) and with 0.9% developer fee for the GPUs (the separate CPU miner is with higher fees, Linux version is available for this one). In terms of performance the JCE miner is pretty much on par with the fastest alternatives like SRB, sometimes it might be a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower, depending on the algorithm and settings. For instance our latest experience shows a bit better performance for Tube mining using JCE compared to the latest SRB 1.7.7 on RX 580. The JCE miner does support a lot of the Cryptonothe (Cryptonight) variations out there, so you can use it to mine pretty much all popular variants. There is support for SSL as well as for NiceHash extranonce functionality

– For more info and to download and try the latest JCE Cryptonote CPU+GPU Miner…

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