GMiner CUDA Equihash Miner v1.19 With GRIN (Cuckaroo29) Support

17 Jan
2019

GMiner has just added support for the new Cuckaroo29 algorithm being used by Grin with the latest update to version 1.19. This marks the first non-Equihash algorithm getting support in the miner and maybe it will also open the doors for other algorithms to get implemented in the future. Performance wise it may not be the fastest Grin miner out there, but it does seem to work quite well based on our short experience with the new version for now, so you might want to give it a try. Due t the higher video memory requirements of the Cuckaroo29 algorithm you will need to have an Nvidia GPU with 8GB VRAM (about 7GB are currently required) as well as enough virtual memory available. Also it seems that the Grin mining implementation does require a faster CPU for optimal performance, on slower processors you might experience some slowdowns in which case you might want to go for a other miner.

Apart from Cuckaroo29 GMiner also supports Equihash 96,5, Equihash 144,5, Equihash 150,5, Equihash 192,7 and Equihash 210,9. The miner requires an Nvidia GPU with CUDA compute capability 5.0 or later as well as CUDA 9.0 driver support. Do note that GMiner is a closed source miner for Nvidia GPUs with binaries available for both Windows and Linux, also there is a 2% developer fee built-in the software.

– To download and try the latest release of the Gminer v1.19 CUDA Equihash miner…

Grin Mainnet Launching Today, Are You Ready for Mining

15 Jan
2019

Grin is a new crypto project for creating a the private and lightweight mimblewimble blockchain that would provide electronic transactions for everyone without censorship or restrictions. The algorithm that Grin uses is Cuckoo Cycle with 1 minute block time, 60 GRIN block reward and no limit on coin supply or reward halving. There is not going to be any ICO, founders reward, pre-mine or masternodes available for this project, so people that do not like any of these should be Ok with this project. Miners for Grin are still currently being developed, although there are some already announced or available, though initially it could be a bit of a challenge to make things work with the right miner and pool. For instance the official MWGrinPool is currently not taking new registrations, though new pools should be available as alternatives. There are already a couple of options for pools on the Testnet where you can test the mining before the Mainnet launch like Spark Pool. Some good places to trade GRIN include CoinEgg, Gateio, HitBTC and Bittrex.

The official open-source Grin Miner software is currently only available for Linux and Mac OS X and it supports both CUDA and OpenCL mining. For miners looking for Windows miners there is the Grin Gold Miner (with 1% fee for the Grin Development Fund and 1% fee for further miner development), although it also works with Linux) that supports all AMD and NVIDIA 8GB cards (requires a GPU with 8GB VRAM!). Do note however that Nvdia RTX 8GB cards need Linux or Windows 7 due to memory addressing issues. RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are fastest in terms of performance if you manage to make them work, OpenCL code for AMD cards is currently still being optimized. Cheaper slower Celeron CPUs are not recommended for many cards on the system (similar to Merit and BITC that also use the same algorithm for mining). Another alternative for Windows miners should be the GrinPro Miner that is not yet available for download and that will have 2% developer fee. This miner should work on AMD and Nvidia GPUs with 8GB VRAM, although it promises upcoming support for 6GB VRAM cards as well, so that could be interesting for some users.

Unfortunately zjazz, who was pretty active in miner development for Cuckoo Cycle support for Merit and BITC hasn’t updated his miner for a while and will probably not be supporting Grin mining at least for the moment. The latest version of Bminer that was just made available however also comes with experimental support for mining Grin, so you might want to check it out as well. Do note that it is a closed source miner with 2% developer fee, so have that in mind as well when checking out different miners for Grin. The latest version of the closed source miner NBMiner has also just added support for the Cuckaroo algorithm used by Grin (both Windows and Linux), so you can give it a try as well (Nvidia only).

What Are The Currently Available ProgPoW AMD and Nvidia GPU Miners

11 Jan
2019

ProgPoW or Programmatic Proof-of-Work can be seen as the successor of the Ethash algorithm with enhanced ASIC resistance and while it has been available for a while there hasn’t been that much going around the new algorithm up until recently. The fact that Ethereum (ETH) is considering the switch from Ethash to ProgPoW in the near future has sparkled interest in the algorithm and we may soon start seeing more coins and miners talking about the use of that particular algo. Some of you might remember that Bitcoin Interest (BCI) was the first crypto coin to switch to the ProgPoW a couple of months ago. And while BCI hasn’t been doing that well actually, before or even after the fork to ProgPoW, it is still interesting to note that it was the first to use it and it also provided pre-compiled binaries of the initial miner for ProgPow.

Meanwhile there hasn’t been that much alternative miners up until recently that had support for ProgPow, probably due to the fact that further significant optimizations in terms of performance might not be possible for the available mining hardware. One of the more recent and not very popular yet miners available with ProgPoW support is TT-Miner, a closed source miner with 1% developer fee available only for Windows and working only on more recent Nvidia GPUs. TT-Miner (TradeTec Miner) also supports Ethash, UBQhash and MTP aside from ProgPoW and in our limited experience it has performed pretty good on a variety of Nvidia GPUs.

Another really fresh ProgPow miner that was just made available and that apparently needs more work is Progminer. It is forked from Ethminer and the source is available along with compiled binaries for Windows and Linux, do note that there are separate pre-compiled binaries available for AMD and for Nvidia GPUs, so make sure you download the correct one. This is probably the best miner to go for at the moment for ProgPoW specs wise, unless you have some trouble making it work on your particular hardware as we have encountered some issues already… Feel free to report your issues (if you have) and what performance running any of these ProgPoW miners in the comments below.

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