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Here is something quite interesting for the people that mine either Ethereum (ETH) or Decred (DCR) or even both, a miner that mines the two different crypto currencies at the same time to give you better profit from your existing hardware. Claymore’s new Dual Ethereum plus Decred AMD GPU beta miner allows you to mine only Ethereum or use the dual mining mode for Ethereum and Decred at the same time on AMD GPUs. Of course you still need to have an AMD-based video card with at least 2 GB of video memory to be able to mine Ethereum and the faster the GPU, the lower the performance hit when using dual mining mode. In dual mining mode you should have a bit lower than the usual hashrate for ETH mining on Radeon 280X or below, with the less powerful GPUs experiencing higher performance drop and hopefully no performance loss for higher-end cards. The trick here is that the miner combines two different crypto mining algorithms – the memory intensive Ethereum and the GPU intensive Decred, so you are able to get full Ethereum mining performance with a slower Decred mining performance with both working at the same time.
Claymore states that the effective Ethereum mining speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code. This does not mean that the miner will report higher hashrate, but instead that you will have less “wasted” hashrate when mining using this miner as compared to other miners available. The miner is designed to be used only with mining pools, no solo mining supported at the moment. Also note that currently it only works with Ethereum Stratum pools where you give your wallet address as a username only, the Decred support for pools is only for the ones with standard getwork implementations (no getwork over Stratum is supported at the moment). There is no separate worker support available yet, or pool failover in case a pool goes down, so there is more work needed to be done, but so far things are looking promising so you might want to try out the new miner.
If you are interested in trying out the new Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU miner you should be aware that it is only available as a Windows binary, no source code is available and no version for Linux or other operating systems. The miner is free, but there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner will mine Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer (Decred mining is 100% for the user). The currently released version is for 64-bit Windows only and is intended for recent AMD video cards only: 7xxx, 2xx and 3xx, with 2 GB or more, there is no Nvidia support available. Also do note forget that the miner is currently in beta and some bugs and various issues are quite possible, so be prepared for experiencing such.
– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…
Most crypto currency miners should be very familiar with the Raspberry Pi, the small and inexpensive Linux-based “computer” that is often used to run big ASIC miners without the need of a dedicated powerful PC. The RPi however can be used for other things such as running a full Bitcoin or other crypto currency node with the help of a large USB drive or running a wallet for PoS for example. So the announcement of a new faster Raspberry Pi 3 could be of interest to a lot of people, especially considering the fact that the new model comes with built-in WiFi and the price remains the same as with the old model 2 – $35 USD, with the RPi 2 still available for anyone that needs it.
Raspberry Pi 3 Specifications:
– Processor: Broadcom BCM2387 chipset, 1.2GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53, 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Classic and LE)
– GPU: Dual Core VideoCore IV Multimedia Co-Processor. Provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. Capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
– Memory: 1GB LPDDR2
– Operating System: Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system or Windows 10 IoT
– Dimensions: 85 x 56 x 17mm
– Power: Micro USB socket 5V, 2.5ARaspberry Pi 3 Connectors:
– Ethernet: 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
– Video: Output HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4 Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC)
– Audio Output: Audio Output 3.5mm jack, HDMI,
– USB: 4 x USB 2.0 Connector
– GPIO Connector: 40-pin 2.54 mm (100 mil) expansion header: 2×20 strip providing 27 GPIO pins as well as +3.3 V, +5 V and GND supply lines
– Camera Connector: 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2)
– Display Connector: Display Serial Interface (DSI) 15 way flat flex cable connector with two data lanes and a clock lane
– Memory Card Slot: Push/pull Micro SDIO
The dimensions and layout of the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B are the same as with the RPi 2 Model B including the connectors, so it should be compatible as a direct replacement for the older unit if you are already using it for a project. The faster CPU can be a good upgrade for tasks requiring more processing power such as running a crypto currency node, the GPU is the same as with the old model, but clocked higher and you get WiFi and Bluetooth built-in for easier wireless network and peripheral connectivity.
– For more details about the announcement of the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B…
- In: General Info
- Tags: Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, RPi 3
The guys at NiceHash have released a beta version of their own easy-to-use best-profit auto-switching application called NiceHash Miner. The software detects what crypto mining capable hardware you have in your systems (for now supports only Nvidia GPUs and CPU mining), checks your hashrate and automatically switches to the most profitable algorithm available to give you the best profit for your hashrate. All you have to do is download and run the miner, choose the server location and enter your Bitcoin wallet address where you want to get your coins sent at and you are almost ready to start mining and maximizing your profit. As a backend the NiceHash Miner relies on the cpuminer-multi form tpruvot for CPU mining and to the ccminer forks from tpruvot and sp for the Nvidia GPU mining.
The first time you run the NiceHash Miner software you will need to go through the Benchmark mode in order for the software to determine what your mining hashrate will provide in terms of hashrate for the different supported algorithm. Then you are ready to start mining with all or only a few of the mining capable CPUs/GPUs you have available – you can choose what you want to mine with. There is however still no support for you to chose only some of the supported algorithm, so you are stuck with all of the available in the software. We are probably soon also going to see an OpenCL miner such as sgminer integrated to add support for AMD GPUs as well, but for now if you have AMD GPUs you can still rely on the Miner Control Tool for example for automatic profit switching at NiceHash/Westhash. Their own tool does look promising and works pretty well, but it needs more work and features, also do not forget that it is still in beta. Still you might want to give it a try though…
– To download and try the latest NiceHash Miner beta software (binary releases)…