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It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
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It seems that the new AMD Radeon VEGA GPUs are starting to show some potential for mining, giving high performance at not so high power usage. VEGA 56 seems to be doing better as far as mining goes as it is already optimized for lower power consumption and not pushed too much in terms of operating voltage to reach higher GPU frequency, and it comes cheaper to buy and these are often two of the most important thing when talking about GPUs for mining anyway. People are already pushing the Radeon VEGA 56 over 1800 H/s for Monero (XMR) mining with a power usage of just about 160W per GPU.
This is possible using the XMR-STACK miner with 2 threads along with the AMD Beta Blockchain drivers and with HBCC on. Reducing the GPU frequency with 30% and the power limit with 20% and setting HBM memory at 950. Though apparently this requires a lot of memory per card at the moment and may be a bit unstable at times and not so user friendly as you still have to rely on Wattman for the GPU settings from within the driver. It is definitely showing a good potential for the VEGA GPUs.
– For more information about the optimized Radeon VEGA 56 settings for Monero (XMR) mining…
It seems that there is now a new model of PCI Express extenders for connecting GPUs to mining motherboards available in white color PCBs and with three different power connectors available. The new extenders come equipped with a SATA power, 4-pin Molex power and 6-pin PCI-E power connectors and you can apparently are able to connect power through any or on all of them. This would allow for better flexibility, especially in cases where you do not have enough power connectors of a certain type, but can also help in overcoming issues with too much power draw over a single power cable. Normally the SATA power is the lowest rated in terms of power capability and thus it is most often the cause of possible issues with burnt or melted cables with GPUs that draw more power from the PCI-E slot. Connecting a Molex to SATA power along with the SATA power onboard on these extenders could help in preventing such problems for example.
Regardless of the power connector options available on these and how you mix and match them you should still be careful how much power is being drawn over a single physical cable going to the power supply. More than two PCI-E extenders on a single physical cable is not recommended, though it also depends what is the power draw of the GPUs as some may have very little or even no power draw from the PCI-E slot, while others may have huge draw even if the GPUs are not with very high TDP. Even if the power cables themselves (18 AWG or even 16 AWG) are capable of handling the higher load the modular power connectors that connect the cables to the power supply are often the failure points as they are really not rated for that much power. So always be careful if your mining GPU rigs in order to avoid any possible hardware failures that can result in extended downtime to diagnose and/or fix afterwards.
There is a new closed source Ethereum (ETH) miner that also works with other Ethash-based crypto coins available and it is called Eminer. The miner is available for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and what makes it really interesting is the integrated local web dashboard that gives you detailed stats for the mining rig the miner is running on. The new Eminer ethash miner v0.6.0-RC1 is written in the Go language and provides performance comparable to that of other top miners for AMD at least with possibly slightly slower hashrate on Nvidia. Eminer comes with support for Stratum and RPC clients with failover, as well as with support for NiceHash stratum implementation. There is however a 1% devfee included in this miner software, so have that in mind should you decide to give it a try. The Windows version comes with Asynchronous multiworker mode that searched shares with multiple instances and this can supposedly bring increased by 1% ~ 2% share luck. Binaries for Linux and Mac OS X of the miner are also available.
The real gem here is the web-based interface that gives you an overview of the mining hardware and the current mining process, including a graphical representation of the hashrate over time. YOu get information on the available AMD or Nvidia GPUs and their current status such as clocks, hashrate, temperature and fan speed. This allows for quick and easy overview over web of multiple mining rigs without having to spend time decoding the console output from the miner… that one can use some improvements to be more useful, but probably the focus was placed more on the web-based dashboard. Still this new miner looks promising and useful and it never hurts to have some competition among the crypto mining software.
Since it is a closed software with no source available posted by a new user on Bitcointalk some people might have some concerns you can check a VirusTotal scan of the executable here. Not a guarantee that there are no warnings since it is a new miner that is not based on other existing codebase that gets detected as potential threat by some antivirus software.
– For more details about the new Eminer Ethash miner v0.6.0-RC1…