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Siacoin (SC) has been picking up recently and there have been talks about privet mining pools available, but the good news is that you can already GPU mine the SIA crypto tokens that are powering a decentralized storage network in an open pool. The open Siacoin mining pool already available is sia.nanopool.org and you can join it and start mining in no time. The pool does not need a registration, all you need to have is a wallet address – generate one with a SIA local wallet or use an exchange generated wallet from Poloniex or Yunbi. You can download the GPU miner for Siacoin written in in Go for pool mining (source) compiled and ready to be used from the link below (64-bit release for Windows) or use the latest Claymore Dual Miner that brings support for Dual Mining Ethereum along with Decred or Siacoin as a second coin (previously only Decred was available for dual mining).
The SIA Nanopool pool uses PPLNS payout scheme, has a fee of 2%, executes payouts once a day with a minimum payout currently set at 5000 Siacoins. Out test with the Siacoin Go miner for Siacoin shows about 1116 MHS as a hashrate for a single Radeon R9 290X GPU without overclocking, so you can have that number as a reference. The miner also works on Nvidia GPUs (it is still using OpenCL, not CUDA), as a reference number you can expect to get about 803 MHS from a GTX 970, do note however that for Nvidia-based mining rigs the go miner is the only choice as the Claymore dual miner is only for AMD GPUs. If you want to focus on mining Ethereum and mine Siacoin as a secondary coin and have AMD GPU mining rigs, then you can also try the latest Claymore dual miner version 5.0 that now gives you the choice for mine Decred or Siacoin besides Ethereum. Please report your hashrate and success in running the miner on different hardware, both AMD and Nvidia-based GPUs, in the comments below. should you decide to try mining Siacoin.
– To download and try the Siacoin Go pool miner for AMD and Nvidia GPUs…
We have already covered the performance of the new AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs for mining Ethereum, so it is time to see how the GPU performs with other popular algorithms. We have already mentioned that the RX 480 apparently has some issues running sgminer (at least under Windows), so we were not able to run tests with many of the currently popular algorithms, but it seems that many people missed that part. The good news is that there is now an updated version of the NiceHash Miner that apparently adds support for GTX 1070/1080 and RX 480. So we have downloaded it and ran the built in benchmark and you can see the results above as well as the fact that some algorithms still have issues apparently hence the 0 MHS results, but it is much better than before. We have noticed that the sgminer that is being packaged and used for RX 480 now has some pre-built binaries for Ellesmere (RX 480) included. So even if you are not planning on using the NiceHash Miner on Windows, you still might get the sgminer-5-4-0-general from the bin folder and use it on Radeon RX 480.
Here is a chart comparing the performance of a reference design AMD Radeon RX 480 from ASUS in the other algorithms apart from Ethereum to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, namely a Gigabyte WindForce OC model and a reference design Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 from ASUS. The benchmark did not produce results for NeoScrypt, WhirlpoolX and Blake256r14 as you can see, so it seems that some algorithms may still have issues running on RX 480. Also do note that the RX 480 has been around for just a few days, so there have not been any specific optimizations for the new Polaris architecture that it uses and further performance increases might be possible. The X11 Evo algorithm is not yet supported by the sgminer for of NiceHash, so there are no results as the dedicated miner is having trouble runnign on the RX 480 on Windows (we have not yet tried Linux).
The pleasant surprises are in Blakecoin and the X-based algorithms where the result of the RX 480 beats with a bit what the GTX 970 manages to provide in terms of hashrate. Unfortunately in the others the GTX 970 turns out faster than the RX 480 for the moment and the AMD card can definitely use some improvements in algorithms such as Lyra2REv2 and Quark for example. The GTX 1070 however manages to provide a significantly higher hashrate compared to the RX 480 and with a lower power usage than the AMD card. Again the RX 480 could get some tweaks and fixes and it definitely needs some and will most likely manage to catch up to the GTX 970, but reaching the GTX 1070 is probably too much to expect.
We should not forget that the GTX 1070 is a significantly more expensive GPU than what the AMD Radeon RX 480 sells for, but still we did not expect doubled or almost doubled hashrate provided by the GTX 1070 in most algorithms. It seems that the benchmark results we get for crypto mining and the ones when using the RX 480 for gaming are pretty much the same (apart from memory intensive mining algos such as Ethereum) where the new AMD card manages to be on par or a bit faster than a GTX 970 in some of the cases.
AMD today unveiled the first of its upcoming Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX series graphics cards – the Radeon RX 480 at a surprising price point, surprising at is it quite affordable compared to what you will have to pay for the latest generation of Nvidia Pascal GPUs. The AMD Radeon RX 480 as well as the other upcoming GPUs are all based on the 14 nm FinFET production process that the Polaris architecture utilizes. As a result what we expect to get is more performance with a lower power usage and at a more affordable price point and AMD delivers just that with the Radeon RX 480. The full specifications are not yet revealed, but we know the cards should be available on the market on June 29th with a price point of just $199 USD for the 4GB edition. The TDP rating of the new RX 480 GPUs is 150W, but we do not know all of the specifications yet, so it is hard to estimate what is the expected performance, especially for mining.
We already know that the RX 480 uses 256-bit memory bus and will come in 4GB and 8GB VRAM models, so the big question that many Ethereum miners are probably already asking is what performance can we expect from the new cards. Since Ethereum’s Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is memory intensive one the speculated performance for Ethereum mining for the new AMD Radeon RX 480 is somewhere in between 20 and 30 MHS, hopefully around the full performance that Radeon 280x had with 1GB DAG files or around 26-27 MHS or more, but that is pure speculation for now. So we’ll have to wait and see some real numbers, but we are not going to be surprised if the lower priced RX 480 does manage to outperform the Nvidia GTX 1070/1080 at least for mining Ethereum, making the new Radeon the better solution for mining ETH. What you should not forget however is the fact that Ethereum mining is not going to last forever, sooner or later the coin will switch from PoW to PoS and you would have to switch to a different altcoin maybe with different algorithm where the RX 480 might not be the best choice…