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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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What to Expect from the Coming Soon New AMD GPUs
15, Jun 2015
There is already a lot of speculation about the new AMD GPUs that are supposed to be announced in the next week or so and among all of the unofficial information there is probably a lot that will end up being the truth. So far it seems that apart from the new high-end Fiji GPUs that will use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) all others will be a refresh of the currently available generation with maybe a bit more shaders or a bit wider memory bus, so you should probably not expect too much out of the net 300 series. The big question is about what level of performance the new AMD Fury video cards based on the Fiji GPU with HBM will be offering. AMD has been hinting that they are targeting a level of performance comparable to that of Nvidia Titan X, but it is not only abut performance, but also about power usage when talking about crypto currency mining and then there is also the cost of the video card. So if the Fiju GPUs that are to be used in the AMD Fury video cards are able to achieve similar performance with a bit higher power usage, but at a significantly better price they may end up be quite interesting. Especially if they do come with a water cooling solution already installed on them, ensuring cool and silent operation – perfect for GPU mining.
However we doubt that the price will be much lower than that of a Titan X and that will make it a bit too expensive for use for crypto mining, just like is the case with the Titan. On the other hand Nvidia has recently released the more affordable and slightly stripped down version of the Titan X in the form of GTX 980 Ti. The good news based on our initial testing was that the GTX 980 Ti was offering a performance very close to that of the Titan X at a much better price making it the more interesting choice for crypto currency mining, especially if you get the card as a gaming / crypto mining solution (mining while not using it for gaming). There is also already some talk that AMD will have two models based on their new Fiji GPU with HBM memory available, so the possibility to get one that will compete with GTX 980 Ti and one that will compete with the Titan X is actually quite high. Based on past experience with AMD GPU mining however it may take some time and maybe some tweaks to optimize the existing OpenCL miners to take full advantage of the new GPUs (not the refresh models). That is especially true considering that the open source miner development for AMD GPUs hasn’t been that active lately, unlike the developers of open source miners for Nvidia GPUs that are doing great job in optimizing and fixing issues constantly. Hopefully the new releases from AMD will finally spark some recovery in the AMD GPU mining ecosystem, well we are going to see pretty soon…
We like the GlobalBoost (BSTY) alternative crypto currency that uses Yescrypt algorithm for mining, so we have decided to run a giveaway of some coins for free to everyone interested in checking it out. The BSTY started as a CPU-only crypto coin, but recently we have seen GPU miners for Nvidia and AMD getting released as well, though they still need some performance optimization. For the moment CPU mining is still faster, especially if you have an up to date multi-core processor that is sitting idle and waiting to be put to some good use such as mining.
So getting back to the GlobalBoost (BSTY) giveaway, all you have to do to take part in it is to post your BSTY wallet address in the comments below and you will get 50 BSTY coins sent to you – that is the reward you get if you mine a single BSTY block. Do note that since the all of the coins will be sent manually to you it may take some time before your reward is sent, but normally it should not take more than a few hours. Only one reward per user is allowed, so please do not abuse our giveaway – we have prepared enough coins to give away, but we reserve the right to cancel the giveaway at any time we decide.
The giveaway is now over, the total GlobalBoost coins sent to users – 2600 BSTY
– For more information about the GlobalBoost (BSTY) alternative crypto currency….
What Hashrate to Expect From an Up to Date CPU
2, Mar 2015
Using the CPU or the central processing unit of your computer to mine crypto currency is pretty much considered outdated nowadays with the only exception being mining new altcoins that are CPU only. If you are interested to find out what hashrate you can expect to get from a powerful multi-core CPU at the moment with come of the more popular crypto algorithms in order to compare to your AMD Radeon 280X GPU or Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti for example, you might want to look at the results we got below. They are achieved using the cpuminer-multi fork on an Intel Core i7 5820K processor (6 core with HT or 12 logical cores) running at default operating frequency (non-overclocked).
Algorithm – Hashrate:
Scrypt – 129 KHS
Scrypt:N – 26.2 KHS
Sha256d – 10.7 MHS
Blake – 18024 KHS
Cryptonight – 192.7 HS
Fresh – 487.2 KHS
Lyra2 – 744.8 KHS
Neoscrypt – 22.2 KHS
Qubit – 488 KHS
Quark – 664.8 KHS
X11 – 308.1 KHS
X13 – 211.4 KHS
X14 – 202.6 KHS
X15 – 194.4 KHS
The cpuminer-multi fork that we used for the test does support more algorithms than those that we tested with, we’ve skipped some because it is hard to find operational pools or even alive crypto coins to use some of them. So we did not test all of the algorithms such as S3, NIST5, Pentablake and a few others that are supported by the software miner. Use these numbers as a reference only for comparing to GPU mining hardware as you probably will not want to use your CPU to mine with on these algorithms anyway. The only exception being Lyra2RE, because this algorithm does provide a very decent hashrate on the CPU as compared to what you can get with a GPU miner.