Halong Mining DragonMint B29 Blake256 ASIC Miner for Decred (DCR)

6 Mar
2018

Out of the blue Halong Mining have just announced a new ASIc miner called DragonMint B29 designed for the Blake256 algorithm supporting Decred (and other Blake256 coins?). The new ASIC should be capable of delivering 2.1 THS Blake256 hashrate with just 900 Watt power consumption. The not so great thing about this new miner however is the price of $10499 USD, even with included power supply and free shipping it is pretty expensive. The DragonMint B29 Blake256 ASIC miners should start shipping March 22-30 according to the official website if you order now while there is stock. There is an official link to a Decred pool with one of the ASIC devices mining on it posted by Halong Mining on Twitter, so you can check some stats here.

There is a short video of the DragonMint B29 Blake256 ASIC miner in action available from Halong Mining and in it they present it as a Decred (DCR) miner. Do not forget that there is also the Obelisk DCR1 ASIC miner that should be available this summer as well as Materia1 Decred ASIC miner that is still apparently in the works. So the competition for Decred (DCR) ASIC miners will be big apparently, but the more important question is if the network will be able to handle all of the ASIC hardware if you are not able to mine anything else apart from Decred (DCR).

– For more details on the DragonMint B29 Blake256 ASIC Miner for Decred (DCR)…

Raven (RVN) X16r Miner Now Available for AMD GPU Miners as Well

6 Mar
2018

There is now a fork of sgminer also available for mining the X16r algorithm used by Raven (RVN), so the coin is no longer in the domain of Nvidia miners alone. The sgminer-gm fork with X16R support by aceneun should work on most recent AMD GPUs such as RX 4xx/5xx series and RX VEGA just fine, we have not tested it on older generations, but it might be just fine for them as well. Do note that there is a Windows binary available and it requires you to have the 32-bit (x86) version of Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 installed in order to run it.

The performance you could expect from the sgminer-gm-x16r is about 5-6 MHS on AMD Radeon RX 470/480 or RX 570/580 series of GPUs, though the results can vary based on different clock settings. On an AMD Radeon RX VEGA 56/64 GPU you should be able to get about 10-12 MHS, though again results can vary depending on configuration and clocks. Performance wise it is not bad compared to what users are getting on their Nvidia GPUs, though the latest ccMiner Enemy 1.03 fork for Raven (RVN) does provide higher hashrate on Nvidia GPUs.

Regardless if you are using AMD or Nvidia GPUs, mining Raven (RVN) might not be a bad idea at the moment as there is a lot of user interest and hype surrounding the coin and difficulty is growing. We are yet to see however how will things develop in the near and the not so near future with this coin as it may all end up with too much hype, but then again this could also end up being a gem for the earlier adopters as well. The difficulty of the coin has been steadily growing in the last few days and now with an AMD GPU miner available as well it will most likely continue to grow higher.

– To download and try the sgminer-gm-x16r AMD GPU miner for Raven’s (RVN) X16r algorithm…

Xrig, a New Cryptonight Miner Designed for AMD RX Vega GPUs

4 Mar
2018

It seems that there is a new Cryptonight miner out there optimized for AMD RX Vega GPUs called Xrig, though it should also work on other AMD video cards. Performance wise it should be similar to other high-performance AMD RX Vega miners like Cast-XMR or XMR-stak, meaning 1900-2000 H/s, depending on the settings. What makes it more interesting is the built-in hardware monitoring as well as options to configure clocks and voltages via a config file. Xrig is open source, though the default Windows binary is with 1% dev fee included and it apparently starts with developer fee mining when you run the miner before it continues to your configured pool.

The miner comes with GPU reset script and devcon.exe bundled, however it may not work out of the box as you need specific version of devcon.exe depending on your Windows version. So if the bundled devcon for the Windows does not work for you, here is an easy way to obtain the required devcon version. Other than that, well you should try the miner and compare what kind of performance you are getting with it on your Vega 56/64 GPUs or other AMDs an if it works better than other alternative options. If not using a config file (you need to create one, example is available on Github) do not forget to set the intensity command line parameter in order for the miner to work.

– To download and try the new Xrig Cryptonight miner for AMD RX Vega 56/64 GPUs…

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