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New ccMiner 1.7.5 fork with Blake2s Mining Support
14, Mar 2016
The Blake2s algorithm is a new entry in the crypto mining scene and while initially there was only CPU mining support available for it now there is also a ccMiner fork with support for Blake2s algorithm on Nvidia GPUs (source). The initial CPU mining support for Blake2s was first introduced in cpumuiner-multi from tpruvot, though there is now a new more-efficient CPU miner available here. With the release of a GPU miner however CPU mining might be not worth it anymore, even though for the moment there is only GPU mining available for Nvidia-based video cards and no for AMD, but soon we are probably going to see Blake2s supported on AMD as well. The miner below is a 64-bit binary compiled with VS2013 and CUDA 7.5 for Compute 3.5, 5.0 and 5.2 GPUs, a 32-bit binary compiled with CUDA 6.5 for Compute 2.1, 3.0. 3.5, 5.0 and 5.2 GPUs is also included. Do have in mind however that the 64-bit version of the miner seems to be offering better performance for mining Blake2s coins.
Back to the ccminer 1.7.5 fork with Blake2s support. Our tests have shown that you can get somewhere around 1080 MHS for a Geforce GTX 970 GPU with a slight increase of the intensity over the default one, the power usage of the GPU while mining is about 168 Watts. For the moment it seems that there are just two altcoins that can be mined with Blake2s, but we are not going to be surprised if we soon see some more getting released. The first one is called NevaCoin (NEVA) and the more recent one launched yesterday is called OXEN. You might however want to be extra careful with OXEN as it seems that there might be a hidden trojan/virus inside the client as some users are reporting suspicious activity after installing the wallet!
– To download the ccMiner 1.7.5 32/64-bit with Blake2s support for Windows OS…
When calculating what crypto coin to mine you need to take into account not only the hashrate you get, but also the power usage for the specific algorithm used by the coin. When talking about Nvidia GPUs the two most popular ones used by miners are GTX 750 Ti and GTX 970 and there is a reason behind that – they offer good price/performance ratio to be used in multi-GPU mining rigs. Sure you can always go for a GTX 980 Ti or even GTX Titan X, but these although more powerful are also significantly more expensive and do not provide so good price/performance ratio.
We have decided to do a quick check of the current situation with a Geforce GTX 970 video card from Gigabyte (WF3OC) and a GeForce GTX 980 Ti reference design GPU and see how they compare in a power and performance check. The results you see in the table above are achieved with the latest ccMiner 1.7.4 from Tpruvot and with the latest fork of ethminer wth CUDA support from Genoil. The video cards are not overclocked further than their factory settings (the Gigabyte GTX 970 is factory overclocked) and they are forced to run CUDA applications in P0 power state to maximize performance in Ethereum.
As you can see from the results aside from Ethereum the GTX 980 Ti is faster with not that much more power usage, however the price of the 980 Ti is roughly double the price of a single GTX 970 and with two 970s you are sure to beat the hashrate of a single 980 Ti. It is interesting to see that a GTX 980 Ti (reference board) can be slower than a GTX 970 GPU, but with a non-reference design you can actually get about 20-21 MHS in Ethereum due to the higher clocks. Still the GTX 980 Ti is most definetly not the right video card for mining Ethereum, if you want to stick to mining Ethereum’s Ether coins with Nvidia you should go for the GTX 970 for sure as the best choice. Even though for Ethereum and other Dagger-Hashimoto altcoins AMD GPUs are still faster in terms of hashrate.
Last month we’ve written about the Crowdfunding Campaign for ccMiner fork With NeoScrypt Support and the miner is already being made available for people that have donated to the developer djm34. We have already played a bit with the latest version of the ccMiner fork with NeoScrypt algorithm support and have tested it on multiple Nvidia-based video cards. Although we have tested the miner on Maxwell-based GPUs (Compute 5.x) only the size of the compiled Windows binary suggests that the miner is also compiled for Compute 3.x cards, so it should work on older video cards as well, though the performance may not be that good. Do note that the ccMiner fork with NeoScrypt support apparently does not currently have support for extranonce that is being used by services such as NiceHash.
We have used GTX 980, GTX 960 and GTX 750 Ti for our tests and the results you can find below are achieved with the latest video drivers that were released along with the GeForce GTX 960 video cards. We are seeing a considerable increase in performance when we compare it to the initial performance results that were shared by djm34 when he initially announced the crowdfunding of the project early last month. So the development of the miner hasn’t stopped and you can show your support by donating to the project to keep the developer motivated and to reach the goal of making it public for everyone.
ccMiner NeoScrypt performance:
GTX 980 – 554 KHS
GTX 960 – 304 KHS
GTX 750 Ti – 149 KHS
There are some important notes regarding the parameter throughput that is used by the miner, it seems that for us value of 1 works best for GTX 980 and GTX 960 bringing a more consistent and high performance. The performance of the GTX 980 is not affected much by the throughput option, so it works without it pretty well, but the GTX without the extra option provides just about 50-60 KHS. For GTX 750 Ti there seems to be not much of a difference what setting we use or throughput in regards to the hashrate we are getting, although a value of 1 does seem to also provide a more consistent hashrate, but your results may vary. Do note that the results posted above are from a reference GTX 750 Ti and GTX 980 video cards that are running at their stock frequencies while the GTX 960 GPU is a factory overclocked ASUS Strix GTX 960. This clarification is important when you take into account the hashrate that the GTX 960 has as compared to the GTX 750 Ti – double, and more that 50% that of the GTX 980 card.
– For more information about the crowdfunding campaign for ccMiner with NeoScrypt support…