New Faster EWBF CUDA Zcash Miner for Nvidia GPUs

7 Dec
2016

eqm-new

There is a new miner for Nvidia CUDA GPUs available for mining Zcash (ZEC) promising a slightly faster hashrate than the currently fastest implementation of the NiceHash EQM Zcash NVIDIA miner. The most important thing about this new miner is that it is not limited to only mining on NiceHash, so even with the same speed it is still a nice thing to have as it supports Stratum mining on other mining pools besides NiceHash (it does seem to support NiceHash’s Extranonce Subscribe as well). According to the author of the miner it is designed for Nvidia Pascal GPUs, but should work on older Compute 3.0 or higher Nvidia GPUs with at least 1 GB of video memory. Do note that the miner is not open source and there is only a Windows 64-bit binary release available at the moment, it does not seem to be based on other popular codebase and is not being reported as malicious software by antivirus products. You might still want to have something in mind as the user that posted it on Bitcointalk is a new account and not an established miner developer, even though it seems that the miner does work pretty well.

The EWBF CUDA Zcash Miner has a built-in developer fee that is set at 2%, meaning that every 10 minutes the software will switch to a different pool and mine for the developer some shares and then get back to mining for you. The author of the software claims speeds of about 250 H/s for Nvidia GTX 1070 while the NiceHash EQM miner does currently about 220 H/s on the same GPU. Our quick tests showed a hashrate of about 235-240 H/s average (up to 250 H/s) on stock GTX 1070, so still slightly faster, but not as much as you may want it to… then there is the dev fee as well and it seems that we are seeing somewhat more rejects than, especially when switching to mine for the dev fee. So while this may be an interesting alternative for users willing to mine outside of NiceHash, the actual performance that you may get poolside may not be much different than with what is currently the fastest implementation from NiceHash (taking into account the dev fee and the rejected shares)…

– For more information about the new faster EWBF CUDA Zcash Miner for Nvidia GPUs…

Less Than 100 Blocks Remain Until the End of the ZEC Slow Start Mining

1 Dec
2016

zchain-block-explorer

In a couple of hours the initial slow start of mining for Zcash will finally be over after a bit over a month since the official launch of ZEC. There are already less than 100 blocks remaining until we reach the 20000 block where the block reward gets to the full 12.5 ZEC. So if you were mining and selling up until now in order to get the maximum out of the slow start phase of mining, now you may also consider the option about mining and holding some coins long term as well. That of course is not a sure strategy for making profit, but sounds like a reasonable idea considering the fact that there is still a lot of interest in Zcash and after some time it may start going up in terms of an exchange rate. At the moment the exchange rate of a single Zcash coin is at about $63.6 USD and it has been pretty stable lately even with the slowly increasing block reward until it reaches the full 12.5 coins per block. Some people consider that this is still a pretty high valuation for ZEC at this point in time, but then again it is also up to the market to decide what is the actual value of the ZEC coins. There is the chance that the value may drop or rise up, so be careful what are you deciding to do after the finish of the slow start of mining phase…

– To keep a track of how things are moving with the Zcash using the Zchain explorer…

SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter for Multiple GPU Mining Rig Owners

30 Nov
2016

tplink-smart-plug

Remotely controlling multiple mining rigs is not a hard thing to do, however remotely resetting them in case of a problem is not as easy as you might think. Sure if you have a rig or two you can purchase a smart WiFi switch for example and connect the mining rig to it and issue a power off/on command remotely via the Internet. Some of these devices also come with another useful feature for monitoring the actual power usage and that can be helpful for some mining rig owners. The smart WiFi plugs are available for as low as $20 USD or EUR, but if you have more than a couple of mining rigs they are not that good of an option. The cost will build up and you can even start having problem with your WiFi router being able to keep everything connected and operating properly.

simplerigresetter

Fortunately there are interesting alternatives also available in the form of dedicated products and one such that was recently announced is the SimpleRigResetter device made by the creator of the Simplemining OS. The device is designed to remotely monitor and control the power on/off functionality of up to 8 mining rigs by plugging 4 cables into the motherboard header of each rig – two for the power LED and two for the power on functionality. It is a custom built hardware that connects over the network and works with custom software to reset any of the connected mining rigs when you need to and it should even come with support integrated in the SimpleMining OS.

The SimpleRigResetter device is not yet available with pre-orders expected to start in December with a base price of $70 USD for the board + $20 USD for shipping and deliveries should start in the second half of January 2017 according to the currently available data. There is even an extension pack announced that should add support for control of up to 24 additional mining rigs that is priced at $90 USD, making the total number of supported rigs 32. It is definitely something to keep an eye on if you need a solution like that and have more than just a few mining rigs in operation.

arduino-mega

Of course if you get creative and have a bit more knowledge in hardware and programming you can pick up something like an Arduino Mega board, slap on an Ethernet shield on it and add a relay pack with some custom code and get support for remote power on/off of more than 50 mining rigs. This is just an idea of course for people that might be looking for other alternatives and might be interested in DIY solution that they can customize by themselves without way too much effort. This of course is not something that just about anybody can do even though using Arudino is not rocket science it still does require some knowledge and experience. Not to mention if you decide to go for a custom PCB and make your own product similar in functionality to the one mentioned above, but then again your focus is probably mining and you will most likely need a ready-made solution that does not cost too much and works well.

– For more information about the upcoming SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter…

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