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When talking about GPU mining with Nvidia-based GPUS for crypto currencies there are two models that usually come in mind – the GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 970. When talking about Ethereum mining however Nvidia mining rigs do not do that well compared to AMD-based rigs and while the GTX 970 does pretty well at about 20-21 MHS the GTX 750 Ti is performing terribly, so it is not suitable for ETH mining. A good choice for GPUs that have only 1 GB of video memory or do not perform well for mining Ethereum is to go for mining Decred (DCR) at the moment, so you have good alternative. But if you are currently building a low powered multi-GPU mining rig at the moment with Nvidia-based GPUs the card of choise will most likely not be the 750 Ti anymore, you should go for the slightly more expensive GTX 950.
The GTX 950 is doing much better for mining Ethereum as compared to GTX 750 Ti, you can expect to see somewhere around 10 MHS from the 950 and it has been like that since the beginning (no performance drop like on some AMD cards). The reference design GTX 950 has a TDP of 90W as compared to 60W for the reference design GTX 750 Ti, but it also offers higher performance and is usable for Ethereum mining at 10 MHS. So a 6 GPU mining rig using Nvidia GeForce GTX 950 video cards should come at about 600W of total power consumption at max load and giving you about 62 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (Ethereum does not use the most power hungry algorithm). The GTX 950 does pretty well for other mining algorithms as well, you have alternatives available like DCR and will still get good performance and profit. Here is a comparison between GTX 750 Ti doing around 500 MHS with the latest ccMiner fork from tpruvot with Decred support (the faster 64-bit version) versus around 645 MHS for GTX 950, these numbers are from the publicly available miner. So do consider going for GTX 950 instead of GTX 750 Ti if you are building an Nvidia mining rig now and GTX 970+ is not an option at the moment.
Mining calculators help miners to easily calculate what will be the profit with their available hashrate for a given period taking into account thing such as network difficulty and price of a given crypto coin. There is an easy to use and simple Decred mining calculator available that can give you an idea on how much coins you can expect to mine in a day, month and year with your hashrate. It can be quite helpful for people mining with GPUs to consider what currency is more profitable to mine at the moment and how much they may be able to earn mining Decred. Most people are well aware that at the moment Ethereum (ETH) is probably the most profitable to mine with GPUs, however Decred is not that far behind and you can easily compare your expected profit with Decred if you are currently mining Ethereum.
There are some GPUs that do not meet the minimum requirements that Ethereum has such as the availability of at least 2 GB of video memory, or the performance may not be very good for mining ETH with the specific video card. Such is the case with Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti, a popular lower-end Nvidia-bssed GPU for mining that does not do very well with Ethereum, but can do quite good with Decred as a good alternative. So our advice is to give Decred a go, especially if you have some GPUs that are not OK for Ethereum mining for various reasons. Do note however that Decred is heavier on GPU and has a higher power usage compared to Ethereum, so the power cost is also a bit higher.
In the example screenshot above we see that a single GTX 970 GPU doing around 1300 MHS mining Decred should give you around 1.87 DCR per day or about $4.6189 USD equivalent with the current conditions. For the sake of comparison running the numbers through an Ethereum mining calculator for that same GTX 970 GPU we get 0.476424 ETH or about $5.13 USD per day, so the difference in terms of profitability is not that big as we have already explained.
– To check your expected DCR mining profit with the Decred Mining Calculator…
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…