Litecoin Core and Litecoin Association Road Map 2016

3 Jul
2016

official-litecoin-logo

The Litecoin Association in cooperation with the Litecoin Core development team has published the much anticipated 2016 Litecoin Road Map. This road map intends to convey recent developments in both the association and core endeavors and it offers a vision and plan for the future. Litecoin has received a lot of critique form users that they do not have visible plans for further developing and establishing Litecoin as one of the top altcoins and thus LTC was slowly getting out of the radar not only for miners, but for crypto currency users. This was happening everywhere aside from China where the interest in LTC is still very strong partly probably because most of the Litecoin mining happens in that region. The new Litecoin road map should calm the people that the Litecoin project is still being worked on and aside from development of the Litecoin Core wallet, there is also work going on LoafWallet – iOS-based LTC wallet, Electrum-LTC – Android and PC wallet, LiteTip – a Litecoin tip bot, support for Litecoin on Lamassu ATM and others. So don’t be too quick to abandon ship as Litecoin may soon make a nice comeback, especially considering the recent issues that Ethereum had with the DAO and the problem still not fully resolved.

– To read the complete Litecoin Core and Litecoin Association Road Map 2016 (PDF)…

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Overclocking and Mining Hashrate

30 Jun
2016

nvidia-gtx-1070-overclock-settings

Time for some overclocking of the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition and running the tests again to see what hashrate increase can we expect from the GPU with the increased operating frequencies. The Founders Edition cards are somewhat limited in the max power you can get, but the good news is that the GTX 1070 FE still has the same 8-pin PCI-E power like the 1080, even though its default TDP limit has been lowered to 151W and the Power Limiter allows for just 12% increase over the default TDP (169W max TDP). There is already a tool for flashing modified video BIOS files available, so now the only thing we need figured out is how to modify the TDP limits in BIOS and other settings such as frequencies and voltages in order to be able to squeeze some additional extra performance over the stock clock capabilities of the Founders Edition cards and even more from the non-reference designs that are already starting to become available on the market.

We already know that the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs are handling quite well overclocking and you can squeeze quite a bit extra performance from them if you are not limited and don’t care than much about the power usage. We are trying the GTX 1070 Founders Edition to see what it can do withing its current limits without touching the core voltage and what we got was: Power Limit + 12%, Core Clock + 210 MHs, Memory Clock + 830 MHs, the max settings that are running stable for 24/7 mining on our test card and the results are below. Do note that these can vary from card to card, so you should experiment until you find what works best for you. Regardless it seems that the GTX 1070 FE cards are doing quite well in terms of overclocking in general, so you should expect an nice extra performance boost from them and even more from the non-reference designs.

nvidia-gtx-1070-overclocked-hashrate

The performance increase we get after overclocking the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition card with the clock settings above are pretty much consistent with what the GTX 1080 FE shows. The performance boost in terms of hashrate increase in the various algorithms is about 12-14% higher than at the stock settings and better results could be achieved with increase of the voltages, however with that you will also need to be careful that you are fitting in the TDP limit. It is interesting to note that the GTX 1070 FE does perform better on NeoScrypt (668 KHS stock/771 KHS overclocked) than the 1080 FE, but it it still outperformed by the GTX 980 Ti for example. It seems that the slower GDDR5 video memory used here does perform better with the memory intensive algorithms unlike the faster GDDR5X memory used in the 1080, however the GTX 1070 still needs some fixes for NeoScrypt. As already noted the situation with Pascal GPUs including the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 is the same for Ethereum mining under Windows resulting in very low hashrates, so while waiting for a driver fix you might want to go for Linux for Ethereum mining on these cards. All other algorithms we have tested besides the not so great NeoScrypt performance are doing well under Windows 7 and 10, so mining for these you don’t need to rely on Linux, especially if you are no good with it.

Optimizing the Power Usage of AMD Radeon RX 480 for Ethereum Mining

29 Jun
2016

rx-480-def-power-limiter

If you have checked our publication Testing the AMD Radeon RX 480 for Ethereum Mining you should already know that at the moment you are a bit limited in your capabilities of reducing the power usage of the new RX 480 GPUs. The pretty much only way to lower the power usage for mining Ethereum with Radeon RX 480 is to use the Power Target reducing it below the 100% value (150W TDP) and thus forcing the GPU to lower its operating voltage and frequency in order to still fit in the allowed TDP. Using a lower operating frequency and voltage for the GPU with the power limiter set at the right value should lower the power consumption, but not change the performance you get while mining Ethereum. Further lowering it below that optimum spot and you will start seeing a drop in mining performance, so our goal here was to find the sweet spot where the hashrate will not be affected.

We have started with the default settings of the RX 480 for both the GPU (1266 MHz) and the VRAM (8000 MHz) and started lowering the Power Target slider until we have reached the 83% – the value at which the power is getting reduced, but the hashrate remains the same. Going below 83% percent of the 150W TDP started lowering the hashrate below the regular value at 100% power. The result was 149 Watt drawn at the wall, taking in consideration the PSU power efficiency that should be about 130W actual power usage. This is down from 177W at the wall with default settings with pretty much the hashrate unaffected and the temperature also went down from 68 to about 60 degrees Celsius.

rx-480-oc-power-limiter

Repeating the same procedure as above, but with the video memory set at 9000 MHz and the Power Target set a bit higher at 85% we saw a very slight decrease in performance with just about 5W extra power usage at the wall (155W). The performance we got with this setting was about 27.8-27.9 MHS and the operating temperature was down from about 72 degrees to about 63 degrees Celsius, so definitely a good improvement. For the moment the only way to reduce the power usage without a drop in performance is by lowering the TDP limit under the default value of 100% and you can easily reduce the power consumption with something like 30 Watt at the wall (if using 80 Plus Gold PSU). You can experiment by further reducing the power target slider under these recommended values, however with the additional power savings you should also start noticing reduction of the hashrate you are getting. Still if you are looking for optimal efficiency you might try going lower and if you already have Radeon RX 480 and use it for Ethereum mining you are welcome to share your settings in the comments below.

top