Claymore’s New Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU Beta Miner

12 Apr
2016

claymore-dual-ethereum-decred-miner

Here is something quite interesting for the people that mine either Ethereum (ETH) or Decred (DCR) or even both, a miner that mines the two different crypto currencies at the same time to give you better profit from your existing hardware. Claymore’s new Dual Ethereum plus Decred AMD GPU beta miner allows you to mine only Ethereum or use the dual mining mode for Ethereum and Decred at the same time on AMD GPUs. Of course you still need to have an AMD-based video card with at least 2 GB of video memory to be able to mine Ethereum and the faster the GPU, the lower the performance hit when using dual mining mode. In dual mining mode you should have a bit lower than the usual hashrate for ETH mining on Radeon 280X or below, with the less powerful GPUs experiencing higher performance drop and hopefully no performance loss for higher-end cards. The trick here is that the miner combines two different crypto mining algorithms – the memory intensive Ethereum and the GPU intensive Decred, so you are able to get full Ethereum mining performance with a slower Decred mining performance with both working at the same time.

Claymore states that the effective Ethereum mining speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code. This does not mean that the miner will report higher hashrate, but instead that you will have less “wasted” hashrate when mining using this miner as compared to other miners available. The miner is designed to be used only with mining pools, no solo mining supported at the moment. Also note that currently it only works with Ethereum Stratum pools where you give your wallet address as a username only, the Decred support for pools is only for the ones with standard getwork implementations (no getwork over Stratum is supported at the moment). There is no separate worker support available yet, or pool failover in case a pool goes down, so there is more work needed to be done, but so far things are looking promising so you might want to try out the new miner.

If you are interested in trying out the new Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU miner you should be aware that it is only available as a Windows binary, no source code is available and no version for Linux or other operating systems. The miner is free, but there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner will mine Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer (Decred mining is 100% for the user). The currently released version is for 64-bit Windows only and is intended for recent AMD video cards only: 7xxx, 2xx and 3xx, with 2 GB or more, there is no Nvidia support available. Also do note forget that the miner is currently in beta and some bugs and various issues are quite possible, so be prepared for experiencing such.

– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…

The Energy Saver Feature of Gentarkin’s Custom Titan Firmware

12 Apr
2016

energy-saver-1

The Energy Saver feature of Gentarkin’s custom KNC Titan firmware was something that we wanted to try out in the 1.0.2 version and we tried to do it, but there was a bug that was causing the process to continue for days without finishing. With the release of the new 1.0.4 version of the custom firmware the issue in the Energy Saver feature has been resolved and we were finally able to finish a complete run on a single Titan Cube in less than 24 hours. On the image above you can see the stock settings of a fully functioning Titan Cube with all cores at 325 MHz with -0.0366V set for each core. The total power usage with these “default” settings is about 347 W and with the PSU power efficiency taken into account it makes it at about 384 Watts with a highly efficient PSU at 92% efficiency, with a less efficient PSU at lets say 85% the power usage will be higher at the wall and the final savings should be more.

energy-saver-2

The idea of the Energy Saver feature is to find the optimal lowest operating voltage of each core automatically and test to ensure the miner can run stable at these settings. As a result you get lower power consumption (lower energy bill) and less heat generated by the components, so in theory you should be able to extend the life of your mining hardware as well. All is done automatically and in the end you just need to confirm the settings that are being suggested. Our results for the fully functioning cube set at 325 MHz after the Energy Saver feature was over was an optimized voltage for all four cores at -0.0732V with a slight reduction of operating temperatures of the DCDC power modules. The more important thing is the reduction of the power usage, the actual consumed power by the device went down from about 347W to about 317W or about 30 Watts down, and a total of about 32 Watts lower power consumption at the wall. It may not seem that much, but this is close to about 10% and if you get 30 Watts lower power usage per cube and have a lot of cubes the number and power savings can get quite big. One more reason for users of KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC miners to get Gentarkin’s Custom Titan Firmware.

– Visit the official website for GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan Firmware for more info…

New ccMiner 1.7.1 fork by alexs78 With Improved Vcash and Decred Performance

11 Apr
2016

ccminer-1-7-1-alexis78

Alexis Provos has updated his fork of ccMiner (source) with improved performance for mining Vcash and Decred Blake256-based crypto coins and we have compiled a Windows binary to try it out. His latest release brings the same performance or even a slightly higher for Vcash (former Vanillacoin) as the specially optimized CUDA 6.5 Compute 3.5 release of ccMiner using the latest CUDA 7.5 and the Compute version supported by the specific GPU you have. The Decred (DCR) hashrate is also higher when compared to the latest tpruvot release that includes the optimizations submitted by pallas. Below you can find a quick comparison of the hashrate you can expect from this release on GTX 980 Ti, the archive below includes a 32-bit and 64-bit binaries compiled with CUDA 7.5 and VS2013 for Compute 2.0 – Compute 5.2 GPUs, though we have not tested how it handles on older GPUs.

Do note that the focus of the ccMiner fork from Alexis Provos is on the Blake256 algorithms and most specifically on Vcash and his release brings support for very few algorithms. There are some optimizations available for the other supported algorithms as well, so you might want to compare them as well in terms of performance. It is not a full ccMiner fork with support for all of the algorithms available in other releases, so with this one you can mine only the following algorithms:

– blake for Blake256-14rounds (SFR)
– decred for Blake256-14rounds (DCR)
– blakecoin for Blake256-8rounds (BLC)
– vcash for Blake256-8rounds (XVC)
– whirlpoolx for WhirlpoolX (old VNL algo)
– keccak for keccak256 (Maxcoin)
– lyra2 for LyraBar
– lyra2v2 for VertCoin

Since this fork is not based on the latest code by tpruvot there might be some bugs that have been resolved in the newer codebase of tpruvot’s ccMiner. We have observed something strange already, namely the very fast increase of the difficulty to a very high level on the Suprnova pool for Decred using Stratum over getwork, though it works just fine on YIIMP. In the end the difficulty issue appeared to be temporary and apparently something poolside and not related to the miner itself. Below you can find some performance comparison results using an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti GPU:

This release with GTX 980 Ti intensity 31 Decred, 30 Vcash
Vcash – 4453 MHS
Decred – 2394 MHS

1.7.4 alexis78 release Compute 3.5 CUDA 6.5
Vcash – 4418 MHS

Latest 1.7.6-git tpruvot with Pallas tweaks
Decred – 2218 MHS

– To download the latest ccMiner version 1.7.1-git by alexis78 with improved performance for Windows OS…

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