Power Usage of Nvidia GPUs in Profitable to Mine Coins

6 Mar
2016

nvidia-power-usage-check

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.

Mining Rig Rentals Offering Dagger-Hashimoto Rigs for Ethereum

6 Mar
2016

mrr-dagger-hashimoto

The service for leasing and renting mining rigs for different crypto algorithms – Mining Rig Rentals has added support for the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm that is used by Ethereum (ETH) as well as some other coins that have since been forked from it. There are two categories for Ethereum mining rigs available and we need to clarify the difference as there might be some confusion as to why. Dagger-Hashimoto(G) is for rigs that support Getwork while Dagger-Hashimoto(S) is for rigs supporting stratum, most of the Ethereum mining pools do rely on Getwork, though there are a few such as Ethpool that support stratum over their own miner called qtminer as well as getwork with standard ethminer. There is also the option to use a stratum proxy that will translate to getwork requests as an alternative to a pools directly supporting a stratum implementation for mining. The current stats show that out of 55 available getwork rigs 22 are available for renting or about half, but there are no rigs with stratum support currently listed at the service.

– For more information about the Mining Rig Rentals service for renting crypto mining rigs…

Another Java-based Decred Wallet GUI is Now Available

6 Mar
2016

decred-java-gui-wallet

While the work on an official Decred GUI wallet is still going on we are getting interesting new unofficial alternatives popping up, after the release of the DecredJWallet now we have another Java=based GUI wallet for Decred (DCR) available. The new GUI wallet (source) looks quite nice in terms of interface and offers a bit of extra functionality as compared to DecredJWallet, but do note that both are still in beta and there could still be some bugs needing to be fixed. Still, the GUI wallets for Decred are making things much easier especially for novice users that are not very fond of using console commands. We know all too well that in order for a crypto currency to be successful it needs to be widespread and easy to be used by as many users and relying only on console clients is certainly not the best thing. But then again it also takes some time for things to be developed, especially when you are not just cloning an existing codebase, but are developing something new as is the case with Decred (DCR).

– To download and try the latest release of the new Java-based Decred GUI wallet…

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