PhoenixMiner 5.5b With Improved Performance and New Features

22 Jan
2021

The latest beta version of PhoenixMiner 5.5b might be of interest for those of you that are trying to mine with the newest AMD Radeon RX6800 and Radeon RX6900 GPUs as it adds support with native kernels giving you better performance. AMD’s Polaris, Vega and Navi GPUs should also perform a bit better and use a bit less power for Ethereum mining thanks to optimized kernels – just make sure to user drivers 20.5.1 or later under Windows 10, or 20.10.x or later under Linux. Nvidia’s dedicated mining GPUs P106, P104, etc. also get better support for tweaking under Windows

PhoenixMiner 5.5b Full Changelog:
– Added native kernels for AMD RX6800 and RX6900 GPUs. These are faster than the generic kernels and produce a lot less stale shares.
– Updated kernels for AMD Polaris, Vega and Navi GPUs that are slightly faster and use less power than before when mining ETH. To use these updated kernels, you need to use drivers 20.5.1 or later under Win10, or 20.10.x or later under Linux!
– The Nvidia mining cards (P106, P104, etc.) can now use straps and hardware control options (power limit, memory overclock, max temperature, etc.) under Windows.
– Added support for AMD Linux drivers 20.45-1164792 and 20.45-1188099. Use this driver only if you have RX6800 or RX6900 GPU. WARNING: Vega and Navi GPUs wont’ work with these drivers!
– Automatically set -ttli instead of -tmax when the later is not supported by the driver. This will throttle down the GPUs when they reach the specified temperature to avoid overheating.

Do note that the AMD’s Radeon drivers for Windows do not support compute mode for Hawaii cards (Radeon 290/390 series), so the hashrate will be quite low (14-15 MH/s with the current ETH DAG epoch). This problem is easily fixed mining ETH under Linux, where you can get the full 29-30 MH/s speed out of the Hawaii cards.

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.5b Ethash miner software…

How To Still Mine Ethereum With AMD Radeon RX 400/500 Series 4GB GPUs

21 Jan
2021

AMD’s Radeon RX 470/480 and RX 570/58 with 4GB of video memory can still be used to mine Ethereum (ETH), even though the DAG size is already a bit over 4GB which is more than the video memory available on these GPUs. The current Ethereum DAG epoch number is #389 and the size of the DAG file is 4.04 GB and it will continue to grow, however with the current profitability mining ETH makes it worth to continue using these 4GB video cards at least a bit more. They can still be used in the so called “Zombie Mode” with a mining software that supports it in order to continue mining Ethereum for a bit more, even though the hashrate is going to be lower and continue to go down a bit by bit with each new DAG epoch coming.

At the moment an optimized AMD Radeon RX 400/500 series GPU with 4GB video memory should be capable of doing 17-18 MHS for Ethash mining with optimized memory timings and downclocked GPU with about a 100W of power consumption at the wall. So, do not be in a hurry to dismiss these “old” and “obsolete” 4GB video cards yet, they still have some life in them for mining Ethereum, you just need to play a bit more to make them work.

The AMD crypto mining software that supports “Zombie Mode” for AMD Radeon 4GB GPUs includes TeamRedMiner, lolMiner and PhoenixMiner and they are available for both Windows and Linux OS, free with some development fee built-in. You will need to add the following command line parameters for each specific miner to enable the “Zombie Mode” and make mining Ethereum work. Have in mind that the number might need to be changed up/down in order to find what works on your mining hardware. Currently we are using 4074 on our test video cards (Gigabyte RX 580 4GB), but on different cards and with a change in the DAG number you may need to set a different number, so do try what works for you.

– For TeamRedMiner: --eth_4g_max_alloc=4074
– For lolMiner: --4g-alloc-size 4074
– For PhoenixMiner: -daglim 4074

If playing with the miners directly is not your thing you may also try the SimpleMining or HiveOS Linux Mining Operating Systems that make it much easier for management of multiple mining rigs. They do come with support for the three miners we have mentioned and thus Zombie Mode for mining Ethereum (ETH) on 4GB AMD GPUs, so you just need to prepare a USB flash drive with the OS on it, plug it in the mining rig and boot from it. Then you continue from a web-based management windows through your browser setting up and monitoring your GPUs. Both SMOS and HiveOS are free to try with a limited number of mining machines and then you need to pay a small monthly fee for additional mining rigs, to continue using the OS. For HiveOS you can use the promo code CMB10USDPROMO that will give you $10 USD in your account balance to play with.

– For more about Simple Mining (SMOS) Linux Mining OS…
– For more about HiveOS Linux Mining Operating System…

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock Ethereum Mining Rig

20 Jan
2021

The recent craze on GPU mining for Ethereum and the resulting Nvidia RTX 30 series shortage as well as pretty much anything else with decent mining performance for Ethash is in full on mode. Still, we have managed to get our hands on a few Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPUs and built a 6x GPU mining rig using them for ETH mining, so below we share some interesting things including the Ethereum mining hashrate we got and the optimized settings for the RTX 3070 and more specifically the GameRock series from Palit that we have used. As you can see from the photo above the GameRock is a bit flashy in terms of design due to the large RGB lighting surface. A feature which might be of interest for a gamer, but is totally not required by a miner as it makes no different whatsoever in terms of performance. Still, the good news is that the cooler of the GameRock GPUs from Palit is with a large surface area and does a great job in keeping things cool and the fans are also dual ball-bearing ones and perform really well. If you are currently using a traditional lighting system, such as fluorescent tubes or metal halides, upgrading to high hat lights should be a top priority if you want to reduce electricity costs.

A single optimized Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock GPU can do a little over 60 MHS with ease with a little tweaking with the help of the MSI Afterburner software. At TDP of just 55% or almost half of the standard power usage these video cards manage to perform really well as far as Ethereum (ETH) mining is concerned with a bit of overclock for the video memory as well – +1100 MHz. The lowered power usage results in lower GPU performance, but RTX 3070 is more than capable of utilizing the fast GDDR6 memory it has with a 256-bit wide memory bus fully to get you about 60.6 MHS mining the Ethash algorithm. No need to overclock or underclock the GPU, though for further power usage optimizations you can also try lowering the operating voltage of the GPU a bit, though not really required (can probably save up to about 100W of power usage for the whole rig).

So, with cooling fans set at 75% and a TDP of 50%, GPU -500 MHz and with +1100 MHz for the video memory you get extra cool and power efficient GPUs mining at over 60 MHs with a total power consumption a little shy from 1000W at the wall (can depend on the PSU efficiency) or a bit over 360 MHs for a 6x GPU mining rig using Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GameRock video card usually reserved for legit cash games with high specs. The screenshot for the hashrate is with the use of the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c and mining Ethash on NiceHash…

The only thing that might be better than the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3060 Ti (in that price/performance range), however the 3060 Ti are even harder to obtain due to their slightly lower price and the same mining performance for Ethereum (ETH). The reason being that RTX 3060 Ti features the same GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, but has a slightly stripped-down GPU. That however does not interfere with Ethereum mining as the GPU on the RTX 3060 Ti still manages really well even with 1000 CUDa cores less. Do note that the RTX 3060 is not that goof of an alternative as unlike the 256-bit memory bus that the Ti has, the regular non-Ti version has just 192-bit memory bus and the hashrate does suffer from that, so no 60 MHs on the non-Ti models!

– To get more details and to download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.4c Ethash miner software…

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