filmes porno buceta gostosa phim sex www xxnxx com xxxvideos porno Xvideos Com

Search Results

First Impressions From a 4-card AMD Radeon R9 290 Scrypt Mining Rig

10, Mar 2014

4-card-radeon-r9-290-scrypt-mining-rig

We’ve recently built a Scrypt mining rig consisting of four AMD Radeon R9 290 by XFX for a friend and since this was actually our first rig with Radeon R9 290 cards we’ve had some interesting findings that we decided to share with you, so if you have some of these troubles we might be able to help. Aside from the four XFX video cards we’ve used an EVGA 1300W PSU (you can see the total system power consumption of 1282W from the mains), Intel Celeron G1820 processor and AsRock H81 Pro BTC motherboard, together with 4GB and Windows 7 OS. For the video cards we have used PCI-E x1 to x16 USB 3.0 Extenders with 1 meter long cable and the cards did not have any trouble working like that. Note that the Radeon R9 290 cards are not considered to be the best option for Scrypt mining, however with R9 280X cards harder to find some people decide to go for the more easily found 290 or 290X models. But unlike with Radeon R9 280X, the R9 290/290X cards have more specifics and could cause you some extra headaches until you finally make them work as they should and provide decent hashrate without problems.

4-card-radeon-r9-290-scrypt-mining-rig-performance

The average hashrate we got from the cards running at stock frequencies of 947 MHz GPU and 1250 MHz video memory got us about 857 KH/S per card or a total hashrate of about 3.4 MH/S. This is what is considered a fairly good results for Radeon R9 290 cards and unfortunately overclocking these cards did not help us in getting higher hashrate, not that we wanted to overclock them as they are already getting quite hot mining Scrypt cryptos. It seems that XFX’s cooling is not that great for mining crypto coins as the temperatures of the VRMs gets easily over 100 degrees Celsius and that is not that great for 24/7 mining even though they are probably rated at up to about 120 degrees C or even a bit more.

One very important thing in making the AMD Radeon R9 290 or 290X cards is how you call up the cgminer, because you need to use a high thread concurrency value that often tends to bring some issues with cgminer. In order to ensure that you can start cgminer without problems you can start by using the command lines below to call cgminer.exe from a BAT file:

set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
set GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
timeout 1
start /realtime cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://us-east.multipool.us:7777 -u yourworker.1 -p password --thread-concurrency 22516 -g 1 --lookup-gap 2 -w 512 -I 20

Note that sometimes even after calling cgminer with the above commands and save a congif file and then you run cgminer.exe directly and it loads up the config file you can still get errors. So if you want to use the config file after you start cgminer with the above commands and save them in config just remove all of the parameters from the cgminer.exe start line, but still start the miner with the BAT file!

Another very important thing regarding the use of AMD Radeon R9 290 video cards for crypto mining is that these video cards do not feature any analog video outputs, so if you plan on using the mining rig without a monitor connected to a card, then you might have trouble. And you cannot just make a dummy plug with resistors, you will need to get an HDMI to VGA or Display Port to VGA adapter to plug in in one of the available video outputs and then add resistors to the VGA output side. This is the recommend solution that can save you some trouble in making the mining rig function properly or if you want to control it remotely with TeamViewer for example. If you have a digital monitor connected and are going to be controlling and monitoring the mining rig with Radeon R9 290 cards then you don’t need to bother with digital adapters to VGA.

How to Mine Both BTC and LTC on Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASIC

6, Mar 2014

gridseed-dualmining-on-windows-success

The 5-chip Gridseed GC3355-based ASIC devices that support Dual Mining for Bitcoin and Litecoin are not that easy to be used in the Dual Mode, because you need to have two different software miners running at the same time. There is a bit of specifics in what and how you need to do in order to mine both BTC and LTC at the same time and after a bit of tinkering we have managed to finally make things work as they should under Windows. You need to download a special modified version of cpuminer for Scrypt (LTC) mining and a modified version of cgminer for SHA-256 (BTC) mining. We have compiled the two software miners and you will find the download links below. You will also need the Zadig software in order to replace the virtual USB to COM driver with WinUSB driver for the cgminer to detect and work with the BTC mining side of the ASICs.

zadig-gridseed-dualminer-usb-config

– Download and run the latest version of Zadig
– From the Zadig interface select Options and choose List All Devices
– From the Dropdown list of devices select CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller and click on Replace Driver with the WinUSB driver selected
– If you have multiple 5-chip GC3355 DualMiner USB devices connected you may need to repeat the procedure for all of them
– Download, edit and run the BTC.bat file from the modified cgminer 3.8.5 for the Gridseed ASICs to start the miner working on BTC
– Download, edit and run LTC_ONLY.bat file from the modified cpuminer for Gridseed ASICs to start mining for LTC (check what your COM port is and edit it). You need to add the parameter “dual” (without the quotes and two dashes in front) to the command line in order for the Dual mode mining to start working

It seems that there are some ASIC devices that may be using different virtual USB to COM drivers other than the CP2102 that our unit has (for example ST32 Virtual COM Port), unfortunately we don’t have any of those to test with. You can however try to make things work by replacing the other driver with WinUSB, just select the right name from the dropdown box (do not try to rename drivers, it is pointless) and Replace it with WinUSB (you may need to unplug and plug the USB cable to the miner after that). If after installing the WinUSB driver over the virtual USB to COM driver the ASIC does not work with cgminer, you just need to uninstall the driver from the Device Manager and unplug/plug the USB cable to the device for it to install the original USB to COM driver and it should be functioning again with cpuminer (note that this way you may have it running on a new COM port).

This is it, you should have the miner running both SHA-256 (BTC) and Scrypt (LTC) mining withe the two software miners and the total power consumption should be about 60W. Note that you may need to lower the operating frequencies a bit for when mining the Dual BTC/LTC mode as the chips get hotter. If you want to mine only BTC you can stick only with running the modified cgminer, for LTC only you need the modified cpuminer without the dual option in the command line. The most attractive aspect of the Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASIC however remains their very low power consumption for Scrypt mining only mode, so think again if you really wan to run them in the Dual Mining more or for BTC only and not in LTC only mining mode instead.

First Impressions from the Gridseed 5-chip Scrypt Asic

1, Mar 2014

gridseed-5-chip-gold-scrypt-asic

Yesterday we have received our order of a single 5-chip Gridseed DualMiner device that is capable of Scrypt mining with a hasrate of 300 KHS as per the deice description, so we have already played with it for a bit and are ready to share what are our first impressions. A few days ago we have also shared our First Impressions from the DualMiner USB Scrypt ASIC that uses a single Gridchip GC3355 processor. The single chip device did work pretty well and although it needs a bit more improvement on the software side, it is well designed and works well in terms of hardware. So we were eager to try out the more powerful 5-chip version that we actually don’t know how to call exactly yet – Gridseed Golden Orb, Gridseed 5-chip Dual Miner, Lightningasic DualMiner it goes by all of these names with some variations in the color of the cooler – gold, silver, or red. The hardware inside remains the same however, capable of mining BTC and LTC at the same time or only Scrypt cryptos such as LTC with a higher performance then when working in dual mining mode. We don’t care about the BTC mining capabilities of the device, so we are going to focus only on the LTC (Scrypt) mining capabilities and performance.

gridseed-5-chip-gold-scrypt-asic-open

From the outside the miner looks pretty good, so we have opened it to see what is the build quality inside the device – checking the components and the cooling design. Unfortunately we cannot say that we are happy from what we saw inside. While the PCB design is good and seems well made, the additional components on top and the wiring disappoint. We see masking tape used to insulate components like for example the USB to COM board, amateurish solution for the button next to the adapter power socket etc. Furthermore our unit had two of the wires from the USB to COM board squashed by the bottom part of the cooler over one of the Gridseed chips. This could cause issues with cooling and can also create problems with communication between the device and the computer feeding it with work, so we had to fix some of the wiring and insulation in order to avoid possible problems in the future. We can say however that we do not really like the build quality for something that is currently sold quite expensive, it seems amateurish and like it has been assembled in someone’s garage without adequate quality control. We really expected more, especially after seeing how good the single chip USB miner was made…

cpuminer-for-gridseed-5-chip-asic

After fixing the hardware inside the miner it was time to fire up the device and try it out. So we had to look for some instructions how to use it as well as drivers and mining software (no documentation or software was included). We actually had some trouble having the miner properly recognized on half of the computers we have tried – the drivers did not function properly or did not assign a COM port for the device – it is connected via a USB port. Then to our surprise we’ve had to use a modified version of cpuminer that will work with the device and that software is really lacking advanced features that are found in the likes of cgminer for example. The miner software even does not give you a local report on the actual hashrate of the device, it only shows 0 KH/S, so you have to rely on the hashrate reported by the pool. There is also no adequate information about stale shares or hardware errors, so on the software miner side there is much work to be done for proper user experience – we need at least a recent version of cgminer modified to support the ASIC device.

gridseed-5-chip-asic-power-usage

Moving to the power consumption of the 5-chip Scrypt ASIC miner. By specifications the device should consume about 8W for Scrypt only mining and 60W for Scrypt and SHA-256 (LTC and BTC) combined mode. We are only interested by the Scrypt mining functionality of the device, so we expected to see very low power consumption, but to our surprise the watt meter showed 56W. It seems that even though we are not mining BTC with the miner that functionality is still active and the miner consumer power as if the device is working in both BTC and LTC mining mode. We’ve read that there is apparently an update released to fix the power consumption issue, but only released as a source code for the miner and you need to be able to compile it yourself – hardly anything that most miners are able to do by themselves.

So to conclude our initial impressions. It seems that these 5-chip Gridseed Dual Miners are far from ready for release to end users, however the company (companies) making them have rushed them on the market due to the user demand. They do not seem well enough built with good quality control, the mining software is in a very basic form just to say it is available and works. There is no detailed documentation for setup and use, so you will have to figure some things by yourself… not to mention any support, so if you have a problem you will have to rely on the mining community for help. It seems that these 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices are not even in Beta, they are more like an Alfa stage product rushed to the market. We suppose that Gridseed did not even consider using these as a separate units, but had in mind to sell them in packs of 10 or 20 orbs with an additional controller that they will be connected and controlled from. We’ve ordered a single unit just to try it out before deciding is it is worth go for a 10 (3 MHS) or 20 unit (6 MHS) solution, but after reading about issues people are having with these and having issues ourselves with the single orb devices we can say that we are not happy with what we got for our money. We expected much more and actually a finished product, not some half baked solution that you can hope will work somehow and not cause you issues. We cannot recommend to an average user or miner these devices at all, if you are a technical guy with a lot of experience and knowledge in mining and miners (including software) you might like the challenge however. The single chip DualMiner USB ASICs however are a much more finished and user friendly product, so you might want to check these out for now and stay away from the bigger 5-chip devices until they become a more complete and properly working solutions.


top