New grs-sgminer Fork with Optimized GroestlCoin Performance

18 Jun
2014

grs-sgminer-fork-windows

If you are mining GroestlCoin (GRS) with AMD GPUs, you might want to check out this new fork of sgminer called grs-sgminer by srcxxx that comes with optimized kernel for higher performance for mining GRS and DiamondCoin (source). Do note that the miner may not work on older AMD GPUs and the performance may vary based on the video driver version you are using, people are reporting various results with different drivers. The windows binary we have compiled and provide below did give us a performance of about 15 MHS on a Radeon R9 280x GPU running the latest beta drivers 14.6 from AMD, but your results may vary. You are welcome to try it out and report your performance and experience with different GPUs and driver version in the comments below.

– You can download the new higher performance grs-sgminer binaries compiled for Windows OS here…

The Scryptcc Cloud Mining Service Moving from GPUs to Scrypt ASICs

18 Jun
2014

scryptcc-scrypt-cloud-mining-service

The Scrypt cloud mining service Scryptcc was one of the first to start offering Scrypt cloud hashrate using GPUs for mining alternative Scrypt-based crypto currencies and paying its users in Bitcoin. The service was quite interesting when they’ve launched, but had some issues from the start and they were a bit slow in fixing things, but lately they seem to have improved. In fact we’ve seen some similar services come and go and this one is still here and without having some major hiccups like others had. The interesting thing was that up until recently they were still using only GPUs for mining Scrypt and thus the profitability was not good at all. However there is a new announcement that they have started adding Scrypt ASICs in their new data center and report that profitability has started to get better again. Currently the price of 1 KHS is ~0.000324 BTC or about 0.324 BTC per Megahash worth of Scrypt mining hashrate at the service, so definitely not the best price. According to the profit calculator available on their website buying 1 MHS of cloud mining hashrate at the moment you can expect to break even in about 152 days. This is not the best deal we’ve seen for sure, but not the worst either.

– For more information about the Scryptcc cloud mining service and to try it out…

KnCMiner is Ready To Start Shipping The 3 THS Bitcoin Neptune ASIC Miners

17 Jun
2014

kncminer-neptune-bitcoin-asic-miners

KnCMiner has just announced that they are already in the testing/tweaking/assembly stage of their 20 nanometer Neptune ASIC processors in Sweden and shipping should commence some time later this week. The Neptune processors are quite an interesting technological achievement as they are actually the first commercially available 20 nanometer processor shipped to end users… and we are not talking about ASIC miners only. Intel for example is currently shipping 22nm CPUs, though they are already preparing for a 14nm launch maybe sometime later this year, and AMD’s latest processors take advantage of 28nm fabrication process. So it is interesting to see a Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer pushing advanced technology ahead of other much larger and more established companies are able to do so.

The Neptune is a 1440-core 55×55 mm package tailor-made for the Bitcoin mining (SHA-256 ASIC). Each Neptune miner will consist of 5 ASIC chips and comes in new sturdier enclosure and packaging and should be capable of 3 THS or even more while consuming about 2.1 KW of power at the wall. That results out to just about 0.7 watts of power used per GHS, so really god power efficiency and KnC does promise to possibly further increase the performance of the device with software updates. The first two batches of the Neptune Bitcoin miners are already sold-out and KnCMiner is taking pre-orders for Batch three at the moment. They expect to start shipping Batch 1 to customers this week and to Batch 2 pre-orders before the end of the month.

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