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Back in September with the release of the new Maxwell-based NVidia GPUs, the GTX 970 and GTX 980 we did some performance testing of the GeForce GTX 980 hashrate using the available at that time ccMiner and CudaMiner miners. Today, a bit over two months later we’ve decided to check how hings have progressed in terms of performance improvements of the various crypto mining algorithms with the latest optimizations available in ccMiner. We’ve used the just posted Maxwell-optimized ccMiner 1.5-git ccMiner fork from SP to get the performance results from the same GTX 980 GPU running at stock frequencies (overclocking can further increase performance).
There is no surprise that there are some significant performance improvements in various crypto algorithms that have been achieved using various optimizations, but to our surprise there ware a few algorithms that did perform worse. The results we got from Groestl, HEFTY1 and JHA were a bit lower with the latest ccMiner than what we got in terms of performance back in September. Some other algorithms also don’t seem to have very big performance improvements such as Keccak, Luffa512 or NIST5, but the more popular and still profitable to mine algorithms do come with nice improvements. You can thank for the increase in performance to all of the developers that continue to work actively and optimize the performance out of which SP and tpruvot seem to be the most active lately, djm34, tsiv as well as others who have contributed code and also Christian Buchner and Christian H. – the creators of the ccMiner in the first place. Their code contributions and efforts in releasing their work publicly deserve some appreciation from the miners who are using Nvidia GPUs in order to keep them motivated. Below you can find the official donation addresses where you can send some coins for a beer or more to the each of the developers:
tpruvot
BTC: 1AJdfCpLWPNoAMDfHF1wD5y8VgKSSTHxPo
DRK: XeVrkPrWB7pDbdFLfKhF1Z3xpqhsx6wkH3
NEOS: NaEcVrdzoCWHUYXb7X8QoafoKS9UV69Yk4
XST: S9TqZucWgT6ajZLDBxQnHUtmkotCEHn9z9SP
BTC: 1CTiNJyoUmbdMRACtteRWXhGqtSETYd6Vd
DRK: XdgfWywdxABwMdrGUd2xseb6CYy1UKi9jXdjm34
BTC: 1NENYmxwZGHsKFmyjTc5WferTn5VTFb7Zetsiv
BTC: 1QD25HSCF8EAxUTYj2XsXZNGBi7RvQ21p8
SPR: SfSEcVQGhbXvPQ2hkTj3vxSd9PEZA12efacbuchner
LTC: LKS1WDKGED647msBQfLBHV3Ls8sveGncnm
BTC: 16hJF5mceSojnTD3ZTUDqdRhDyPJzoRakM
Lithium (LIT) Added to BlakeCoin Merged Mining
5, Oct 2014
The Blake-256 based crypto currencies merged mining now has another new addition, the new coin is called Lithium (LIT), bringing the total number of merged mined coins to 7 (including BlakeCoin). LIT is still pretty new coin and is not yet available for trade on an exchange, but will most likely soon appear on exchanges that support other Blake-256 coins. If you still haven’t tried merged mining for BLC + 6 other Blake-256 coins, then you might want to check things out. Also we already have a new NOMP-based merged mining pool available as well as a ccMiner fork with Blake algorithm support since the last time we have covered merged mining for this crypto algorithm.
Blake-256 Algorithm GPU miners:
– Cgminer 3.7.2 with Blake-256 support for AMD
– Cgminer 3.1.1 with Blake-256 support for AMD
– ccMiner with Blake-256 support for Nvidia
– CudaMiner with Blake-256 support for Nvidia
Pools for Merged Mining of Blake-256 coins:
– http://eu3.blakecoin.com/
– http://ny2.blakecoin.com/
– http://la1.blakecoin.com/
– http://cg1.blakecoin.com/
Exchanges for trading Blake-256 coins:
– Atomic Trade
Nvidia has just introduced their new high-end Maxwell-based GPUs the GTX 980 and GTX 970 and the expectations from them in terms of performance for crypto mining are pretty high. After earlier this year we saw what the mid-range GTX 750 Ti, the first Maxwell card was capable of, we already had high hopes for the upcoming faster models. Apparently we are not going to be disappointed by the performance we are going to get, below you can see a chart with the hashrate that the new GeForce GTX 980 (GM204) provides in various crypto algorithms. These were actual tests ran using the latest versions of CudaMiner and ccMiner with support for Compute 5.0 with no special optimizations that could possibly benefit the new cards any further.
In the table you can see the algorithm, the hashrate you get with the GTX 980 and the TDP usage percentage. The GeForce GTX 980 has a TDP rating of just 165 Watts, so with this maximum power consumption you can see that not all algorithms are utilizing it at 100%, meaning the actual power usage is lower. The performance you can expect to get from the GTX 980 is roughly about three times higher with about three times more power usage as compared to the GTX 750 for crypto mining. The initial price of the GTX 980 however could be a reason for miners to go to the slightly slower GTX 970 model for crypto mining as you should be able to get two GTX 970s for a price a bit higher than for a single GTX 980 and the performance you will get from the two cards should be significantly better than from a single GTX 980.
The results posted above are with a reference GTX 980 card running at stock frequency, considering that the GM204 does overclock really good, higher results can be attained when the card is overclocked. The second set of results (the OC ones) are achieved with the card overclocked to GPU at 1520 MHz, Video RAM to 8250 MHz and TDP limiter set to the maximum 125%. This is really pushing the GTX 980 to its stable maximum limits as the card really does handle serious overclock pretty well. Unfortunately we do not have access to a GTX 970 GPU for the moment, so we cannot yet test to see the difference in performance, though it should not be that high, but the 970 should be available at a much more attractive price, so it could be the more obvious choice for crypto mining rigs. The GTX 750 Ti still seems like a good more budget oriented solution for mining.
You should be well aware of the fact that some ccMiner forks are nor working very well with the GTX 980, we’ve had some weird results showing like way too little load and low hashrate or the miner crashing, also one of the reasons that not all available algorithms are listed. The GTX 980 and GTX 970 does support Compute 5.2 and not all forks of ccMiner we have used for testing are compiled to even support the Compute 5.0, the CudaMiner has not been updated for a while and we have used the latest official release for the Scrypt testing… not that you would use a GPU nowadays to mine Scrypt crypto coins anyway.