Zeus Catching Up With Shipping Units from the BATCH 1 Orders

5 Jun
2014

zeusminer-new-case-design

It seems that our order for a ZeusMiner Blizzard has been finally shipped yesterday (Order #2054 ), so it seems that the company will most likely be able to do what they have promised. That however does not make the Blizzard an interesting buy other than for testing, and that is precisely why we did order the unit, so that we can review it and try the Zeus Scrypt ASIC chips. Meanwhile Zeus has announced they are going to e releasing a ZeusController image for Raspberry Pi with a web-based interface for their miners and apparently they are also working on offering miner hosting options for customers that request it. With the reports we are seeing on higher actual power consumption than what was previously announced as official specs, a hosted option may not be a bad option if the price is right.

zeusminer-batch-2-prices

Zeus also announced new prices for Batch 2 orders that are supposed to start shipping on June 15th, the new Hurricane and Thunder miners will also come with new and improved cases. But there is no word on optimized firmwares yet to help users get the best performance/power usage ratio. Also BATCH 1 customers will get an additional 10% off for one order from the second batch, and if you are already an existing BATCH 1 customer, you automatically qualify for the more free stuff If you place an order for the same amount of higher for BATCH 2. It is up to you do decide if it is worth ordering, for us, well we are waiting for our first miner to see how things are actually working.

– To read the latest update from ZeusMiner regarding the current status of shipping units…

New Crypto Coins Launching Today – June 4th

4 Jun
2014

physical-bitcoins

The new coins launching today are pretty much X11 and X13 only, with X13 really booming the last two days giving a good opportunity for people to lease their X13 mining rigs or sell the hashrate and make some nice profit due to the overwhelming demand and high prices for X12 hashrate at the moment. If you don’t want to sell your hashrate you might want to check out the new coin launches and if you find any of them interesting enough to try to catch it for the launch. We feel like we are going to pass on all of these new launches today, even though the LeagueCoin (LOL) might’ve been promising if it was properly developed and considered to be interesting for users to mine, with a 1 Million LOL coins going for an IPO and only 1.2-1.5 Million coins actually mineable in the coin’s POW stage it is really pointless to even consider mining it.

List of New Crypto Coins Launching Today:
– HonorCoin (XHC) – X11 – POW/POS – 2% Premine for Free Distrbution
– AngryBirdsCoin (ABC) – X11 – POW/POS – 0.5% Premine
– LeagueCoin (LOL) – X11 – POW/POS – HUGE 1 Million LOL IPO!!!
– SherlockCoin V2 (SHC2) – X13 – POW/POS – Premine the number of v1 coins mined to be exchanged
– XICoin (XI) – X13 – POW/POS – 1% Premine

New sgminer 5.0 beta with Unified Runtime-Kernel-Switching Now Available

3 Jun
2014

sgminer-5-0-beta-windows

There is now a new sgminer 5.0 beta (source) available that is trying to provide an unified and feature-full GPU miner by integrating the kernels from the sph-sgminer, the SHA3 (keccak) from cgminer as well as the modified x11 and x13 kernels from lasybear’s fork of sgminer. The most important feature, apart form the wider crypto algorithms support in the new version is the support for runtime-kernel-switching on the fly. Simply said you are able to have multiple pools set in your config and these pools can be for different algorithm coins and with different GPU settings for each. So a single GPU mining rig can mine for different coins using different algorithms, or have these pools as failover etc. No need to use a different miner for different pools and for different coins anymore, or at least almost as not yet all algorithms are supported.

Currently the new sgminer 5.0 beta does have support for the following kernels: Scrypt, Scrypt-N, X11 (darkcoin-mod), X13 (marucoin-mod), SHA3-Keccak (maxcoin), animecoin, fuguecoin, groestlcoin, inkcoin, myriadcoin-groestl, quarkcoin, qubitcoin, sifcoin and twecoin. Do note that sgminer is still an OpenCL miner suitable for mining on AMD-based GPUs, for Nvidia CUDA support you will still have to rely on either CudaMiner or ccMiner, depending on the algorithm of the coin you are mining if it is supported. You can also run Nvidia GPUs with OpenCL on the sgminer, however the performance you will get this way will simply not be worth it as compared to what a dedicated CUDA-based miner might offer. The pool specific settings you can currently set on per pool basis in the sgminer.conf file are the following: pool-algorithm, pool-nfactor, pool-intensity, pool-xintensity, pool-rawintensity, pool-gpu-engine, pool-gpu-memclock, pool-gpu-threads, pool-thread-concurrency, pool-gpu-fan.

We have compiled a windows binary for the new sgminer 5.0 beta and you can download and try it yourself. Do note however that this is a beta software and still needs some more work in order to work stable and without problems. While we were testing it we had the miner crashing multiple times while building the binary of the OpenCL kernel, we have noticed that if you have more than 3 pools setup in the config it happens all the time, with 3 or less it builds the kernels just fine and after that it seem to work stable with more pools added. This happens regardless if the pools are using the same algorithm or are configured to use different algorithms, so good for testing, but do not be in a hurry to replace all of your other miners just yet.

– You can download and try the new sgminer 5.0 beta for GPU Mining on Windows OS here…

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