Impressions from the Newer 5-chip Gridseed Scrypt ASIC Devices

12 Mar
2014

gridseed-5-chip-asic-new-version

In our article about our first impressions from the Gridseed 5-chip Scrypt Asic earlier this month we were not very happy with our initial experience from the device. It seems we’ve got one of the earlier builds that were not very well built and the software for using them was also at a very early stage. Today however things look much better, we just got a new unit that we have ordered and it is much better built and uses the STM32 Virtual COM port driver instead of the CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller that our previous unit had.

cgminer-gridseed-stm32

We have tested the new ASIC device and it works just fine with the STM32 drivers installed with the modified for low power usage cpuminer for Scrypt mining by giving the virtual COM port number of the device. The ASIC also worked just fine when we have replaced the STM32 vitual cOM Port driver with WinUSB using Zadig to use cgminer 3.7.2 for Scrypt mining on the ASIC. We still haven’t tried using the new 5-chip Gridseed ASIC device to work in dual mining mode with TLC and BTC mining running at the same time as apparently the dual mining method that have already described for our older ASIC using the CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller is not working for devices with STM32 Virtual COM port drivers, so we’ll be getting back with more details on that later on when we figure it out.

For the moment however we are much more satisfied with the newer revisions of the 5-chip Gridseed LTC/BTC ASIC devices, especially when we take into account the improvement of the software support side for them in the last few days.

Download CUDAminer Nvidia GPU Miner With Blake-256 Support

12 Mar
2014

cudaminer-blakecoin-support

The latest beta version of cudaminer has support for the Blake-256 algorithm available, however there is still no official release available compiled for windows that has the new code with Blake algorithm support, so we have compiled it and provide it to you for download. So far the Blake-256 algorithm is only used by two crypto currencies – Blakecoin (BLC) and Photon (PHO), but the good news that if more come out you will be already ready to mine them with Nvidia GPUs as well. Note that the hashrate you will be getting mining Blake-256 crypto currencies will be in megahashes and not in the kilohashes range and that is pretty normal for this algorithm. Mining on AMD GPUs will still bring significantly higher performance than on Nvidia, but still you can mine on Nvidia as well.

– Download the CUDAminer Nvidia GPU Miner with Blake-256 Support for Windows…

Weekly Report on Our PB Mining Cloud Mining Service Testing

11 Mar
2014

pbmining-current-hashrate-and-price

One more week has passed from our ongoing PB Mining Bitcoin cloud mining service tests and we got some requests to report on how things are progressing. We are currently testing a few more other cloud mining services that lately do have some issues as apparently they are getting DDOS attacks from people trying to hack them and this is hurting the user experience. What we have noticed is that so far there were no problems with the normal operation of the PB Mining service since we’ve started using it more than two weeks ago and things are still running smooth and on time, definitely a serious plus in our personal opinion.

pbmining-week-2-earnings

As we’ve already discussed PB Mining is sending the payouts from the cloud mining hashrate that you have purchased every Sunday before Midnight. This is a bit of a drawback as you have to wait a week to get your earnings available the in Bitcoin wallet, it would’ve been even better if the payouts were daily, so that you would have access to the mined funds faster. Another thing that we have noticed since we’ve purchased another 9 GHs after the initial 1 GHS we used for testing was that each purchase comes on a separate line in your profile and that makes it a bit harder to track the overall results. Also when you are getting your payments sent they come in separate transactions for each purchased lot of hashrate, so if you purchase 10 or 20 times different amounts of cloud mining hashrate it will be harder to track them easily, though there are no problems and you are getting payed as promised and what you have earned right on time.

We have noticed that the total hashrate of the pool has reached 38000 GHS, so the operators of the service are apparently adding more ASICs all the time in order to supply enough hashrate with the increasing demand. If you are planning to start using the BTC cloud mining services that PB Mining provides it will be wise to wait a bit more until the new Bitcoin difficulty hits as we expect the price per GHS to get even lower. The next difficulty increase of the Bitcoin network should happen in about one more day, though the increase this time will be a bit more subtle with roughly about 12-13%. With the previous difficulty increase we’ve seen a price drop for the price per GHS, so we expect to see another one this time as well, so you can just purchase a few GHS to test the service now and get more in a day after the difficulty increases at even better price. Note that PB Mining does provide a long term contracts where you are renting the hashrate you purchase for 5 years period of time and you cannot sell it or transfer it to another user (at least for the moment). So do have in mind that if you plan on investing into cloud mining hashrate there, we do plan to increase our hashrate from the current 10 GHS to at least 20 for the next week when the new difficulty hits and we get an even better price per KHS.

– For more information and to try out the PB Mining Bitcoin cloud mining service…

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