The Crypto-Games Team is Giving 0.5 BTC as Rewards to Folding@Home Users

1 Apr
2020

There is one more incentive for anyone willing to switch their CPU/GPU mining hardware from crypto mining to helping the Folding@Home in their fight against COVID-19 coming from the Crypto-Games Team who are giving away 0.5 BTC to join their Folding@Home team. In order to be able to participate in this incentive you need to use the following team number in your Folding@Home client – 247983 in order for your stats to be tracked.

Starting right now and until the end of April or until they run out of rewards, there will be a team competition for most Credits completed within the Folding@home team. The prize pool is 0.50 BTC for this event, all prizes will be dealt via the tipping feature on the Crypto.Games website, so if you do not have an account yet, you would need to sign up for one. You need to post your F@H username and CG username in a dedicated thread on the Bitcointalk forum or in Crypto.Games Discord server in order to be assigned to one of three squads, then for every 100k credits you complete while folding, you will get 0.0001 BTC or an altcoin equivalent.

The maximum reward for one user is at 0.01 BTC, which can be reached with 10 Million credits accumulated in F@H, though continuing after that will still contribute to your group’s total. In addition to the individual rewards, you and your squad will compete against the other groups for the most combined Credits. The first placed squad gets 0.06 BTC, the second gets 0.03 BTC, and the last gets 0.01 BTC. Rewards are distributed evenly for each and every member of the group, assuming they did complete 5 or more Work Units. Furthermore 0.05 BTC will be rewarded with lottery tickets to users that participate, but do not have a lot of computing power.

Apart from donating your computing power for free, or taking part in this incentive, you can also earn CureCoin (CURE) as well as earn Banano (BAN). So there you have multiple options to both help with the coronavirus fight and at the same time also earn some crypto in order to at least cover some part of the electricity costs of your mining hardware… or if you just need some extra incentive.

– For more details about the currently running CG Folding@Home competition…

Trying Out the Autotuning Function of Braiins OS+ on AntMiner S9

31 Mar
2020

One of the most interesting features of the brand new Braiins OS+ firmware for Antminer S9 ASIC miners is the auto-tuning functionality that automates per-chip overclocking in order to maximize performance for the available power and temperature conditions in order to increase the performance of your available miners. Since we already had a couple of S9 ASIC miners that used older release on the Braiins OS we did a quick and easy upgrade offer SSH to the latest Braiins OS+ release and decided to do a quick test of the auto-tuning feature. We remind you that the OS+ version is not completely open source and “free” like the normal Braiins OS, but it is the one that features the auto-tuning option. Braiins OS+ has a 2% developer fee built-in as a means to help further development, but thanks to the auto tuning feature you should be able to squeeze some extra performance to cover the fee and still be better than manual or stock settings.

We started our testing by disabling the temperature control and forcing the fans to operate at 100% all the time in order to ensure that the cooling performance will be at maximum level all the time for these air cooled S9 miners. Then we have set the PSU power limit to 1500W and started waiting for the automated script to do its magic in finding what the optimal settings would be for all of the chips in the ASIC miner and what will be the final hashrate we are going to be getting in a while from this stock 14 THS SHA256 ASIC miner. Do note that you are not actually required to specify a power limit of the PSU that the autotuning algorithm can take into account in order to maximize the TH/W produced by the mining device, but that can help to ensure that you will not have problems caused by the miner reaching the limits of the PSU you are using.

The result after leaving the auto-tuning to run a while on the miner showed the following result: 16.5-16.6 THS hashrate within the set power limit of 1500W and operating temperatures of the chips trying to stay below 90 degrees Celsius with the cooling fans operating at 100%. We should also note that even though the firmware may do per-chip optimizations for best results, the web-based interface does not provide you with detailed per-chip information, you still get a somewhat summarized hash chains information. We are not sure how long it may take for the auto-tuning to finish or of it actually finishes or tries to find optimal settings when operating conditions change… it is just not well documented for the moment, but it does seem to be working pretty well based on our first experience using it. Of course depending on a lot of conditions the results you will be getting from the auto-tuning feature may vary from miner to miner, so do not expect to see the same improvement on all of your available S9 miners!

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…

New Braiins OS and Braiins OS+ Firmware for Antminer S9 ASICs

31 Mar
2020

There is a new major release of the Braiins OS open source miner firmware for Bitmain’s most popular S9 series of ASIC miners available now. In fact there are now two different versions available Braiins OS community edition and Braiins OS+ enterprise edition, both available for free, with a different feature set and some specifics we’ll cover in a moment. You can use the new Braiins OS or OS+ to replace the original Bitmain firmware on Antminer S9, S9i and S9j and soon hopefully the newer S17 and T17 models will also be supported along with other devices in the future. Braiins OS is fully open-source and customizable so you can tweak it to fit your needs, it supports AsicBoost, supports Stratum V1 and V2 implementation, uses a custom BOSminer developed from scratch in Rust and provides some extra useful features that can help you tweak your ASIC miners and get more of your hardware. The Braiins OS community edition is completely free and open-source without the need to pay for it or any developer fees, unlike the case with some other custom firmware solutions.

The new Braiins OS+ enterprise edition is built on top of the standard community editions and has some extra features available, most interesting of which are the auto-tuning feature to increase hashrate and the low power mode for maximum efficiency as well as the pre-heat option. The rest is like in the standard edition, but the extra features allow you to tweak even better your performance or energy efficiency, depending on your specific needs. The small catch with the Braiins OS+ enterprise edition is that for the extra features you get you will have to agree to the 2% built-in developer fee, however you will also get a 50% reduction (from 2% to 1%) of the pool fee if you use the miners with Braiins OS+ on the Slush Pool for mining. Thanks to the auto-tuning feature in which algorithms automatically evaluate the optimal frequencies for hashing chip-by-chip, instead of treating the entire machine as one single unit the extra performance you may get from a miner should be much more than the fee that you will need to pay.

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…

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