Search Results

nvidia-8x-titan-x

Here is something interesting that is not originally intended to be used as a GPU mining rig, but for a powerful compute oriented machine – an 8x GPU AsRock Rack Barebone populated with eight Nvidia GeForce GTX TITAN X video cards and two 14-core Intel Xeon processors. These powerful rackmount systems are designed for use with Nvidia Tesla cards for high-performance CUDA applications, but you can put in GeForce cards as well such as the TITAN X and have them all running at PCI-E 3.0 x16 speeds (no SLI support is available).

So we took one of these interesting systems and ran a quick test with the latest ccMiner to see what kind of performance we are going to get for crypto currency mining. It was out of curiosity as the system is not intended to be used for GPU mining – the whole things is just way too expensive to probably ever see ROI let alone make some profit from mining. Interestingly enough the 8x GPU configuration requires the use of Windows Server or compatible Linux distribution, with Windows 7 or 8.x we were having trouble making all 8 GPUs work properly (Error code 43 on the 8th card). Apparently there is a solution to make all 8 cards work fine under these consumer versions of Windows as well, all you need to do is some registry modification and you should be fine.

nvidia-8x-titan-x-performance

As you can see from the screenshot the system runs fine with a total hashrate of about 190 MHS mining Quark (98 MHS total on X11 and 25MHS total on Lyra2RE) on all eight GeForce GTX TITAN X GPUs. This means that a single TITAN X card gets you about 24 MHS for mining Quark-based crypto currencies and ll of the cards manage to provide optimum performance. Notice that the fans are turned all the way to 100% for best performance, because otherwise the cards are easily hitting the thermal limit with their fans running on auto at about 50-60% and as a result they throttle down and you loose performance with the GPU frequency dropping down to 1000 MHz. Again this is not a system designed for crypto currency mining, but for compute applications, we were just curious how well it will perform for crypto mining and it does a great job with some tweaking. Of course since the whole thing is designed to be in a server room the noise level is not relevant, though it is quite high as expected thanks to the 8 GPU fans and the other 8 chassis cooling fans that are 24W each when running at maximum RPM.

Maybe if GPU mining picks up to a large scale level like it is happening with Bitcoin mining and is profitable enough we might be able to see solutions like these used, but for now these are limited to businesses using them for high-performance CUDA applications. Think along the lines of 3D design, visual effects rendering, medical imaging, energy exploration or scientific simulations etc.

skc-giveaway

We have received some SkeinCoin (SKC) from a reader to give away for free to visitors of the blog that are interested in some free coins. The idea of course is to rise the interest in SkeinCoin a bit as apparently the coin needs it, so don’t miss your chance to get some free SKC coins. SkeinCoin (SKC) is a Skein-SHA2 alternative crypto coin that can be mined with both CPU and GPU and there is support for mining it with both a fork of cgminer and sgminer on AMD GPUs as well as with Nvidia GPUs using a more recent version of ccMiner.

So getting back to the SkeinCoin (SKC) giveaway, all you have to do to take part in it is to post your SKC wallet address in the comments below and you will get 80 SkeinCoins sent to you – that is the reward you will get if you mine 10 SKC blocks at the moment. Do note that since all of the coins will be sent manually to you it may take some time before your reward is received, but normally it should not take more than a few hours. Only one reward per user is allowed, so please do not abuse our giveaway – we have more than enough coins to give away, but we reserve the right to cancel the giveaway at any time we decide.

The giveaway of SKC (SkeinCoin) is now officially over, we have sent to users 1840 SKC in total.

For more information about the SkeinCoin (SKC) alternative crypto currency…

miner-control-tool-package-update

Time for another update of the complete packages based on the Miner Control tool for Nvidia GeForce GT 750 Ti and AMD Radon R9 280x GPUs due to the latest developments in the mining world. The latest versions you can download from the links below include some updates and it removes the YAAMP pool support as it has become a part of NiceHashand currently redirects to their stratum servers. The latest updates also includes the most recent versions of SP-MOD’s ccMiner for Nvidia Maxwell as well as the sgminer fork with increased performance for Quark and Qubit with pre-compiled Binary Kernels for 280X. The two Miner Control tool packages are based on the latest fork of Miner Control from KBomba version 1.6.4.

To be ready to use the packages you just need to update the account settings for each pool to reflect your BTC payment address. Do note that the default configuration that we have set is mining from time to time for the author of the software (Miner Control) as a donation alternative, but you can change that setting should you wish to. The packages are ready to be used with either AMD Radeon R9 280X or Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti cards, but you can also us the Nvidia package for other GPUs or more cards – what you may need to reflect however in the config file is the total hashrate and power usage. Since the AMD packages contains not only specific settings for AMD Radeon R9 280X, but also pre-compiled binary kernels specifically for that particular card if using it with other GPUs you will actually be getting lower hashrate, though n problem to use it with multiple 280X cards.

To download the Miner Control 1.6.4 AMD Radeon R9 280x ready to use pack for Windows…
To download the Miner Control 1.6.4 Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti ready to use pack for Windows…


top