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The NiceHash service for leasing and renting hashrate has added support for the Neoscrypt algorithm as well following the recent addition to Mining Rig Rentals. This comes to show that the user interest in GPU mining is far from gone and new algorithms such as Neoscrypot by crypto currencies such as FTC are attracting a lot of attention. The service operators at Nicehash do recommend however to use the latest sgminer 5.0 development version with support for Neoscrypt for selling your hashrate to the service as the official cgminer 3.7.8 with Neoscrypt support has the extranonce bug. Looking at the profitability of the available algorithms at the Nicehash service you can see that Neoscrypt is taking the top spot for the best paying algorithm from time to time already.
- In: General Info
- Tags: FeatherCoin, Feathercoin hashrate, FTC, FTC hashrate, neoscrypt, Neoscrypt support, Nicehash
Feathercoin (FTC) has hard forked from the Scrypt algorithm to the NeoScrypt as was announced earlier this year after block 432000. You need to update your wallet to Feathercoin 0.8.7.0 in order to continue using it after the NeoScrypt update and you need to download a special version of cgminer with support for the NeoScrypt algorithm (link below). The goal of the hard fork away from the Scrypt algorithm is to make FTC not mineable with Scrypt ASIC miners giving back the opportunity to GPU miners to mine the coin. Currently the profitability of mining FTC is quite high compared to other coins that are being mined with GPUs, so there is high interest in Feathercoin at the moment. Do note that here is no special miner dedicated for Nvidia miners to mine NeoScrypt using CUDA, however the version of the cgminer with NeoScrypt support actually works quite well not only on AMD, but on Nvidia GPUs as well using OpenCL. The screenshot above is from a GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card at stock frequencies giving a bit over 40 KHS and with some overclock you should be able to push the performance of a single GTX 750 to about 50 KH/S.
Mining with cgminer 3.7.7B with NeoScrypt support (source) on AMD GPUs has something that you make sure to do to get the best performance out of your GPUs. You need to make sure you have Catalyst drivers 13.11 installed, and then run the cgminer to compile the kernel with the settings you are using, then update to the latest 14.9 drivers and run the miner with the already generated kernel (BIN) file with the old drivers. Make sure you don’t change settings affecting the kernel after getting back to the latest video drivers as this will invoke the compilation of a new kernel that will not work and you will most likely be getting HW errors only. Generating kernel with newer drivers and not using a kernel generated with the older 13.11 drivers will not work and you will be getting only hardware errors instead of actual work being done. This is a bit of inconvenience, but you will have to do the driver trick only once and hopefully there will be a fix for this in the future as well as further performance improvements. Currently we are getting about 90-100 KH/s on a single AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU, so the performance on Nvidia graphics cards compared to AMD is looking very nice considering that we are using OpenCL and not CUDA.
– You can download the cgminer 3.7.7b with NeoScrypt support for Windows OS here…
BitMain has revealed a new 63 GHS AntMiner U3 SHA-256 ASIC miner designed for home users as the successor of the previously available USB stick miners that the company offered. The device is apparently made for home users that do not want serious noise levels or high power usage. It is more of an interesting and affordable device for users that are new to ASICs or just for a fun “toy”, don’t expect the U3 USB miner to actually make you some serious profit or something like that. The Antminer U3 is based on four BM1382 ASIC chips resulting in 63 GHS worth of hashrate and is priced at $56 USD per unit or 0.151 BTC at the moment (without shipping). The AntMiner U3 USB miners (connected to a PC via USB, not powered by USB) should start shipping on November 5th, or with other words less than 2 weeks from now. There is however a catch, if you want to order the BitMain AntMiner U3 directly from the manufacturer you will not be able to get a single unit, the minimum order quantity is 20 units. So this kind of defeats the purpose of directly ordering it from BitMain if you are an end user, but we are probably going to see some of BitMain’s partners also offering the miner for people that might be interested in purchasing single units.
BitMain AntMiner U3 ASIC Miner Specifications:
– Hash Rate: 63 GH/s at 0.75V
– Power Efficiency: 0.8 Watt/GH/s on wall at 0.75V
– Voltage: DC 12V input, 6A
– Chip Quantity per unit: 4
– One 80mm fan
– Noise: ~25 DB at 25 °C ambient temperature
– Hashrate and VDD core voltage can be adjusted via cgminer command line
– USB connection
– 12V AC/DC power brick of 6A, but power line not included
– Certificate Compliance: FCC/CE
Note that the noise level of these should be pretty low indeed at just about 25 Decibels, there is no exact power usage quoted, but it should be less than 70W which the supplied power adapter is apparently capable of as maximum. With the cited power usage of 0.8W per GHS the actual power usage should be close to about 50 Watts for the whole unit or maybe slightly more. The devices should be overclockable apparently through the cgminer command line, so there should be some headroom for increasing their hashrate with the expense of a bit more power usage. Again do note that these miners are low hashrate and low powers, designed to be silent and used by home miners just for fun and not as a means to make profit as they many not even be able to get you a return of investment in the foreseeable future.
– For more information about the BitMain AntMiner U3 Bitcoin ASIC miner…