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It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
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Claymore has been quite active in further developing his dual miner for AMD OpenCL GPUs intended to mine both Ethereum (ETH) and Decred (DCR) since our initial post about his first release a few days ago. The latest updates include some of the features we noted as missing in the initial release such as Stratum support for Decred or the ability to set workers for Ethereum mining pools. The more interesting improvements however are those relates to the performance you get from the miner, he has been able to squeeze some extra performance in terms of the hashrate you get for mining Ethereum while at the same time you still get decent performance for mining Decred as well.
The earlier versions showed a bit of a decrease of the performance in Ethereum while using the dual mining mode, but the latest improvements have significantly improved the situation, including the results for slower AMD GPUs. With the latest version 3+ you can get slightly more Ethereum mining hashrate than with the regular ethminer while at the same time you are also mining some Decred. The higher-end the AMD GPU you are using, the higher performance gain you can expect – from about 1 MHS on 79×0/280x cards to a few on 290/390 series of cards plus the extra Decred mining hashrate. Interestingly enough not mining in dual mode, but only Ethereum is not showing difference in the hashrate now on a Radeon R9 280X for example.
So if you still have not tried the Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred Miner for AMD GPUs (it does not work on Nvidia video cards), you should give it a try. Do note that although this miner is free-to-use, there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner mines Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer. Also, if you have been mining only Ethereum for the moment and you switch do dual mining mode adding Decred you should know that the power usage and the heat generated by the GPU will increase. So make sure your AMD GPU mining rig can handle the extra power usage and heat generated when dual mining, because Ethereum is less power hungry and more memory than GPU demanding algorithm while the situation with Decred is the right opposite and thus both can be mined together with pretty good results. Another important thing to note is that the miner is only released as a Windows binary, no source code or binaries for other operating systems are currently available.
– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…
Ethermine, a New PPLNS Ethereum Mining Pool
24, Mar 2016
Ethpool has launched a new mining pool for EThereum (ETH) with a more standard PPLNS mode for payment as with the increase of network hashrate and difficulty the payment method used by the original Ethpool is not very favourable for smaller miners. Ethermine is a direct successor of Ethpool. It provides the same level of mining efficiency and service as Ethpool, but pays out using the traditional and fair PPLNS mode. Payouts are instant and you will receive your Ether coins as soon as you reach a minimum balance of 1 ETH. The new pool supports Stratum mode using Stratum Proxy v0.0.5 by dwarfpool, Stratum mode using QtMiner and the more traditional Getwork mode using ethminer. The mining fee will is now reduced to 0% for the remaining week in order to make the new pool more attractive for users to switch to it, so you might want to give it a try.
– To check out the new Ethermine PPLNS Ethereum Mining Pool by Ethpool…
When calculating what crypto coin to mine you need to take into account not only the hashrate you get, but also the power usage for the specific algorithm used by the coin. When talking about Nvidia GPUs the two most popular ones used by miners are GTX 750 Ti and GTX 970 and there is a reason behind that – they offer good price/performance ratio to be used in multi-GPU mining rigs. Sure you can always go for a GTX 980 Ti or even GTX Titan X, but these although more powerful are also significantly more expensive and do not provide so good price/performance ratio.
We have decided to do a quick check of the current situation with a Geforce GTX 970 video card from Gigabyte (WF3OC) and a GeForce GTX 980 Ti reference design GPU and see how they compare in a power and performance check. The results you see in the table above are achieved with the latest ccMiner 1.7.4 from Tpruvot and with the latest fork of ethminer wth CUDA support from Genoil. The video cards are not overclocked further than their factory settings (the Gigabyte GTX 970 is factory overclocked) and they are forced to run CUDA applications in P0 power state to maximize performance in Ethereum.
As you can see from the results aside from Ethereum the GTX 980 Ti is faster with not that much more power usage, however the price of the 980 Ti is roughly double the price of a single GTX 970 and with two 970s you are sure to beat the hashrate of a single 980 Ti. It is interesting to see that a GTX 980 Ti (reference board) can be slower than a GTX 970 GPU, but with a non-reference design you can actually get about 20-21 MHS in Ethereum due to the higher clocks. Still the GTX 980 Ti is most definetly not the right video card for mining Ethereum, if you want to stick to mining Ethereum’s Ether coins with Nvidia you should go for the GTX 970 for sure as the best choice. Even though for Ethereum and other Dagger-Hashimoto altcoins AMD GPUs are still faster in terms of hashrate.