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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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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…
PiMP or Portable Instant Mining Platform is a dedicated Linux-based mining distribution intended for GPU and ASIC mining without the need to rely on Windows. PiMP is designed to be easy to deploy and use, it can be installed on a USB flash drive, so you do not necessarily have to use a hard drive on your GPU mining rig, though you can install it on SSD or HDD as well. The latest version of PiPM is designed for AMD GPUs only as well as Scrypt ASIC miners such as Gridseed and ZeusMiner, and you can also use other popular SHA-256 ASIC miners. In terms of GPU support you can mine not only Scrypt (Already pointless for GPU mining), but also Scrypt-Jane, Scrypt-N, Quark, X11, X13, X15, Keccak, Skein, Groestl, Qubit, HEFTY1, JHA and NIST5. As you can see not all of the latest and GPU algorithms are yet supported, but the most commonly used and supported ones are available in the distribution.
And while the latest version of PiMP is still only available for AMD-based GPU mining rigs, there is already work being done for the addition of a version of the Linux mining distribution intended for miners using Nvidia-based GPUs (you can try the already available KopiemTu for Nvidia). There is also work being done on an ASIC only version designed for PCs as well as for Raspberry Pi controllers to be used as mining controllers for ASIC miners. So we are looking forward to seeing these versions as well and meanwhile you can check out the AMD/ASIC version that is already available. Here we are more of a Windows miners, however we do like to try out new things as well and check out Linux-based mining distributions like PiMP as well as use RPi as a mining controllers as well and we like what we are seeing so far with PiMP.
– For more information and to try out the PiMP Linux mining distribution yourself…
Today a new altcoin has been launched called FreshCoin that uses a new algorithm that they called fresh that supposedly offers 15% to 20% less energy usage compared to x11 / x13 / x15. The Fresh algorithm combines some of the low energy hashing algorithms (SHAVITE, SIMD and ECHO) and the 5 rounds of multiple algorithms are supposed to provide high security and to keep ASIC miners away according to the authors of the coin and the new algorithm. We have compiled windows binaries of both the ccMiner fork with Fresh support for Nvidia as well as the sph-sgminer fork with Fresh support for AMD GPUs and you can download and try them below if interested in trying out the new altcoin.
Our tests have shown that on an AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU we are getting about 3700 KHS mining with the sph-sgminer fork for Fresh and on a GeForce GTX 750 Ti we are getting up to about 3100 KHS mining Fresh with the ccMiner fork and about 6500 KHS on GeForce GTX 780 Ti. The results are quite good in terms of performance and it seems that Nvidia miners using 750 Ti and other more recent and powerful GPUs may have some advantage performance wise. Also initially the coin did not have an option for renting mining hashrate as the algorithm was something new and there were no miners for it until the release of the coin. Now however you can already rent some hashrate from Mining Rig Rentals, so it did not take that much time. You can still join with your GPUs and mine some FreshCoin while the blow reward is highest and the network hashrate hasn’t jumped through the roof.
– To download the new ccMiner fork with Fresh algorithm support for Windows OS…
– To download the new sph-sgminer fork with Fresh algorithm support for Windows OS…