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We have updated our NiceHash Control tool pack for GeForce GTX 750 Ti miners for selling your hashrate on the NiceHash service with maximum profit. Our mining pack comes ready for mining rigs using GTX 750 Ti cards, with a ccMiner fork supporting Windows XP or newer and Compute 3.0 cards or newer. We have preset the hashrate for a single GTX 750 Ti card for the various algorithms, though this pack supports only X11, X13, X15 and Nist5 as we believe that there is not much point in adding the others as they are not very profitable or mine on Nvidia GPUs or on GPUs in general. You can use the tool on mining rigs with multiple cards or with different Nvidia GPUs as well, but then the automatic calculation for the expected profit for the various algorithms will be off.
In this update we have used the latest version 1.04 of the NiceHash Control tool. Also we have made a simple solution to include a backup pool in case NiceHash does have some problems, something that is useful as ccMiner does not officially support failover pools. Do note that the backup pool will kick in after a minute of the miner not being able to connect to NiceHash and it will mine there until the software switches the most profitable algorithm or if the backup pool connection fails for some reason.
What you need to do in order to use our GTX 750 Ti mining pack is to edit the config file and set your BTC address, edit the backup pool in the MINERS.bat file and then just start the AUTOSTART.BAT file to fire up the software. What is left is to monitor your earnings on the NiceHash website, and you can check the log.txt file for information what algorithm was switched to and when. If you like this tool and our GTX 750 Ti mining pack based around it, don’t forget to send a tip to the author of the NiceHash Control software.
– To download the NiceHash Control 1.0.4 GTX 750 Ti ready to use pack for Windows…
Lately there is much talk about power efficiency of various mining algorithms and with the summer here people with GPU mining rigs are looking for algorithms that use less power and thus the video cards run cooler and quieter. We are starting a series of tests with GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPU first and then we are also going to move to other popular video cards for mining crypto currencies such as the Radeon R9 280X for example.
On the photo above you can see the power usage of the GTX 750 Ti video card in idle as well as the idle power usage of the whole system we are using for testing; below you can find the specifications of the hardware. Note that one of the power meters measures only the power usage of the video card (the power meter is attached to the power line going to the card directly and all power going to it passes through the meter, so it does not take into account the PSU power efficiency) and the other one is for the whole system measured at the wall (the actual full power consumption) taking into account the efficiency of the power supply (extra power wasted as heat during the conversion).
The systems we are using for the tests include:
– Palit GeForce GTX 750 Ti StormX OC 2GB video card
– Intel i3-4130 dual-core CPU at 3.4 GHz
– Asus H81M-A Motherboard
– 2x 4GB A-DATA DDR3 1600 MHz Memory
– 1TB Seagate 7200 RPM Hard drive
– 500W Cooler Master Power Supply
We have used ccMiner for our tests, the latest fork with Fresh algorithm support and we have measured the power usage of the GPU only as well as of the whole system with all of the supported algorithms by that particular version of ccMiner. Do note that if mining for Scrypt for example you will be getting higher power usage, but this is already pretty pointless to be done with GPUs with so many Scrypt ASIC miners already deployed. The results we’ve seen on the GTX 750 Ti are pretty interesting; it seems that the most power efficient algorithms are Fugue256 and HEFTY1 with the new Fresh algorithm following close by with the same power usage as Qubit. The worst performing crypto algorithms on GTX 750 Ti are the Groestl-based ones and the X-ones are pretty much in the middle. Do note however that these are the results measured on GTX 750 Ti, the situation with AMD with the same algorithms may differ significantly and we do plan to run some tests to check the situation there as well, so stay tuned for more very soon, probably tomorrow.
Since there were some questions and people doubting our measurements, we have repeated the tests with another power meter connected to measure the power going only to the video card and the results are pretty much the same as with the previous meter in terms of power usage as you can see on the photo above. Do note that the Palit GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card that we have used for testing does not have an external PCI-E power connector available, so all of the power going to the video card is from the PCI-E slot. So in order to measure the exact power used by the video card we have used a powered PCI Express x1-x16 USB 3.0 Extender. This extender does not use USB 3.0 interface, just a USB 3.0 data cable for the transmission of data between the PCI-E slot on the motherboard and the video card (no power is transmitted over that cable). Instead the power provided to the video card all goes through the 4-pin Molex power connector on the extender’s board. Also do note that the power measured is coming directly from the power supply, so this measurement for the power usage of the GPU does not take into account the power efficiency of the power supply (loses of power during the conversion from 110V/220V to 12V) and depending on the power supply there will be about 10-20% of extra power lost as heat during the conversion. This power is measured by the second power meter that does measure the full system’s power consumption at the power socket however.
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…