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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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A little while ago we have discussed how you can build a low power dedicated Bitcoin or Litecoin node using Raspberry Pi. This however has raised some concerns due to the limited resources and processing power as well as the use of an SD flash card for storage of the big blockchain. Also the RPi has been used quite a lot with various ASIC miners to make them independent from a computer and allow them to run with only a direct Internet connection with the mining software installed on the Raspberry Pi board. The good news is that there is now a new faster and more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B available for the same affordable price (about $35 USD) that will handle the load associated with running a crypto currency node on it than on the previous RPi. The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B features a faster 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU that is supposed to provide up to about 6x the performance of the previous model, 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM or essentially 2x the memory of the old model and offer full backwards compatibility with with Raspberry Pi 1.
The only drawback that still remains is that the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B still relies on SD flash card as a storage option and in the case for use as a dedicated crypto currency node this could turn out to be a problem on the long run. The blockchain of Bitcoin is already over 30 GB in size and will continue to grow, so you need larger storage and a more reliable one. If you are looking for similar to Raspberry Pi solution with better storage options that would allow you to use a HDD or even better an SSD drive, then you might want to check out the very similar projects Banana Pi and Banana Pro that feature a SATA port for storage connection. These are dual-core solutions with 1 GB of RAM, so faster than the now older first RPi, but probably not as powerful as the new model. Of course there are also many other alternatives to Raspberry Pi, including more powerful ones in terms of performance and with additional extra features. The RPi however is still one of the best solutions in terms of price/performance/features ratio and that is really important when talking about using it for projects such as running a dedicated crypto currency node for example.
– For more details about the new more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that is already available…
We have gotten an ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX to test GPU mining with it and also checked the power usage with the various algorithms supported by the latest ccMiner fork from SP that is optimized for Nvidia Maxwell GPUs. The ASUS STRIX is one of the GTX 960 video cards out there with the highest factory overclock, so it is supposed to provide higher performance as compared to the more reference Palit GTX 960 OC card that we have tested recently. Do note that the Nvidia rated TDP of the GTX 960 GPUs is 120 Watts and it seems that the reference cards that are not factory overclocked are more like in the 100W of power usage and the higher clocked models such as the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 do manage to go up to the 120 Watts power consumption mark.
We have used the ccMiner 1.5.31-git Fork by SP for Maxwell, the same version that we used a few days ago, so that we can compare performance with the GTX 750 Ti and the GTX 960 OC card from Palit to the results that the ASUS STRIX card offers. There is a newer version of the ccMiner fork from SP already available that fixes the NIST5 support, though there is not much difference in the performance in the Lyra2 algorithm on the GTX 960 as compared to GTX 750 Ti. Also the Blake, Blakecoin and Penta algorithms that rely a lot on the CPU and do not use much of GPU resources do not seem to provide much better results on the more overclocked ASUS cards. Other than that the ASUS STRIX card does provide some extra hashrate over the Palit GTX 960 and thanks to the higher clocks factory preset for the ASUS its performance gets closer to 2x the hashrate provided from a reference GTX 750 Ti GPU that is not factory overclocked.
SpreadCoin (SPR) is not a new coin, but it was a mine-able only with CPU up until yesterday when an AMD GPU miner was released and today the coin also got an Nvidia GPU miner that is apparently much faster than the AMD one. The AMD OpenCL miner is available on the official SpreadCoin GitHub page (source) and there is a compiled windows binary available on the official coin website. You can get the spreadminer for Nvidia GPUs thanks to tsiv who created it (source), there is an official windows binary release for Compute 3.0 to 5.2 GPUs available on his GitHub page as well that you can download and use directly.
SpreadCoin uses SpreadX11 algorithm and does not use mining pools, you can only solo mine the coin, so you need to make sure that you have created spreadcoin.conf file with the required settings to be able to connect the miner to the wallet running on one of your computers. The config file needs to be placed in the Users\ YOURUSERNAME \AppData\Roaming\SpreadCoin folder and named spreadcoin.conf and then you need to restart the wallet, also make sure that you have downloaded the block information before trying to run a miner. You can find an example settings for the config file below if you haven’t solo mined yet and this will be the first coin that you try and don’t forget to set the username and password in the miner config to be the same and also allow any additional IP addresses or a range that will be connecting to the wallet:
rpcuser=username
rpcpassword=password
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcallowip=192.168.0.*
rpcport=41677
port=41678
gen=0
server=1
For the moment you would probably want to try out the coin if you have an Nvidia GPUs as they are performing much better in terms of hashrate than what you can get on AMD GPUs. On a stock Radeon R9 280X we managed to get just about 800 KHS using the official OpenCL miner and with the Nvidia CUDA miner on a GTX 750 Ti card we easily got over 1400 KHS, trying it out on a GTX 980 we’ve managed to squeeze close to 4500 KHS. So if you have some Nvidia GPUs, especially Maxwell-based cards you might want to mine some SpreadCoins while the difficulty is not way too high to be worth mining with one or just a few cards. Also do not forget that with solo mining luck plays an important role as well and you might get lucky and find more blocks in short time or not and wait more for little blocks, so give the miners some time.
– For more information about SpreadCoin check the official announcement thread on Bitcointalk…