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Impressions from the Newer 5-chip Gridseed Scrypt ASIC Devices

12, Mar 2014

gridseed-5-chip-asic-new-version

In our article about our first impressions from the Gridseed 5-chip Scrypt Asic earlier this month we were not very happy with our initial experience from the device. It seems we’ve got one of the earlier builds that were not very well built and the software for using them was also at a very early stage. Today however things look much better, we just got a new unit that we have ordered and it is much better built and uses the STM32 Virtual COM port driver instead of the CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller that our previous unit had.

cgminer-gridseed-stm32

We have tested the new ASIC device and it works just fine with the STM32 drivers installed with the modified for low power usage cpuminer for Scrypt mining by giving the virtual COM port number of the device. The ASIC also worked just fine when we have replaced the STM32 vitual cOM Port driver with WinUSB using Zadig to use cgminer 3.7.2 for Scrypt mining on the ASIC. We still haven’t tried using the new 5-chip Gridseed ASIC device to work in dual mining mode with TLC and BTC mining running at the same time as apparently the dual mining method that have already described for our older ASIC using the CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller is not working for devices with STM32 Virtual COM port drivers, so we’ll be getting back with more details on that later on when we figure it out.

For the moment however we are much more satisfied with the newer revisions of the 5-chip Gridseed LTC/BTC ASIC devices, especially when we take into account the improvement of the software support side for them in the last few days.

Download vertminer for Mining GPU Coin (GPUC) on Windows

10, Mar 2014

vertminer-for-gpucoin-mining

GPU Coin (GPUC) is a new Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor cryptocoin that just recently launched and being a ScryptN crypto coin and not a standard Scrypt crypto simply means that you need to use another miner that supports the coin algorithm. If you haven’t mined for VertCoin, then you might not have used the vertcoin miner which is essentially a fork of cgminer with support for Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor crypto currency mining. Below you can find and download vertminer 0.5.3 for mining GPU Coin on windows and start mining as soon as GPUC reaches its 2600th block. This will happen in a few hours and you should start mining the coin only after block 2600, because the blocks before that are all with a reward of 1 GPUC. Starting from block 2600 the per solved block reward will go all the way up to the standard reward of 20000 GPUC, so no reason to start mining before block 2600, unless you just want to test and be sure that everything has been setup and works. Note that when mining for Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor crypto currencies such as GPU Coin you will see lower hashrate like for example half of the normal hashrate you will be getting when mining standard Scrypt crypto currency such as LTC for example.

First Impressions From a 4-card AMD Radeon R9 290 Scrypt Mining Rig

10, Mar 2014

4-card-radeon-r9-290-scrypt-mining-rig

We’ve recently built a Scrypt mining rig consisting of four AMD Radeon R9 290 by XFX for a friend and since this was actually our first rig with Radeon R9 290 cards we’ve had some interesting findings that we decided to share with you, so if you have some of these troubles we might be able to help. Aside from the four XFX video cards we’ve used an EVGA 1300W PSU (you can see the total system power consumption of 1282W from the mains), Intel Celeron G1820 processor and AsRock H81 Pro BTC motherboard, together with 4GB and Windows 7 OS. For the video cards we have used PCI-E x1 to x16 USB 3.0 Extenders with 1 meter long cable and the cards did not have any trouble working like that. Note that the Radeon R9 290 cards are not considered to be the best option for Scrypt mining, however with R9 280X cards harder to find some people decide to go for the more easily found 290 or 290X models. But unlike with Radeon R9 280X, the R9 290/290X cards have more specifics and could cause you some extra headaches until you finally make them work as they should and provide decent hashrate without problems.

4-card-radeon-r9-290-scrypt-mining-rig-performance

The average hashrate we got from the cards running at stock frequencies of 947 MHz GPU and 1250 MHz video memory got us about 857 KH/S per card or a total hashrate of about 3.4 MH/S. This is what is considered a fairly good results for Radeon R9 290 cards and unfortunately overclocking these cards did not help us in getting higher hashrate, not that we wanted to overclock them as they are already getting quite hot mining Scrypt cryptos. It seems that XFX’s cooling is not that great for mining crypto coins as the temperatures of the VRMs gets easily over 100 degrees Celsius and that is not that great for 24/7 mining even though they are probably rated at up to about 120 degrees C or even a bit more.

One very important thing in making the AMD Radeon R9 290 or 290X cards is how you call up the cgminer, because you need to use a high thread concurrency value that often tends to bring some issues with cgminer. In order to ensure that you can start cgminer without problems you can start by using the command lines below to call cgminer.exe from a BAT file:

set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
set GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
timeout 1
start /realtime cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://us-east.multipool.us:7777 -u yourworker.1 -p password --thread-concurrency 22516 -g 1 --lookup-gap 2 -w 512 -I 20

Note that sometimes even after calling cgminer with the above commands and save a congif file and then you run cgminer.exe directly and it loads up the config file you can still get errors. So if you want to use the config file after you start cgminer with the above commands and save them in config just remove all of the parameters from the cgminer.exe start line, but still start the miner with the BAT file!

Another very important thing regarding the use of AMD Radeon R9 290 video cards for crypto mining is that these video cards do not feature any analog video outputs, so if you plan on using the mining rig without a monitor connected to a card, then you might have trouble. And you cannot just make a dummy plug with resistors, you will need to get an HDMI to VGA or Display Port to VGA adapter to plug in in one of the available video outputs and then add resistors to the VGA output side. This is the recommend solution that can save you some trouble in making the mining rig function properly or if you want to control it remotely with TeamViewer for example. If you have a digital monitor connected and are going to be controlling and monitoring the mining rig with Radeon R9 290 cards then you don’t need to bother with digital adapters to VGA.


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