Posts Tagged ‘Cast XMR’

New Cast XMR Miner 0.9.1 With A Bit of Performance Improvement for VEGA

22, Mar 2018

The Cast XMR CryptoNight GPU miner for AMD RX VEGA 56/64 GPUs has just been updated to version 0.9.1 with a slight performance improvement of 0.5% overall for Vega-based GPUs according to the developer of the software. The previous version 0.9.0 from eralier this month has already added support for the upcoming CryptoNightv7 fork for Monero (XMR) and other coins in the view of the new wave of ASIC miners targeting that crypto algorithm. Do note that Cast XMR is a closed source miner available as a binary only for 64-bit Windows and comes with a 1.5% developer fee. It is originally optimized for ADM RX VEGA GPUs using the Blockchain driver, though it should also work fine on other AMD RX series of GPUs.

Cast XMR should be able to autodetect and switch between CryptoNight and CryptoNightV7 on Monero (XMR) and most other coisn that decide to fork as well, though there is also an option available to switch manually to the desired version of the CryptoNiht algorithm in case there is an issue with the autodetection (use the --algo command line option). Currently it seems that the only GRAFT is having trouble working properly with the autodetection mechanism, so it is advised to manually select the version for the moment. GRAFT has not yet forked, so it is currently still using the old CryptoNight version and not the new V7 as are pretty much all other coins that have already announced their plans to also fork to v7. Just as a reminder, Monero (XMR) will fork at block 1546000 or around April 4th and that is less than two weeks away.

– To download and try the latest version 0.9.1 of the Cast XMR miner for CryptoNight coins with support for V7…

Get Your AMD RX VEGA 56/64 GPUs Ready for Mining CryptoNightV7

22, Mar 2018

There are just a few days left until the fork of Monero (XMR) to CryptoNightV7 to make it again ASIC resistant and you might want to be ready for mining it after the fork, especialyl if you have ADM RX VEGA GPUs. So far the latest Claymore’s CryptoNote AMD GPU Miner does not yet have support for CryptoNightV7, but for VEGA GPUs you probably are using XMR-stak (also not ready) or Cast-XMR or the more recently announced Xrig. The last two have already been updated and their latest versions do come with support for CryptoNightV7, so you should update to Xrig 0.8.1 and Cast XMR 0.9.1 in order to be sure you are ready for the fork. Although these miners are optimized especially for VEGA mining, they should work on other AMD RX series of GPUs like 470/480 and 570/580 for example, so until a Claymore adds CryptoNightV7 support you can try using these miners as well. After Monero forks to the new CryptoNightV7 POW other coins are also expected to do the same and remain to be ASIC proof. The upcoming Monero (XMR) fork to CryptoNight v7 is scheduled for block 1546000 which should happen some time around 2018-04-06 (April 4th), so less than 2 weeks left until the fork.

Quick Guide on Using AMD Radeon RX Vega GPUs for CryptoNight Mining

2, Dec 2017

For a while now the CryptoNight algorithm used by crypto coins such as Electroneum (ETN), Monero (XMR), Sumokoin (SUMO), Karbowanec (KRB) and maybe some others have been quite profitable to be mined by AMD GPUs. That is normal since AMD GPUs are doing better than Nvidia when talking about the CryptoNight algorithm, especially the latest AMD Radeon RX Vega GPUs that are doing really great in that algorithm. Even though AMD’s latest GPUs are still not entirely problem free in terms of software support and can give you some headaches making them work for mining, when they do they work really well for CryptoNight performance wise. We have prepared a quick and easy to follow guide to help you get started and save you some trouble mining CryptoNight with Vega GPUs.

– Start by downloading and installing the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute as this is the driver that probably still offers the best performance for mining CryptoNight on VEGA.

– When you install the driver you need to go through the Radeon Settings / Gaming / Global Settings and for each and every GPU in your mining rig to make sure that HBCC Memory Segment is disabled as well as if you have Crossfire enabled for a pair of GPUs to also disable it. Reboot the system and check that all of the video cards have HBCC and Crossfire disabled before continuing further.

– Each time the system starts you need to disable and re-enable all of the GPUs in your system in order to get the best mining performance, you can do it manually via the Device Manager, though there is also an automated way to do it, so that the mining can start automatically on each boot. For that you need to download the respective version of Devcon for the Windows you are using, here is an easy way to obtain the required devcon version.

– Here is how to disable all AMD RX Vega GPUs and then re-enable them with the DevCon.exe tool:
devcon.exe disable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_687F"
devcon.exe enable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_687F"

– The next step is to overclock/underclock the GPUs so that you can get the optimal performance and power usage combination, here things may vary in terms of the settings you can use from card to card. You can use AMD’s Radeon Wattman built-in tool, but it is not very convenient, so going for OverdriveNTool might make things much easier in the process of testing GPU and Memory clock settings.

– Some people set the final GPU frequency/voltage settings in the registry after they finish with the test what works best, so that they are loaded automatically on boot. We however prefer to use the profile feature of the OverdriveNTool and load and apply the settings from a profile before starting the miner. Here is an example how you can load a profile you save as “XMR” for 6 GPUs using the OverdriveNTool, this way you can easily have different profiles for different algorithms:
OverdriveNTool.exe -p0"XMR" -p1"XMR" -p2"XMR" -p3"XMR" -p4"XMR" -p5"XMR"

– Now you can go for the CryptoNight miner software, there are number of these, but not all of them give you the best performance on Radeon RX Vega GPUs. The two choices for best performance at the moment are Cast XMR and the latest version of XMR-stak. If using XMR-stak just make sure you configure the miner with two threads per GPU, this would require more virtual memory. Both miners need quite a lot of virtual memory, so make sure you have something like 48-64 GB to be on the safe side and problem free.

Following the tips above you should be able to get 1800-2000 H/s for mining CryptoNight on a single AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU, depending on your GPU and memory settings, so the performance is quite good if you are able to keep the video cards cool enough. If using the XMR-stak miner you can also mine some coins using the CryptoNight-light such as AEON, the settings are the same, this algorithm just produces about double the normal CryptoNight hashrate.


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