Crypto Mining Blog

Claymore’s Zcash (ZEC) AMD miner has been updated a couple of times already since the release of the initial version from some days ago. The number of optimizations and hashrate improvements with pretty much each major update has been tremendous, bringing back to life many of the old AMD Radeon GPUs such as 7950/7970 or the 280X, some of the most popular mining video cards for the last few years. The latest release, already a major version 6 brought more fixes and optimizations in terms of performance. As one would expect Nvidia is left behind once more, even though there were some signs that recently it was starting to catch up to the levels of performance of AMD GPUs, it is now yet again significantly slower. So owners of Nvidia-based mining rigs might want to switch to some other alternative for mining at the moment after the latest performance boosts from Claymore. Do have in mind however that Claymore’s Zcash miner does come with a 2.5% dev fee, below is a list of major changes and updates of the miner after the initial release:

Version v7.0:
– improved speed by about 15-25% (depends on card model). About 230H/s on stock 390X.
– added “-benchmark” option.

Version v6.0:
– improved speed by about 20-25% (depends on card model). About 180H/s on stock 390.
– “-i” parameter values are 0…4 now, default value is “-i 4”.
– fixed issue with mixed cards.

Version v5.0:
– improved speed by about 30-50% (depends on card model). About 145H/s on stock 390X.
– improved support for Catalyst 16.x and 4xx cards.
– reduced CPU usage.

Version v4.0:
– improved speed by about 20% (depends on card model). Up to 100H/s on stock 390X on “-i 2” mode.
– added “-retrydelay” option.
– added “-nofee” option.
– various bug fixes.
– changed coloring.
– EthMan: added “View miner console” command.

Version v3.0-v3.1:
– improved speed by 20-30% (depends on card model). Up to 80H/s on stock 390X on “-i 2” mode.
– improved stability.

Version v2.1:
– added “-i” option for adjusting mining intensity and CPU usage.
– improved speed for high intensity mode (“-i 2”), about 60H/s on stock 390X, 50H/s on stock 280X.
– since nicehash cannot upgrade their ddos protection, now “-allpools 1” is required for this pool.

Version v2.0:
– improved speed by 5-15% (depends on card model).

Version v1.1:
– added Linux version.
– fixed issue with rejected shares after devfee mining.
– remove “-allpools 1” option if you use it and mine on miningpoolhub, suprnova, coinmine or nicehash pools.
– added “XnSub” support for Nicehash.
– fixed bugs.

– For more details and to download the latest Claymore’s Zcash AMD GPU Miner…

Claymore has just released his new miner targeted at Zcash (ZEC) miners and only for Windows at the moment, probably making it the fastest AMD OpenCL GPU miner at the moment for Windows OS. Do note that the miner is free, but there is currently a developer fee set at 2.5%, meaning that every hour the miner mines for 90 seconds for developer. According to Claymore this initial release is only for recent AMD video cards only: 7xxx, 2xx, 3xx and 4xx, 2GB or more and it does not support Nvidia GPUs with only Windows x64 binaries available at the moment for download.

A bit something about speeds with the new Zcash miner from Claymore, they are higher than what other Windows GPU miners were offering prior to the release of this miner (there are apparently faster Linux miners like SilentArmy’s V3 for example). A stock AMD Radeon 280X seems to do about 44-45 H/s, AMD Radeon 290X does a bit more at about 46-47 H/s, AMD Radeon 370 does about 35 H/s, AMD Radeon RX 480 does about 40-41 H/s in our initial tests. Feel free to share your hashrate results in the comments below if you do try the new miner…

– For more details and to download Claymore’s Zcash AMD GPU Miner v1.0…