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Posts Tagged ‘Claymore’
Claymore has been quite active in further developing his dual miner for AMD OpenCL GPUs intended to mine both Ethereum (ETH) and Decred (DCR) since our initial post about his first release a few days ago. The latest updates include some of the features we noted as missing in the initial release such as Stratum support for Decred or the ability to set workers for Ethereum mining pools. The more interesting improvements however are those relates to the performance you get from the miner, he has been able to squeeze some extra performance in terms of the hashrate you get for mining Ethereum while at the same time you still get decent performance for mining Decred as well.
The earlier versions showed a bit of a decrease of the performance in Ethereum while using the dual mining mode, but the latest improvements have significantly improved the situation, including the results for slower AMD GPUs. With the latest version 3+ you can get slightly more Ethereum mining hashrate than with the regular ethminer while at the same time you are also mining some Decred. The higher-end the AMD GPU you are using, the higher performance gain you can expect – from about 1 MHS on 79×0/280x cards to a few on 290/390 series of cards plus the extra Decred mining hashrate. Interestingly enough not mining in dual mode, but only Ethereum is not showing difference in the hashrate now on a Radeon R9 280X for example.
So if you still have not tried the Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred Miner for AMD GPUs (it does not work on Nvidia video cards), you should give it a try. Do note that although this miner is free-to-use, there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner mines Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer. Also, if you have been mining only Ethereum for the moment and you switch do dual mining mode adding Decred you should know that the power usage and the heat generated by the GPU will increase. So make sure your AMD GPU mining rig can handle the extra power usage and heat generated when dual mining, because Ethereum is less power hungry and more memory than GPU demanding algorithm while the situation with Decred is the right opposite and thus both can be mined together with pretty good results. Another important thing to note is that the miner is only released as a Windows binary, no source code or binaries for other operating systems are currently available.
– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…
Here is something quite interesting for the people that mine either Ethereum (ETH) or Decred (DCR) or even both, a miner that mines the two different crypto currencies at the same time to give you better profit from your existing hardware. Claymore’s new Dual Ethereum plus Decred AMD GPU beta miner allows you to mine only Ethereum or use the dual mining mode for Ethereum and Decred at the same time on AMD GPUs. Of course you still need to have an AMD-based video card with at least 2 GB of video memory to be able to mine Ethereum and the faster the GPU, the lower the performance hit when using dual mining mode. In dual mining mode you should have a bit lower than the usual hashrate for ETH mining on Radeon 280X or below, with the less powerful GPUs experiencing higher performance drop and hopefully no performance loss for higher-end cards. The trick here is that the miner combines two different crypto mining algorithms – the memory intensive Ethereum and the GPU intensive Decred, so you are able to get full Ethereum mining performance with a slower Decred mining performance with both working at the same time.
Claymore states that the effective Ethereum mining speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code. This does not mean that the miner will report higher hashrate, but instead that you will have less “wasted” hashrate when mining using this miner as compared to other miners available. The miner is designed to be used only with mining pools, no solo mining supported at the moment. Also note that currently it only works with Ethereum Stratum pools where you give your wallet address as a username only, the Decred support for pools is only for the ones with standard getwork implementations (no getwork over Stratum is supported at the moment). There is no separate worker support available yet, or pool failover in case a pool goes down, so there is more work needed to be done, but so far things are looking promising so you might want to try out the new miner.
If you are interested in trying out the new Claymore Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU miner you should be aware that it is only available as a Windows binary, no source code is available and no version for Linux or other operating systems. The miner is free, but there is a small developer fee of 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode and 2% for Ethereum plus Decred mining mode, so every hour the miner will mine Ethereum for 36 or 72 seconds for developer (Decred mining is 100% for the user). The currently released version is for 64-bit Windows only and is intended for recent AMD video cards only: 7xxx, 2xx and 3xx, with 2 GB or more, there is no Nvidia support available. Also do note forget that the miner is currently in beta and some bugs and various issues are quite possible, so be prepared for experiencing such.
– Visit the official miner announcement thread for additional details and downloads…
- Published in: Mining Software
- Related tags: Claymore, Dual AMD GPU miner, Dual ETH and DRC miner, Dual Ethereum and Decred miner, Dual GPU miner, Dual Miner, Dual mining Ethereum and Decred