Posts Tagged ‘CUDAminer’

GPU Miner for Heavycoin is Possible and is Being Worked On

14, Mar 2014

heavycoin-crypto-cyrrency

Heavycoin (HVC) is a recently launched crypto coin that can be mined only with the CPU, but apparently it is not impossible for a GPU miner to be created for it as well like with many other coins that started as CPU mining only. The key of the coin being “CPU only” is the use of multiple crypto algorithms – SHA-256, Keccak-512, Grøestl-512, BLAKE-512. But if you port all of them on the GPU you can achieve considerable speedup than what is possible with the CPU only mining, however for the moment there is no GPU miner available for HVC. The author of CudaMiner has reported some success already, note what he has posted in the bitcointalk forum about his work on a GPU miner for HVC (not CudaMiner, but a separate project):

we’ve accelerated 4 out of 5 hashing algos for HVC, but the last one (Groestl) is causing us a bit of trouble. Our first port is actually slower than the CPU – at least on my system.

Running Groestl on CPU and the rest on GPU I am getting an 800% performance boost vs. running the CPU alone.
Multiple CPU threads can even share a GPU ;)

Note that overall HVC is *not* CPU-only. They really need to change their advertising, and change it quickly. Whatever they did to SHA256 to turn it into a “GPU and ASIC resistant” HEFTY1 algorithm – it didn’t work as they intended.

Christian

Download CUDAminer Nvidia GPU Miner With Blake-256 Support

12, Mar 2014

cudaminer-blakecoin-support

The latest beta version of cudaminer has support for the Blake-256 algorithm available, however there is still no official release available compiled for windows that has the new code with Blake algorithm support, so we have compiled it and provide it to you for download. So far the Blake-256 algorithm is only used by two crypto currencies – Blakecoin (BLC) and Photon (PHO), but the good news that if more come out you will be already ready to mine them with Nvidia GPUs as well. Note that the hashrate you will be getting mining Blake-256 crypto currencies will be in megahashes and not in the kilohashes range and that is pretty normal for this algorithm. Mining on AMD GPUs will still bring significantly higher performance than on Nvidia, but still you can mine on Nvidia as well.

– Download the CUDAminer Nvidia GPU Miner with Blake-256 Support for Windows…

The Power Consumption of a 6-card Mining Rig using GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPUs

10, Mar 2014

six-gpu-rig-gigabyte-geforce-gtx-750-ti

We have already published some interesting findings about the power usage of the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics cards when used for crypto mining and recently we have built a 6-card GTX 750 Ti mining rig. We have taken some time to also measure the power usage of the individual cards as well as the total power usage of the whole system in order to give you some additional details about what you can expect in terms of power consumption from such a mining rig. We have used Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti video cards (N75TOC-2GI) that do have an external onboard PCI-E power connector and we started by measuring the total power that goes to a single video card both trough the PCI-E slot as well as through the external PCI-E power connector with the help of a watt meter that is attached directly to the power lines going to the video card (using a powered extender).

gtx-750-ti-power-usage-pci-e-power

As you can see on the photo the total power used by the video card is about 31W (with the card running at +135 MHz for the GPU and + 610 MHz for the video memory). Note that this power measurement is on the 12V line from the PSU going to the video card, so it does not take into account the power efficiency of the power supply and as a result the total power used by the video card from the mains will be higher by something like 15-20% (depending on the PSU). Note that we have used a powered PCI-E extender with USB 3.0 cable for the data lanes. This extender takes all the power provided to the PCI-E slot of the video card through a 4-pin molex connector and supplies both the 12V and the 3.3V power that the card uses drawing only power from the 12V line (there is a voltage regulator to output 3.3V from the 12V input on the extender’s board). So what the wat tmeter shows is the total power going from the PSU to the video card and in the case of the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti it was 31W. Again the total power usage from the mains will be higher as this measurement does not take into account the power efficiency when converting 220V/110V to 12V.

gtx-750-ti-power-usage-5-6-cards

So what is the situation with the total power usage per GTX 750 Ti video card from the mains? The easiest way to check that is to measure using a watt meter connected between a power socket and the power supply of the computer the total power consumption of the system with 6 cards and then disconnect one card and to measure again. The difference we got using this method was about 79W, though this is not for the video card only as it also affects a bit the overall power consumption of the whole system. Also note that the measured 374 Watt for the 5-card and 453 Watts with the 6-card setup are with the video cards overclocked to +135 MHz/+610 MHz. The results we’ve got with the cards running at the stock frequency were 367W with 5-cards and 432W with 6 cards or a 65W difference per card (total power used from the mains). This difference of 14 watts between stock and overclocked frequencies brings roughly about 40 KHS more in terms of hashrate for Scrypt mining (per card). Have in mind that our power supply used had an efficiency rating of about 80-85%, so this means that 15-20% of the total power used at the mains is actually wasted in the conversion between 220V/110V and 12V.

Another interesting thing that we have noticed while testing the power usage and overclocking capabilities of the 6-card GeForce GTX 750 Ti mining rig was the total power consumption that we got for the system with the power target limit changed from the standard setting of 38.5W to the 65.5W. The watt meter showed an increase of power from the 453W with the 38.5W power target limit to 556W with the 65.5W power limit – about 100W increase with the same operating frequencies with a slight increase in performance of about 90 KHS total from the 6 cards or roughly a bit over 1W per KHS and in our opinion this is not worth the extra increase in power usage, so raising the power limit may not always be a good idea!


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