Crypto Mining Blog

When it comes to mining ZCash (ZEC) or other Equihash-based crypto coins on Nvidia GPUs for most people it is time for the EWBF ZCash CUDA miner, however it seems that the development of that miner has been abandoned a while ago. There have been a few alternatives available that we have covered with dstm’s ZCash Cuda Miner being a very promising successor. The problem with it was that there were a few key features that were missing up until recently, but that is no longer the case with this miner. So if you were reluctant to give it a try, now you might want to reconsider and test it on your Nvidia mining hardware.

dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner version 0.6 adds failover pool support, one of the features that we wanted to see the most to make this a really good alternative. It is not failover pool support only however, the latest version introduces support for configuration files as well and an option to control mining intensity for the GPUs. There are also a number of other new features added as well as improvements that might be useful for some people, but we can already say that dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner is now the better miner when compared with EWBF ZCash CUDA miner, so if you are still using EWBF’s software you might want to give dstm’s one a go. Do note that dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner should be faster performing in terms of hashrate with the same settings, also there is a 2% developer fee included with this closed source miner.

– If you want to check out the dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner available for Linux and Windows (64-bit only)…

The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia miner has been available for a while and we’ve been keeping a track, but it was only for Linux operating systems – not anymore. With the latest version 0.5.2 the miner is also released for Windows in a 64-bit binary and not anymore available only for Linux miners. The miner is closed source one and comes with a 2% developer fee included. It support Nvidia-based GPUs with Compute Capability 5.0 or later, meaning it is for Maxwell or the newer Pascal video cards. There is support available for stratum as well as for NiceHash extranonce, so it can be used there as well without problems for selling Equihash hashrate.

The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia Miner is supposed to be slightly faster than the popular and widely used EWBF’s CUDA Zcash miner that has not been updated for quite some time, so you might want to give the new miner a try. Our initial tests show a bit better hashrate with the same GPU settings as with the EWBF, though the difference is not huge. Do note that dstm’s miner has its own specifics that you need to get used with such as the use of a separate thread for each GPU and getting 6 separate workers on the pool from one mining rig for example. The interface could also use some improvements and some color coding can further help in readability, but in general it is quite Ok even at the moment. Do note that the 64-bit Windows binary is built with Visual Studio 2015, so if you do not have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 installed you might get an error about a missing DLL.

– If you want to check out the dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner available for Linux and Windows (64-bit only)…