Crypto Mining Blog

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speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code.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…