Posts Tagged ‘Dual Miner’

Claymore’s New Dual Ethereum and Decred AMD GPU Beta Miner

12, Apr 2016

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speed should be higher by 3-5%, because of a completely different miner code that should deliver much less invalid and outdated shares, has higher GPU load, and uses optimized OpenCL code.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

Thermal Images of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner

16, Mar 2016

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Time for a bit more in-depth look at the operating temperatures of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC with the help of a thermal imaging camera. We are starting with the front and rear of the case that the mining ASIC uses, the front has four powerful Delta Electronics server fans that such cold air through the whole case where the mining blades are and the hot air exits directly through the back of the case. There are no other fans at the back, just open space for the hot air to exit the case of the device effectively cooling. The only other fan is the one of the server grade power supply that is mounted inside the case, another server grade Delta Electronics fan that is also powerful and noisy when in operation. The fans do not have power control, so they operate at maximum RPM all of the time making the device quite noisy, but also effectively cooled even in no so cool environment.

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The four blades with ASIC chips are located on the side of the cooling fans and on the other side of the case is the power supply with the Raspberry Pi controller mounted over it. The side with the RPi and the power supply is pretty cold compared to the side where the four blade with 48 chips each are located. As one might expect the hottest part inside the miner are the ASIC chips, the rest remains pretty cold thanks to the high airflow provided by the cooling fans. Even the heatsink that are on the back of the PCB with the chips remain pretty cool thanks to the high airflow passing through them.

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And now let us take a look at the chips themselves as the hottest element of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC miners. Under the stock operating conditions they do remain with a surface temperature range of about 60-68 degrees Celsius as the temperature varies slightly depending on their position on the blade. As we’ve said already the cooling heatsink is not placed on top of the chips themselves, but instead is on the back of the PCB. This is the easier way to make things work, but not the most efficient for cooling as the chips use the PCB as a large heatspreader that then passes the heat to the large heatsink. This results in higher operating temperatures of the ASIC chips as there is no direct contact, but the temperatures are still Ok for normal operation. You should however be careful should you decide to overclock in order to get some extra hashrate as this will increase the operating temperatures of the chips. It seems that iBeLink has already chosen the optimal operating frequency for the device that results in very little HW errors while providing optimum performance. Further increasing the PLL frequency over the stock 110 MHz even with just a few Megahertz may result in increased percentage of HW errors.


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