Posts Tagged ‘ETH’

Mining EthereumPoW (ETHW) Crypto after the Merge of Ethereum

21, Sep 2022

EthereumPoW (ETHW) is the name of the Proof of Work fork that continued as PoW after the original Ethereum (ETH) has switched to Proof of Stake after the so-called Merge of ETH that has happened on 15th of September. ETHW is mineable on a number of large pools already and is available for trading on some of the larger exchanges with more coming apparently as the interest, especially from miners is pretty high at the moment. The ETHW hard forking from ETH means that any address that had Ethereum coins available on the Ethereum mainnet will also have the same amount of ETHW coins on the EthereumPoW mainnet. Many of the exchanges that added support for ETHW have already credited users with coins based on their ETH holdings at the time of the fork, though not all have started trading yet.

EthereumPoW (ETHW) has a price of a little over $6 USD at the moment, though that price can fluctuate wildly at the moment. The peak price ETHW has reached was a little of over $60 USD for a brief moment soon after the hard fork, but is currently at just about 1/10 of that peak level it had according to CoinMarketCap. You can visit the official website of the EthereumPoW – The Original Ethereum Blockchain powered by Proof of Work, though we’ll try to summarize the most important things to help you get started mining ETHW if you are interested. Here you can find an ETHW Explorer and the official GitHub page with EthereumPoW code

The best thing about EthereumPoW (ETHW) is that it uses the very familiar Dagger-Hashimoto or Ethash algorithm that was used by Ethereum (ETH) supported by most mining software such as PhoenixMiner, NBMiner, T-Rex Miner, lolMiner and many others. So, if you were just mining ETH prior to the Merge, you should be able to very quickly and easily get up to speed with switching to ETHW mining. The only thing you will need is a new mining pool with support for ETHW such as f2pool.com, 2miners.com, poolin.com, woolypooly.com or nanopool.org – these are the Top 5 ETHW mining pools in terms of mining hashrate at the moment. Then you would also need to get an ETHW wallet address, if you don’t have one already, in a supporting exchange such as Kraken, Poloniex, Bittrex or one of the others that already have introduced support for EthereumPoW.

That is it you can point your mining hardware to mine the ETHW coin easily and pretty straightforward if you were already mining ETH, the only thing that remains to happen is for EthereumPoW to become profitable to be mined as currently it is the same as with other crypto coins. Mining ETHW at the moment can hardly even cover for the electricity being used with its current price and difficulty level, profitability wise it is on par with Ethereum Classic (ETC) at the moment. Though for ETC mining you have the option to increase the mining profitability by dual-mining ETC+ZIL.

Mining Ethereum with ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Video Card

19, Feb 2021

We’ve managed to get a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU to play around with mining Ethereum and other cyrpto coins, though here we are going to be focusing on ETH mining. The RTX 3080 is really hard to find on the market at the moment and if you manage to find stock somewhere the price will be so high that you probably would consider buying a RTX 3090 instead. We managed to somehow get our hands on a single ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 (ASUS TUF-RTX3080-10G-GAMING) video card to play around with it for crypto mining and below you can read what we have found out using this GPU.

This TUF Gaming RTX 3080 from ASUS is definitely not the greatest model you can find and definitely not as impressive as some other cards, but still, at the moment it is what you can find and you cannot be too choosy. The TUF RTX 3080 works and performs really well and the cooling manages to keep the card cool while mining even with stock out of the box settings. The ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 comes with dual 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, 2.7-slot cooling solution that works surprisingly well with the three fans on top of the radiator. The default specifications of the ASUS TUF Gamin RTX 3080 are the ones that the reference design Nvidia RTX 3080 uses and although that may not be that great for gamers or PC enthusiasts it is perfectly fine as far as Ethereum mining is concerned.

The card comes with a 1440 MHz Base clock, 1710 MHz Boost Clock, 1188 MHz Memory clock (19 Gbps effective) and a 320W TDP. The RTX 3080 video card comes equipped with 10GB of GDDR6X video memory that has a 320-bit wide memory bus. There are 8704 CUDA cores, 272 TMUs and 96 ROPs in the large graphics processor that consists of over 28 million transistors. One hell of a graphics monster that is only bested by the even faster and better in terms of performance Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, including the crypto mining performance as well.

Using the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 with its default out of the box settings for mining Ethereum (100% TDP, no clocks and fans at 100%) got us at 87 MH/s Ethash mining hashrate. This is a great result in terms of performance, though with default settings the GPU uses around 320W of power and that can be reduces with some optimizations for sure. With the cooling fans running at 100% even the 320W of power usage while mining is not much of an issue with the average GPU temperature at around 52 degrees Celsius. With a bit of tweaking however we can optimize performance and reduce power quite well making the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 even better for mining Ethereum for sure…

Reducing the power usage from the default TDP level of 320W to just 71% TDP got us to 230W of power usage for the RTX 3080 with even higher hashrate. We’ve set the GPU clock at -300 MHz and the memory at +1000 MHz in MSI Afterburner resulting in 97.5 MH/s hashtrate mining Ethereum. The RTX 3080 can handle a bit higher overclock at +1100 for an extra megahash of performance, so you might want to try that as well, though we are fine with the lower clock as the cooling solution on this particular RTX 3080 form ASUS is not the best you can find on 3080 GPUs. And we like our GPUs not pushed to the absolute maximum when mining, but at a bit more conservative settings, but running rock solid for a very long time and you should probably adopt the same philosophy as well.

Optimized RTX 3080 Mining Settings:
– TDP: 71%
– GPU: -300 MHz
– VRAM: +1000 MHz
– FANs: 100%

Since now we can measure the operating temperature of the GDDR6X memory chips with the HWiNFO tool we are going to be monitoring that as well as it is important to keep the video memory at the lowest possible temperature due to these new fast chips getting quite hot under load. We would not only want to avoid getting the memory up to a level when it begins to throttle (around 110 degrees Celsius) and starts dropping the hashrate, but also to have it running as cooler as possible. This is one of the reasons why we use 100% for the cooling fans, even though the GPU is not getting that hot at 52 C and can handle lower fan speed without increasing its operating temperature much.

Another interesting feature that was more recently introduced in the HWiNFO tool is the ability to HotSpots on Nvidia GPUs, so that besides the average working temperature that all monitoring tools report for the GPU you can now know what is the hottest spot. This is especially useful for diagnosing potential issues with GPUs that have been mining for a while and are showing some instabilities due to things such as bad thermal grease or bad cooler contact. Here we see that the hottest spot of the RTX 3080 GPU is around 13-14 C hotter than the average operating temperature reported for the GPU and this is kind of normal, but then again this is a brand-new GPU.

The GPU Memory Junction temperature that we are measuring during Ethereum mining with overclocked VRAM with +1000 MHz in Afterburner is at 88 degrees Celsius with the fans at 100%, without the clock for the memory it runs at around 82 C, so the extra clock does not make things much hotter. For instance, on RTX 3090 we are seeing operating temperatures that are around 10 degrees higher than the ones measured here under similar conditions. This is due the fact that the RTX 3090 had memory chips on both sides due to the larger memory config, so the RTX 3080 is doing better, but the temperature is still pretty high in our opinion for 24/7 operation. Still, if you manage to get things running at under 100 C for RTX 3080/RTX 3090 it should be fine, but you should try to reduce the temperature of the hottest memory chip to around 90 at least with a better airflow for instance.

Getting 97-98 MH/s hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) using the Ethash crypto algorithm is easily achievable on Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU with around 230W of power usage. This should be possible on pretty much all reference designs (specs wise) like the ASUS TUF that follows the base specifications set with the Nvidia Founders Edition GPUs. Some models with further increased operating clocks and voltages may require extra tweaking or different settings in order to achieve similar performance at the same power usage level, though they should still be able to get you the same hashrate if you manage to keep things running cool.

– For More Information about the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 GPU…
– What Hashrate to Expect from an ASUS EKWB GeForcce RTX 3090 Do Mining Ethereum…

The Upcoming Ethereum ASIC Miners To Offer 2000+ MHS

3, Feb 2021

There is a lot of talk going on around the new generation of Ethash ASIC miners for mining Ethereum (ETH) that are expected to be released for order in the following few months, although nothing is official or really 100% confirmed, but both devices are expected to have hashrate higher than 2000 MH/s. We are talking about the Innosilicon’s A11 ETH miner and an upcoming device from a newcomer on the mining market, a company called Linzhi that has been getting some attention for a while now. Linzhi Inc was founded by Chen Min, the former CTO of Canaan, a popular name for everyone that has been into crypto mining for a while already as this is one of the first companies to be making Bitcoin ASIC miners – the Avalon miners.

Currently the Innosilicon A10 Pro ETH Miner is the best performing specialized non-GPU-based miner for Ethash with 500 MHS hashrate and 950W of power consumption and a price of $4388 USD　(or 0.125933 BTC) as per the official company website (currently all sold out). The alternative is using GPUs for mining ETH and you even might be able to get the same level of performance as the A10 Pro ETH Miner if you go for Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series – 8x RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 or 5-6x RTX 3080 or 4-5x RTX 3090 video cards, but unfortunately pretty much all GPUs suitable for mining are currently hard to find and more expensive than usual.

F2Pool did an unboxing and a test of a sample Linzhi Phoenix ETH miner (the video above). The device is supposedly capable of 2600 MHS hashrate for Ethash with a power usage of 3000-3500W. The Linzhi Phoenix E2600M ETH mining devices are supposedly to be up for purchase around March-April this year with a price in the range of 13-15 thousand USD. The main problem with the Linzhi miner is that it has 4.4GB of memory and Ethereum’s DAG file is already over 4GB in size, meaning that the life expectancy of these miners for mining ETH won’t be very long. If they start shipping as announced and you are among the first to get the device you may still end up with just 4-5 months of use for mining Ethereum, though you would still be able to mine other crypto coins with the Ethash algorithm and smaller DAGs. So, maybe everything was great when they started development 2 years ago, but now 4.4 GB is not enough and if they do not manage to increase the available memory by the time of release to the market things might not be looking very good for their sales.

The Innosilicon A11 ETH miner is the other upcoming next-gen ETH ASIC miner. Supposedly the A11 Ethash miner will be delivering 2100 MH/s Ethash hashrate with just 2300W of power usage and should come with 8GB memory. The not so good thing here is that the price will be higher, probably in the range of about 15-16 thousand USD with shipping expected to start somewhere in April-June time. The Innosilicon is probably the better choice if the final end-product specifications turn out to be as the values we are expecting, as even though it may be slower in terms of hashrate, and more expensive as a price, but is also more power efficient and better equipped for long term use with enough onboard memory.

You should also consider the fact that Ethereum (ETH) will be switching from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Staking) or with other words moving from mining to staking as a model of generating new coins. This transition has already been started, even though mining is still active and will be for maybe 2 years at least, but when looking for a long-term investment in mining hardware you should have things like that in mind. Not to mention that unlike the specialized ETH miners, going for GPUs allows for much better flexibility even though they may not be as efficient in terms of performance for a specific algorithm.

– Build of a 720 MHs Ethereum Mining Rig With 6x MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24G GPUs…


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