Posts Tagged ‘ETH mining’

Get Up to 30 MHS from Mining Ethereum on AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs

22, Jan 2021

It is time to dust off those old AMD Radeon R9 290/290X and Radeon R9 390/390X GPUs with 8G VRAM you may have lying around and wondering what to do and make them mine Ethereum (ETH) with full power and some nice profit as well. The Hawaii and Grenada GPUs that these Radeon video cards use feature a 512-bit wide memory bus and that is more than welcome for mining Ethereum, even if they are already pretty old. You can be getting about 29-30 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) with these, although they are more power hungry than more recent GPUs that offer the same performance it is still worth it with high mining profit we have at the moment.

With Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs there is a bit of a catch in order to get 29-30 MHS Ethash mining hashrate with about 150-200W of power usage per video card (with optimized video BIOS for lower power usage). It is only possible to do it under Linux as the AMD video drivers for Windows 10 do not feature support for Compute Mode for Hawaii GPUs and you can get only 14-15 MHS, but the Linux drivers do and you get 29-30 MHS. What you need to do is to make sure you have up to date video drivers and that you are using the latest version of PhoenixMiner in order to be able to fully utilize the Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs for mining Ethereum (ETH).

If you are not very good with Linux you can make your life much easier with a dedicated crypto mining operating system such as HiveOS. HiveOS simplifies getting a mining rig with AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs ready for mining Ethereum (ETH) with the full 29+ MHS hashrate. Again, in order to be able to get the optimal mining performance for Ethereum on these Hawaii GPUs you need to stick to Linux, Windows is not an option for the full performance and HiveOS just makes it easy. Do note that for HiveOS you can use the promo code CMB10USDPROMO that will give you $10 USD in your account balance!

– To Download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.5b Ethash AMD and Nvidia GPU miner…

Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork to Start on December 4th

8, Nov 2019

The first phase of Ethereum’s next major hard fork is planned to happen on less than a month around December 4th at block number 9056000. The hard fork called Istanbul is divided in two parts with the first one to be executed on December 4th and the second one planned for early 2020. The next hard fork called Serenity that will bring Ethereum 2.0 and switch the project from PoW to PoS may or may not happen before the end of 2020, so there is still time for that. Is is worth mentioning that on December 4th Ethereum (ETH) will not be switching its mining algorithm from Ethash to the much anticipated and still somewhat controversial ProgPoW as this is still planned to happen in the second Istanbul phase with the EIP-1057 scheduled for the first quarter of 2020.

If you are still mining Ethereum with ASIC miners or GPUs and the Ethash algorithm you will have more than just a month left, it could easily take up to another 6 months for ProgPoW to replace Ethash as the PoW algorithm, though it can also happen faster than that. Nevertheless this can signal the upcoming death of ETH ASIC miners as although there are a number of other projects using the Ethash algorithm, they will most likely not be able to handle the massive hashrate outflow from Ethereum if/when it forks to ProgPoW. On the other hand ProgPoW can also bring a change in the way GPUs are being used for mining as it is supposed to provide a more level playing field for the different GPUs in terms of mining performance. So definitely Ethereum’s upcoming hard forks will have a serious impact on the crypto mining sector.

Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28, May 2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…


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