Posts Tagged ‘GPU mining’

Download sgminer 4.2.1 Scrypt GPU Miner for Windows

1, Jun 2014

sgminer-4-2-1-windows

We got a request for an up to date windows binary of the latest official sgminer 4.2.1 (source), so here it is. Do note that this is the standard version of sgminer that in intended for Scrypt mining and does not support a lot of alternative crypto algorithms, for that you will need to get sph-sgminer, a fork based on an older version of the official sgminer, namely sgminer 4.1.0. From the link below you can download the latest sgminer 4.2.1 Scrypt GPU miner for windows.

– You can download sgminer 4.2.1 with Scrypt GPU support for Windows OS here…

AMD Announcing There Are No More Radeon R9 GPU Shortages

15, May 2014

sapphire-radeon-r9-280x-tri-x

In a message from AMD sent to press they have announced that the company has good availability of their AMD Radeon R9 product lineup and there are no more shortages. And not only that you can easily get a Radeon R9 280x now for example, but you can also get it at a lower prices as there is no price speculation caused by shortages. Of course AMD is focusing on gamers, though we all know that the shortages were all caused by people buying the cards for crypto currency mining and not for gaming. Below you can see a quote of the message sent to press:

Dear Editor,

You’ve seen many articles, discussions online about the AMD Radeon R9 lineup – especially chatter about pricing and availability. As we’ve talked about it before, the demand for the R9 lineup has been nothing but astonishing, and went well beyond our most optimistic expectations. That created a situation where gamers weren’t able to purchase their desired R9 graphics card.

We have good news! All R9 Series products are now available and in stock at worldwide retailers, and street prices have returned to the SEP (or below)! The chart below should help you get a good overview of the current stack and pricing.

Now that product is available and at suggested pricing, these prices will remain stable. No more madness like you saw in Q1.

I’d like to direct your attention to the AMD Radeon R9 280 – which is now available starting at SEP price of 180€ + VAT ($249 in the US). You will see this price in effect right now on a few items with more on the way. You have most likely not had many of these boards in your lab, and we have a batch of samples available from multiple board partners waiting to be benchmarked. Please let us know if you’d like to review one of the AIB SKUs based on the R9 280.

In tandem with the stable pricing and wide availability, we’ve re-launched our Never Settle Forever bundle program to include over 20 titles from which gamers can pick and choose. In addition, we’ve lined up a few brand new games to add to this promotion, and we’ll be sharing more info with you in the next few weeks!

In summary – for all those gamers who were unsure whether to purchase an R9 graphics card, this is exactly the right time to do so. AMD’s performance and enthusiast line-up has never been more competitive. Armed with technologies like Mantle, TrueAudio, the AMD Radeon R9 series of products offer the best performance and value in every segment from 145€ to 1300€!

Should you have any questions, please let me know.

Kind regards,
AMD PR team

The reason for enough R9 availability is the fact that due to Scrypt mining moving to ASIC mining hardware people are no longer building GPU-based mining rigs like crazy and thus the demand for the video cards is not so high anymore. Also at the moment on the second hand market you can find some great deals on cards used for mining that still have warranty remaining at some really good prices. So why buy new cards when you can get perfectly working ones at even lower price as so many people are selling their GPUs in order to get Scrypt ASIC miners.

Fear not however, GPU mining is not dead, it is just most likely going to take some more time to be revived yet again with the move to another strong alternative crypto currency that is going to replace Litecoin. In the last few days we’ve seen DarkCoin going pretty well, especially after the release of X11 mining support for Nvidia GPUs. There are however multiple other contenders such as VertCoin for example, so do not be in a hurry to sell your GPU hardware yer, or you might regret it later on.

GPU Mining for Primecoin (XPM) Available, But Is it Worth It

28, Apr 2014

claymore-xpm-gpu-miner

Primecoin (XPM) was one of the crypto currencies that was able to hold the front for no GPU miners for quite some time and it was only mineable with CPU however for a few weeks already it is possible to mine it with GPU as well. The first GPU miner “available” was Primegpu, supporting only solo mining and requiring the users to buy a license for the miner at 25 XPM per GPU it dd not seem very reasonable thing to do, so we have skipped it. The good thing is that there is already a new open source project that supports GPU mining, so far only solo mining, that may not be the fastest solution, but available for free, so you can test it yourself. The third GPU miner available is called Claymore XPM GPU Miner and this one has two versions, one for solo and one for pool mining with support for ypool.net, this is the miner we have been testing the last few days. Do note that this miner has a 10% developer fee that goes to the author of the project in order to keep him motivated to develop it even further and we consider this approach to be the much better choice than to have to pay for a license. The only drawback is that the miner is only available for Windows.

If you are wondering what version to use, then you should consider what is the number of GPUs that you have available and want to throw at mining XPM. If you are using one or two GPUs then you probably will be better off using the pool version at ypool as it should give you more constant earnings. If you are going to be using more and more powerful GPUs you may try solo mining, it has higher risk, but can also bring you much better profitability. We have tested the miner with a single Radeon R9 280X GPU at the ypool in order to see what we can expect to get for 24 hours and we ran the test for 48 hours. The reason for that is due to ypool’s way of calculating share value – it is accumulated for the last 160 rounds, so you start with lower earnings per block and after 160 rounds you can get a better estimate on per round earnings you are going to be getting if you continue mining. This way the first 24 hours will bring you less mined XPM coins than what you will get in the next 24 hours and after that, so give it a bit more time in order to see what profitability is going to be just like we did.

GPU mining Primecoin with a single Radeon R9 280X:
– First 24 hours mining at ypool: 1.78 XPM or ~ 0.136 LTC
– Next 24 hours mining at ypool: 2.31 XPM or ~ 0.177 LTC
– 24 hours mining directly for Litecoin: 0.1164 LTC

So it seems that GPU mining for Primecoin (XPM) can offer a nice boost in terms of profitability over direct LTC mining for the moment. And with some good luck and ore GPUs you might be lucky enough to get close to double the direct LTC mining profitability. Solo mining with more GPUs could also prove to be a good thing to try, but as we’ve said the luck there plays a much bigger role, and the higher the risk, the higher the chances for even better profitability as well. Solo mining is not recommended for a single or two GPUs as there the risk is much higher as it may take significantly more time to find a block and you may give up early and loose some precious mining time ending up with nothing.

– You can download the latest version of the Claymore XPM GPU Miner for Windows OS here…


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