Posts Tagged ‘Gridseed’

Download cgminer 3.8.5 for Windows BTC mining on Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs

6, Mar 2014

cgminer-3-8-5-gridseed-windows-btc

In our efforts to make the Gridseed 5-chip GC3355-based ASIC miner devices to work in Dual Mode for mining Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) at the same time under Windows we have compiled the special modified version of cgminer 3.8.5 that is designed to work with the Gridseed miners. You need to use this special version for mining BTC or to use the ASIC in Dual Mode where this software will be used for the Bitcoin mining part and the modified cpuminer will be used for LTC mining. Note that in order for this cgminer to detect your ASIC miner device you need to install a WinUSB driver over the virtual COM to USB driver, but a detailed guide will follow, so stay tuned. Meanwhile you can download cgminer 3.8.5 for BTC mining on Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs from the link below in order to give it a try for Bitcoin mining.

– You can download cgminer 3.8.5 for BTC mining on Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs on Windows OS here…

Download cpuminer OC Edition for Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs

5, Mar 2014

cpuminer-gc3355-win32-fixed-oc-edition

A few days ago we have published a version compiled for windows of the cpuminer for the 5-chip Gridseed ASICs that fixed the power consumption when using the devices for Scrypt mining only (6-8W power consumption). This version has allowed the user to set the operating frequency of the chips inside up to 900 MHz and our unit seem to work best at 850 MHz as at 900 MHz is seems to have more HW errors. That however did not stop us from modifying the cpuminer to allow for even higher operating frequencies of the Gridchip GC3355 processors, so now we release an OC Edition of the cpuminer that will allow you to go all the way up to 1200 MHz operating frequency.

The OVERCLOCK EDITION we have made allows you to go for higher operating frequency above 900 MHz – you can try running the chips at 950, 1000, 1100 and 1200 (use the –freq=xxx command line parameter to set these frequencies). We have found our test miner to perform best with 850 MHz, however yours might be able to function at higher frequency without problems (many HW errors), so you might want to try higher than 900 MHz all the way up to 1200. At 1000 MHz the device consumes about 9W and at 1200 MHz the power consumption might go as high as 10W, so there should be no problem with the cooling, however the chips might not be able to run well at so high frequencies and can give more or only HW errors.

– You can download the cpuminer OC Edition for the 5-chip GC3355 ASICs for Windows OS here…

What Hashrate We are Getting from the 5-chip Gridseed DualMiner ASIC

2, Mar 2014

gridseed-5-chip-scrypt-asic-performance

Yesterday in our first impressions from the Gridseed 5-chip Scrypt ASIC device we have shared that the modified version of the cpuminer software is not reporting local hashrate. This is a problem as you can hardly know what is your current hashrate, especially when you start overclocking the device to get some extra performance out of it. You need to rely on information reported by the pool about your worker’s current hashrate, but these tend to often report lower or inaccurate results than actual hasrate. This is due to the fact that pools base the reported hashrate on the submitted shares for a given period of time, so result can vary. We can report that the average hasrate we are getting from our 5-chip Gridseed DualMiner ASIC device in terms of Scrypt mining performance to be hovering around 300 KHS with the stock frequency of 600 MHz that the five Gridschip GC3355 chips inside run at.

We could get the chips to run at about 850 MHz, but they were giving out quite a few HW errors, at least visually as the cpuminer software does not report actual number of stale shares or HW errors that the device makes. Seeing a lot of the red error messages means you are probably getting a lot of HW errors and should try reducing the clock frequency with 50 MHz or more. With 800 MHz the device was running more stable with much less HW errors, however this result was achieved with the use of the standard cpuminer software supplied with the device. Apparently this version of cpuminer had a bug and did not disable the BTC core and as a result mining Scrypt only you can get up to about 60W power consumption. By using the newer fixed cpuminer for Gridseed the power usage got down to the 8-9W range and we could overclock the device at 850 MHz with more stable results and very few HW errors. With 850MHz clock we got pools to report hashrate going up to about 400 KHS which is definitely a nice improvement though the newer version of the cpuminer still does not report local hashrate, so it is hard to get more realistic rate for the performance of the device when overclocked.

If you wan to overclock the Gridseed ASIC devices you need to use one fo the preset frequency values as they will not accept just about any frequency that you send to them. The lst of accepted frequencies consists of the following values: 250, 400, 450, 500, 550, 600 (default), 650, 700, 750, 800, 850 and 900 MHz. It is possible that with the version of cpuminer linked above that ensures low power consumption the ASIC devices may be ale to run pretty stable even at 900 MHz, however we still haven’t extensively tested that. Still even when using 850 MHz with about 400 KHS does not sound bad at all as compared to the claimed stock 300 KHS at 600 MHz.


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