It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Here is an updated ccMiner 1.7.6-r10 Widows binary of the Nanashi Meiyo-Meijin fork (source) with optimized Lyra2RE and Lyra2REv2 performance. The latest r10 update fixes the hashrate issues that were present with other versions of ccMiner on the latest Nvidia Pascal GPUs such as GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. You can see a brief test of the performance of the new 32-bit Windows binary of the miner compiled with VS2013 and CUDA 8.0 below.
ccMiner 1.7.6-r10 Neoscrypt performance:
– GTX 1080 – 985 KHS
– GTX 1070 – 889 KHS
– GTX 980 Ti – 840 KHS
Just as a reference the latest ccMiner fork by SP has managed to provide just about 365 KHS on GTX 1080 and 668 KHS on GTX 1070, so now you can fully utilize the performance of the new Nvidia Pascal GPUs for mining NeoScrypt-based crypto coins. Do note that the results quoted above are with
– To download the latest ccMiner 1.7.6-r10 with fixed Neoscrypt on Pascal for Windows OS…
Time for some overclocking of the GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition and running the tests again to see what hashrate increase can we expect from the GPU with the increased operating frequencies. The Founders Edition cards are somewhat limited in the max power you can get, but the good news is that the GTX 1070 FE still has the same 8-pin PCI-E power like the 1080, even though its default TDP limit has been lowered to 151W and the Power Limiter allows for just 12% increase over the default TDP (169W max TDP). There is already a tool for flashing modified video BIOS files available, so now the only thing we need figured out is how to modify the TDP limits in BIOS and other settings such as frequencies and voltages in order to be able to squeeze some additional extra performance over the stock clock capabilities of the Founders Edition cards and even more from the non-reference designs that are already starting to become available on the market.
We already know that the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs are handling quite well overclocking and you can squeeze quite a bit extra performance from them if you are not limited and don’t care than much about the power usage. We are trying the GTX 1070 Founders Edition to see what it can do withing its current limits without touching the core voltage and what we got was: Power Limit + 12%, Core Clock + 210 MHs, Memory Clock + 830 MHs, the max settings that are running stable for 24/7 mining on our test card and the results are below. Do note that these can vary from card to card, so you should experiment until you find what works best for you. Regardless it seems that the GTX 1070 FE cards are doing quite well in terms of overclocking in general, so you should expect an nice extra performance boost from them and even more from the non-reference designs.
The performance increase we get after overclocking the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition card with the clock settings above are pretty much consistent with what the GTX 1080 FE shows. The performance boost in terms of hashrate increase in the various algorithms is about 12-14% higher than at the stock settings and better results could be achieved with increase of the voltages, however with that you will also need to be careful that you are fitting in the TDP limit. It is interesting to note that the GTX 1070 FE does perform better on NeoScrypt (668 KHS stock/771 KHS overclocked) than the 1080 FE, but it it still outperformed by the GTX 980 Ti for example. It seems that the slower GDDR5 video memory used here does perform better with the memory intensive algorithms unlike the faster GDDR5X memory used in the 1080, however the GTX 1070 still needs some fixes for NeoScrypt. As already noted the situation with Pascal GPUs including the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 is the same for Ethereum mining under Windows resulting in very low hashrates, so while waiting for a driver fix you might want to go for Linux for Ethereum mining on these cards. All other algorithms we have tested besides the not so great NeoScrypt performance are doing well under Windows 7 and 10, so mining for these you don’t need to rely on Linux, especially if you are no good with it.
Time for a quick look at the power usage of the GeForce GTX 1070, the reference design from Nvidia that has a TDP of 151W set by the manufacturer, making it pretty energy efficient for the performance it provides for crypto currency mining. We are checking the situation with the different algorithms apart from Ethereum, because we already know that the GTX 1070/1080 is far from great choice for Ethereum mining when using Windows and we are testing the mining for other algorithms with Windows 7.
Looking at the results from the different algorithms the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition does seem to be about 30% on average slower (25%-33%) compared to its bigger brother – the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition at the stock settings. The situation with the power usage difference between the two cards is also very similar to the performance difference in the tested algorithms. So the next very interesting question is how well the GTX 1070 will overclock and how will the OCed performance compare to a stock GTX 1080 and an overclocked one. We are going to be posting our results from the GTX 1070 overclock soon, so stay tuned for them.
While we were testing and comparing crypto mining performance we have actually noted that the comparison between GTX 1070 and GTX 980 Ti is actually more interesting as you can see from the table with results. As you can clearly see the GTX 1070 is slightly faster than GTX 980 Ti, but power usage wise it is much more efficient. This can give you a better idea on the evolution of performance and power usage between the previous and this generation of Nvidia GPUs. The GTX 1070 is also a more attractive choice for building multi-GPU mining rigs at the moment as compared to the GTX 1080, though you might want to wait a bit more for the non-reference designs to come out that will allow more serious overclocking and thus even better performance.