Posts Tagged ‘NBMiner

The ProgPoW mining algorithm is still not widely used by crypto projects, some of you migh remember Bitcoin Interest (BCI) as the first to switch their PoW mining to ProgPoW, but now the project is pretty much dying a slow death. And while we are waiting to see when and if Ethereum (ETH) will finally switch from Ethash to ProgPoW as a mining algorithm, there is another project that has been using ProgPoW for a while now – Super Zero (SERO) that you may play around with if you want to see the current status of ProgPoW miners. There are of course some other projects using ProgPoW as well, but among them SERO is pretty much the most popular one. We remind you that ProgPoW or Programmatic Proof-of-Work was designed in a way that it utilizes graphics processors to their maximum in order to provide an equal level performance without favoring a specific GPU manufacturer or being able to actually provide much faster hashrate if implemented on ASICs. Some good places to trade the coin include Citex, Gateio and Hotbit.

Recently GMiner has added support for ProgPoW mining for SERO on Nvidia GPUs, however that was a bit problematic as it required the user to install the respective Nvidia CUDA Toolkit for the video drivers you have used. The latest GMiner 2.01 has addressed this problem by including the required runtime libraries needed for ProgPoW support, so things are easier and less problematic using GMiner 2.01 for mining SERO on Nvidia GPUs using the ProgPoW algo. GMiner however is not the only mining software to support ProgPoW, it is just the latest one to add support, prior to that you could mine using MBMiner and also prior to that with TT-Miner. In fact TT-Miner (Trade-Tec Miner) was one of the first to introduce ProgPoW support along with the controversial and now not available anymore Progminer software.

Now, the big question that remains is which mine of the three should you be using if you are mining SERO with the ProgPoW algorithm on Nvidia GPUs? Well, performance wise all of the miners are doing pretty much the same in our up to date tests done on GTX 1080 Ti… it seems that ProgPoW support is based on the same kernel in all of the miners and not much has been further optimized (maybe not much is possible) since last year. So how can you make the right choice if hashrate is the almost the same on all of the 3 available miners, you should simply look at other things, like the dev fee that these miners have. GMiner and NBMiner do come with 2% developer fee for ProgPoW mining while TT-Miner has only 1% dev fee for all of the supported algorithm, so it seems like the best choice for the moment.

To download and try the latest TT-Miner 3.2.2 for SERO (Super Zero) ProgPoW mining…

The latest NBMiner 27.7 update comes with improvements for Handshake (HNS) and HNS + ETH Dual mining on Nvidia GPUs, bringing a bit better performance as well as some fixes like for the NVML initialization failure on certain cases and for ETH mining on NiceHash. With the latest performance improvement NBMiner 27.7 is again taking a lead for Handshake mining performance from the latest GMiner. With the latest performance improvements a mining rig with 6x 1080 Ti’s gets closer to what Blackminer’s FPGAs with HNS support, though GPUs are still a bit slower and with a bit higher power usage. Nevertheless mining HNS now may still be worth it with the expected availability of the first Handshake ASIC miner sometime in June.

We remind you that the NBMiner is a closed source GPU miner for Nvidia CUDA and now AMD as well that is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and it has the following developer fee built-in: tensority_ethash 3%, tensority (Pascal) 2%, tensority (Turing) 3%, ethash 0.65%, cuckaroo & cuckatoo & cuckaroo_swap 2%, progpow_sero 2%, sipc 2%, bfc 3%, hns 2%, hns_ethash 3%.

To download and try the latest NBMiner 27.7 Nvidia and AMD GPU Miner for Windows/Linux…

The latest GMiner 2.00 miner adds support for the ProgPoW algorithm used by the Super Zero (SERO) project. SERO’s use of the ProgPow mining algorithm is not new,but apparently it has lately caught more attention of users and hence more happening around the project lately. There is a catch however, the ProgPow support of Gminer requires you to have the latest Nvidia CUDA Toolkit installed or you will be getting the “Failed to initialize NVRTC library” error message wen trying to run the miner software for mining SERO. This is a few gigabytes of installation package, though in theory you can get the smaller network installer and select to install only the Runtime Libraries and not the full package that includes unnecessary data as far as mining is concerned and no actual CUDA software development is required… nevertheless it is bothersome requirement for a mining software. Older algorithms supported by the miner should work fine without the CUDA Toolkit, so it is a requirement only if you want to mine SERO with the latest GMiner.

The GMiner miner software was originally only an Nvidia GPU miner, although some algorithms are already supported on AMD GPUs as well. Do note that GMiner is a closed source miner for Nvidia and AMD GPUs with binaries available for both Windows and Linux, there is a 2% developer fee built-in the software.

To download and try the latest release of the Gminer v2.00 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner…


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