It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Back in January this year Sapphire, a popular name among AMD GPU miners, has announced their RX 570 GPUs with 16GB of video memory intended for use for GRIN crypto mining and more specifically the Cuckatoo31 algorithm that requires more video memory and can take advantage of the extra VRAM on these GPUs. This might have sounded interesting for some miners at least initially after the launch of the GRIN network and the hype and high initial price of the Grin coins, but things look different now. Miner developers have been able to optimize and enhance performance on 8GB+ Nvidia GPUs for the Cuckatoo 31 algorithm and the $399 USD mining GPU from Sapphire with just 6 months warranty already seems like a total joke when you compare performance…
The latest version of the miner specifically optimized for Grin mining on the Sapphire RX 570 16GB mining video cards ePIC Boost Miner supporting both Cuckaroo29 and Cuckatoo31 is apparently capable of delivering up to 2.6 G/s for Cuckaroo29 at 163W and up to 0.47 G/s for Cuckatoo31 at 195W if you have a top specs computer used for mining and not what a traditional GPU mining rig looks like. These results are for a mining rig with i5/i7/i9/Ryzen Multithreading CPU, PCIe 3.0 with Atomics and AMD ROCm Linux driver. If you use a low-end Celeron/Pentium CPU, like most GPU mining rigs do, PCIe 2.0 bus for the GPUs and the AMD GPU Pro driver you will be down to 1.5 G/s for Grin29 and 0.35 G/s for Grin31 according to the latest official performance results.
Now, how does an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti with 11GB of video memory compare with the currently fastest Cuckatoo31 miner NBMiner 21.0 under Windows 10 on a normal low-end mining rig with a Celeron CPU. You can easily get about 1.3-1.35 G/s with about 200W of power usage (lowered down TDP of the GPU, up to about 1.45 G/s with stock TDP) to get similar power usage as with the AMD. You get almost three times the performance with the Nvidia at the same power usage with two to three times the price of the AMD mining GPU from Sapphire and without a number of specific requirements that are not easy for a lot of miners.
The answer to the question are the Sapphire RX 570 16GB mining GPUs worth it at the moment is a simple NO! But what about the performance for the upcoming Grin Cuckatoo 32 protocol upgrade planned for 2020… well, who knows, but what will you be doing by then?
Bitmain has made available a new 96KHS ASIC miner for Bytom (BTM) called Antminer B7 as a successor of their Antminer B3 ASIC from about a year ago that was offering just 780 H/s mining hashrate with 360 Watts of power usage. After the release of the B3 ASIC last year the development of a much faster GPU miner for Bytom’s Tensority algorithm began and currently most recent GPUs are delivering quite good hashrates for BTM mining. The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is going to put out a more serious competition however for anyone interested in minig BTM.
The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is currently only available on the Chinese website of Bitmain and promises 96 KHS hashrate with just 528 Watts of power usage, so tough competition for GPUs in term of hashrate and power usage. The price of the new Antminer B7 ASIC miner is currently set at 9900 Chinese Yuan or a little less than $1500 USD, but ordering the device to Europe or US can easily bump the price to over 2K. When you look at the current low profit numbers however you may very quickly decide not to invest in these new ASIC miners however…
The most recent version of the fastest NBMiner 21.0 GPU miner for Bytom (BTM) is capable of delivering about 3.4 KHS for a single GTX 1070 Ti, 5 KHS for a single GTX 1080 Ti and 11.5 KHS for GTX 2080 GPUs according to the official information from the developer. This means that a 8x GTX 2080 GPUs mining rig would be needed in order to deliver hashrate similar to that of the Antminer B7, but it will end up significantly pricier and with higher power usage.
– You can visit the official Chinese website of Bitmain for more details on the new B7 ASIC miner…
The latest NBMiner 21.0 that has just been released comes with support for Aeternity (AE) as well as improved miner stability and performance for the Grin29 and Grin31 algorithms (Cuckaroo29 and Cuckatoo31). Performance wise the new version does seem to catch up to the competition regarding Cuckaroo29 hashrates (the latest Gminer is still slightly faster) and could currently be the fastest miner for Cuckatoo31 in terms of hashrate (at least for Windows on GTX 1080 Ti) compared to BMiner and GMiner. Stability wise Cuckatoo31 however could use some more improvements as we see the miner crashing on some systems that otherwise work just fine with competing miners.
We remind you that the NBMiner is a closed source GPU miner for Nvidia CUDA that is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and it has the following developer fee built-in: tensority + ethash – 3%, tensority (Pascal GPUs) – 2%, tensority (Turing GPUs) – 3%, ethash – 0.65%, cuckaroo29 and cuckatoo31 – 2%.
– To download and try the latest NBMiner 21.0 Nvidia GPU Miner for Windows/Linux…