Posts Tagged ‘Primecoin profitability’

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…

Real world example with Primecoin (XPM) mining

16, Jan 2014

primecoin-xpm-earnings

We already talked a bit about the Primecoin (XPM) alternative cryptocurrency and have mentioned that it has good potential for growth, so it might be a good idea to mine some XPM now and keep them with the idea that the exchange rate will increase along with the interest in this crypto currency over time. At the moment Primecoins can only be mined with the CPU of a computer, so you can combine Primecoin mining on the CPU with Litecoin mining on the GPU on the same system and make some extra profit from that if you are already mining LTCs on one or more computers. You can of course mine XPM on pretty much any computer, but the more powerful the processor is the better and the same goes for the number of cores, the more – the better.

We’ve decided to give it a go with two systems using different processor for 24 hour time period in order to see what profit we are going to make. Both of the systems are mining Litecoin on the GPU, but that does not interfere as long as you set the cgminer processor affinity to just a single core if using Windows. We have decided to use one of the biggest Primecoin pools for the test – ypool, though the pool also offers other alternative cryptocurrency mining options.

The two CPUs we’ve used for mining are:
– Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core 3.3 GHz
– AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Six Core 3.3 GHz

The pool we used for XPM mining is ypool:
– 3% fee
– 1000 confirmations per block

The total earnings for 24 hour period (confirmed + unconfirmed):
– 0.3565483 XPM

The value of the Primecoin mined for 24 hours is as follows:
– 0.04838065 LTC
– 0.00139265 BTC
– ~1.15 USD

A little over $1 USD per day does not seem that much of a profit for the moment, but that is only if you sell the Primecoins now, the wise idea however would be to mine now and save the coins for later, expecting to the exchange rate to go sky high. Anyway, it is up to you to to decide if you want to mine and sell now or mine and save the coins for later.


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