It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Ravencoin (RVN) has officially hardforked and has switched the PoW mining algorithm from X16Rv2 to KAWPOW. If you are running a local Ravencoin wallet you need to make sure that you have the latest Ravencoin v4.1.0 release installed. Most mining pools and services supporting RVN have already updated and support the fork, though as usual you should be careful moving coins for a while after the fork just to be on the safe side.
The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has recently added support for KAWPOW rigs, and so just did the NiceHash hashrate selling/buying service right in time for the fork. It will be interesting to see what will happen and if NiceHash could end up being more profitable than directly mining for Ravencoin with the user attention that the fork is generating already. And although the fork should drive away ASIC miners from the Ravencoin network the NiceHaash support could bring a lot of mining hashrate from GPU users that are not interested in RVN itself, but are in it just for the sake of better profit. AMD GPU miners can mine RVN with the new KAWPOW algorithm only using NBMiner for now at least. Nvidia GPU miners have much more choice for mining software such as kawpowminer, TT-Miner, GMiner, T-Rex, Z-enemy and Bminer. The latest kawpowminer and TT-Miner do not have dev fees, others do have 1% or 2% fee, so while performance is very similar with all of them the difference in terms of development fee can influence the decision you make.
With just 1 day left until the hard fork of Ravencoin (RVN) to the new KAWPOW algorithm everyone that is planning to mine the cryptocurrency once more should be well prepared. There are already a number of miners supporting the new algorithm available, as well as some test pools where you can test and setup your GPU mining rigs for optimal performance. The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has just added support for KAWPOW rigs, but NiceHash has not yet added support for the new algorithm, so no massive hash going on and off on the RVN network after the fork. The KAWPOW algorithm is a variation of ProgPow and the available miners are offering very close performance, so the deciding factor in choosing should be what you are more familiar with and what works better for you (has less fee, or no dev fee at all, is open source or not etc.). Users with Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti might benefit the most from the new algorithm to be used by RVN, AMD owners with one of the most popular Radeon RX 480/580 GPUs might not be too happy whit the hashrate they will be getting (about half of the GTX 1080 Ti). KAWPOW is more GPU intensive and not affected by the video memory that much, so the more powerful the GPU, the higher the hashrate.
AMD Radeon users are significantly limited in their choice of mining software for the KAWPOW algorithm at the moment as there is essentially just one option available – the closed source NBMiner with 2% dev fee for KAWPOW that also supports Nvidia GPUs. The only opensource miner with no dev fee is the official kawpowminer that only works with Nvidia GPUs for the moment, though AMD support will hopefully be also added. The other KAWPOW miners are all closed source and work only on Nvidia GPUs for the moment, these are GMiner with 2% dev fee, T-Rex with 1% dev fee and TT-Miner with 1% dev fee. Our preferred choice out of these miners at the moment is T-Rex for Nvidia GPUs, though we are still waiting to also see an updated release of the z-enemy miner, so our preference may change in the future. We are also hopefully soon going to start seeing some additional optimizations to help differentiate performance from different miners at least a bit more…
The latest T-Rex Nvidia GPU miner version 0.15.3 has introduced support for the new KAWPOW algorithm just as expect in time for the fork of RavenCoin (RVN) that is coming in just a few days – May 6th 2020 at 18:00:00 UTC. Aside from the new Kawpow support for the upcoming RVN fork, the latest T-Rex miner also adds supports for ProgPow and MTP-tcr algorithms.
Aside from T-Rex adding support for KAWPOW in the latest version, there are a few other alternatives available already – the official open-source kawpowminer, the latest TT-Miner, the latest NBMiner and the latest GMiner. The only one that is still missing support for KAWPOW is Z-Enemy, however enemy has already announced that there should be an update before the RVN fork and it will also support the new Ravencoin algorithm.
T-Rex is closed source Nvidia GPU miner available for both Linux and Windows operating systems. The miner comes in multiple versions supporting CUDA 9.1, CUDA 9.2 and CUDA 10.0. The miner has developer fee of 1% for all of the supported algorithms, only tensority has a higher dev fee of 3%.
– For more information and to download and try the latest version of the T-Rex miner…