Posts Tagged ‘ypool’

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…

MaxCoin Pools Still Under Constant DDoS Attacks

8, Feb 2014

maxcoin-alternative-crypto

It seems that since the launch of the MaxCoin some of the largest pools that added support for mining MAX cryptos are under constant DDoS attacks and that is preventing the normal mining of the currency by normal users. Not only that this is hurting the trust in the new crypto, but it is generally driving away users from pools, especially if the pools are not prepared for such attacks. As a result of the constant DDoS attacks ypool has announced that they are stopping the MaxCoin mining pool and they were probably the largest MAX crypto pool. Another big pool that reports issues from the DDoS attacks is the 1GH pool, but they are still holding up and have not yet announced that they will give up on MAX.

– For more information about the MaxCoin alternative crypto currency…

Protoshare Mining Test at 1GH PTS Mining Pool

31, Jan 2014

1gh-pts-mining-profitability

After trying out PTS mining at ypool we have also decided to try out another Protoshares mining pool with CPU mining to see if we are going to get better results with the Round-Based Pay Per Share (RBPPS) payment system and the lower 3.5% fee that the 1GH PTS mining pool has. We’ve been testing the pool with GPU miners lately, however for the last 24 hours we tested only with CPU miners to see what profit we are going to get.

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 1GH pool we used for PTS mining has:
– 3.5% fee

The total earnings for 24 hour period (confirmed + unconfirmed):
– 0.1169 PTS

The value of the Protoshares mined for 24 hours is as follows:
– 0.00173806 BTC
– ~$1.38 USD

The profit we got from the 1GH PTS mining pool was a bit higher than the one we’ve managed to get for 24 hours at ypool, however the difference in USD is also affected by the BTC/USD and PTS/BTC exchange rates. What is clear however is the fact that there is not much point in mining Protoshares (PTS) with CPU at the moment, if you plan on mining Protoshares then you need to think about going for GPU mining. The 1GH Protoshares mining pool has a very good performing GPU miner that works on both AMD graphics and Nvidia graphics very well. Furthermore the 1GH pool has another advantage over ypool and that s the fact that this pool sends automatically your earnings as long as they are over 0.1 PTS confirmed and in ypool the minimum is 1 PTS.


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