Ethereum GPU mining?

[Madpacket]

Yeah the features of Claymore's miner put it ahead of the standard and Genoil forks in my opinion. I can try the Genoil miner this weekend on my Win10 machine and see how it stacks up vs. Claymore. I'm still finishing a 24-hour run of ethminer + eth-proxy (farm recheck 1000) get some more comparison data. farm recheck 3000 did not seem to be working out so well, at least not on this machine.



I have problems with being unable to underclock a lot of the Hawaii cards I mess with in Win10. aticonfig under Linux seems to work no matter what the card. Regardless I flash their default clockspeed and mem down to 900/1250 so I can set them anywhere I want no matter what the OS.



That's about what I noticed from the one I got. I returned mine anyway since I did not want to deal with the blower, at least not on that particular card. But it was good for 1070 MHz -100 mV during my testing. Power usage was acceptable.

Can you imagine a room full of these things mining away? The agony.

What tools are you using to underclock the Hawaii cards on Windows? After ticking the right boxes and a few reboots MSI Afterburner works fine for the most part. I find Sapphire Trixx is a buggy mess with memory leaks and tends to crash after a week or two of running. But it can give you more room to undervolt (up to -200mv on my Asus 390's) without having to resort to hard flashing BIOS's.

I did open another 290 last night and it runs quite a bit hotter than the first card at the same settings (around 8 Celsius on the core) It also had a few very minor scuffs on the face of the plastic shroud surrounding the card so perhaps these are simply factory refurbs and some are better than others? Not sure but both are mining away with extenders on my cheap AsRock board, I'll add the rest tonight and report back.

FIVE BLOWER FANS IN ONE BOX! Fun fun...

Anyone else notice NCIX now has a serious price drops on the MSI 290X?

 

[MrTeal]

What tools are you using to underclock the Hawaii cards on Windows? After ticking the right boxes and a few reboots MSI Afterburner works fine for the most part. I find Sapphire Trixx is a buggy mess with memory leaks and tends to crash after a week or two of running. But it can give you more room to undervolt (up to -200mv on my Asus 390's) without having to resort to hard flashing BIOS's.

I did open another 290 last night and it runs quite a bit hotter than the first card at the same settings (around 8 Celsius on the core) It also had a few very minor scuffs on the face of the plastic shroud surrounding the card so perhaps these are simply factory refurbs and some are better than others? Not sure but both are mining away with extenders on my cheap AsRock board, I'll add the rest tonight and report back.

FIVE BLOWER FANS IN ONE BOX! Fun fun...

Anyone else notice NCIX now has a serious price drops on the MSI 290X?

I assume you mean that 390X Gaming for CDN$430, but I'd hope they drop the price on all of them. Really, much more than $350 is too much for a 390X at this point, given that the 8GB 480 should be slotted in around $400 and is likely close in performance while being much lower power use. For a miner the three weeks makes a difference, but for most gamers waiting a couple more weeks won't make a difference.

 

[Madpacket]

I assume you mean that 390X Gaming for CDN$430, but I'd hope they drop the price on all of them. Really, much more than $350 is too much for a 390X at this point, given that the 8GB 480 should be slotted in around $400 and is likely close in performance while being much lower power use. For a miner the three weeks makes a difference, but for most gamers waiting a couple more weeks won't make a difference.

Oops yes the 390X in CAD. I agree it probably hasn't dropped low enough but without knowing the actual performance of Polaris it's hard to tell if this is overpriced. But yes unless mining (or even if mining) $430 CAD is still too expensive at this point. I hope we see under $300 CAD for 390's soon.

 

[DrMrLordX]

What tools are you using to underclock the Hawaii cards on Windows?

MSI Afterburner, Sapphire Trixx, the standard AMD Crimson software . . . they all have the same limitations. Some cards just don't underclock via software in Win10. In Linux, they all do.

Anyone else notice NCIX now has a serious price drops on the MSI 290X?

No, but it's worth keeping an eye on it . . .

As an addendum, let me say that after nearly 24h of mining with the 290 + 390 on my Win10 box via ethminer + eth-proxy, I'm getting 24.1 + 24.9 MH/s, or a total of 50 MH/s. So it's within +/- 1% of the same cards running Claymore after the 1% fee is calculated. I'll try Genoil + eth-proxy over the weekend.

 

[codyray10]

Anyone have a rough idea of how long it takes to sync up the blockchain? I'm going on 3 days now. Currently at #1674742. Going in to it I knew it was going to take a while, but holy moly...It's writing to a SSD too.

 

[SimianR]

Anyone have a rough idea of how long it takes to sync up the blockchain? I'm going on 3 days now. Currently at #1674742. Going in to it I knew it was going to take a while, but holy moly...It's writing to a SSD too.

I got annoyed with the amount of space the blockchain was taking up and started using an online wallet. https://www.myetherwallet.com/ is the one I've been using.

 

[Erithan13]

Anyone have a rough idea of how long it takes to sync up the blockchain? I'm going on 3 days now. Currently at #1674742. Going in to it I knew it was going to take a while, but holy moly...It's writing to a SSD too.

Depends on your connection speed of course, but I think something is wrong if it's taking that long. I remember when I first started syncing it was agonisingly slow at the start, then after I kept restarting geth it suddenly sped up greatly and was done in one afternoon. There's also a command that does a fast sync that doesn't download the whole thing although I can't remember it at the moment.

 

[codyray10]

Depends on your connection speed of course, but I think something is wrong if it's taking that long. I remember when I first started syncing it was agonisingly slow at the start, then after I kept restarting geth it suddenly sped up greatly and was done in one afternoon. There's also a command that does a fast sync that doesn't download the whole thing although I can't remember it at the moment.

I've got a 50/5 connection. It's moving through blocks pretty quickly for the most part. Starting to think something might be wrong too.

 

[codyray10]

I got annoyed with the amount of space the blockchain was taking up and started using an online wallet. https://www.myetherwallet.com/ is the one I've been using.

Thanks for the link. I'll check that out

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

As an addendum, let me say that after nearly 24h of mining with the 290 + 390 on my Win10 box via ethminer + eth-proxy, I'm getting 24.1 + 24.9 MH/s, or a total of 50 MH/s. So it's within +/- 1% of the same cards running Claymore after the 1% fee is calculated. I'll try Genoil + eth-proxy over the weekend.

maybe I missed a post saying youre underclocking/undervolting but 390s should pull 31's @1100/1500 -100mv

I will downclock mine later but right now my 2 390s and 1 380 run pretty much flat out. 81 mhs total. thee heck with the heat

 

[Feld]

Good deal on open box Asus 390 cards at Newegg for $240.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121974R

I'm sorely tempted because I do have the slots to plug in two more cards in my existing rigs and my electricity is cheap (6.4 cents/kWh), but the heat I'm already putting out is at about the limit of what my apartment's AC can deal with and it's only going to get hotter as the summer wears on. I'm mainly looking forward to what Polaris can do - if it can provide substantially better MH/W than Hawaii and decent raw MH/s I'll probably try to sell all my Hawaii cards and fill my mobos with 480s, purely to reduce the amount of heat I'm generating. I expect the hashrate won't be as high as a 290/390 but if I can make up the difference by running an extra card or two while still drawing significantly less power, it would be worth it to me.

 

[Feld]

Good deal on open box Asus 390 cards at Newegg for $240.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121974R

I'm sorely tempted because I do have the slots to plug in two more cards in my existing rigs and my electricity is cheap (6.4 cents/kWh), but the heat I'm already putting out is at about the limit of what my apartment's AC can deal with and it's only going to get hotter as the summer wears on. I'm mainly looking forward to what Polaris can do - if it can provide substantially better MH/W than Hawaii and decent raw MH/s I'll probably try to sell all my Hawaii cards and fill my mobos with 480s, purely to reduce the amount of heat I'm generating. I expect the hashrate won't be as high as a 290/390 but if I can make up the difference by running an extra card or two while still drawing significantly less power, it would be worth it to me.

And now they're out of stock. No longer able to tempt me!

 

[DrMrLordX]

maybe I missed a post saying youre underclocking/undervolting but 390s should pull 31's @1100/1500 -100mv

I will downclock mine later but right now my 2 390s and 1 380 run pretty much flat out. 81 mhs total. thee heck with the heat

My 390 and 290 in the Win10 box are both @ 900 MHz GPU, and -a lot of voltage. Because both of them were being overheat monsters so they're in time out at the moment.

The 390 seems to be leaking less current or whatever the hell was wrong with it so I may put it back on full mining duty eventually, but the 290 is probably going to need TIM replacement or something before I even think about that.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

ah, gotcha.

one of my 390 is in the daily driver PC im typing on and in a nzxt h2 case with decent-but-not-great airflow so it hits 70C (vrms @ 79C) @ 43% fan. house is climate controlled to 71F (gotta love geothermal hvac).

the other 390 and the 380 are free air suspended via zipties and extenders from a workbench shelf in the basement and run very low 70sC @ 45ish% (unsure of vrms as its ubuntu on that rig) in the unfinished basement which is 65F more or less.

the basement rig dual mines eth and dcr with claymore, the daily driver does not, which is why the basement rig runs pretty much same temps as the desktop. the basement rig ran 65C @ 42-43% eth only as I recall.

happiness is lots of space to spread the heat out heh.

EDIT: the two 390s are sapphire nitros each with 3 80mm fans. the 380 is a sapphire nitro 380itx with a single 92mm. all are pretty quiet at < 50% fan. WAF factor (primarily noise) was big in deciding to go with sapphires, plus in my btc days they were problem free.

 

[EightySix Four]

Just a head's up, last night my Windows rigs started classifying Claymore as a virus and quarantining it. May want to be on the lookout.

 

[Madpacket]

Just a head's up, last night my Windows rigs started classifying Claymore as a virus and quarantining it. May want to be on the lookout.

I wouldn't worry. This is typical behaviour of malware / AV. Malware authors did the same with Bitcoin mining where they pack the software along with malware. Malware authors are smart in that they simply pack working mining apps along with the malware so Antivirus companies write signatures and the mining app is flagged.

So 99% chance this is a false positive. This is actually great news, it means Malware authors are bothered enough to pack in Claymore to earn ether I guess ethereum really is starting to take hold haha.

Do you mind listing what A/V software flagged it?

 

[Madpacket]

Anyone have a rough idea of how long it takes to sync up the blockchain? I'm going on 3 days now. Currently at #1674742. Going in to it I knew it was going to take a while, but holy moly...It's writing to a SSD too.

This issue will be addressed soon. A new version of geth that syncs much faster has recently been developed, it just needs to be packed in with the next version of MIST. Just tough it for out, should finish eventually.

Careful using fast sync, it can open you up to potential attacks. More here:

http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/1161/what-is-geths-fast-sync-and-why-is-it-faster

 

[Madpacket]

I got annoyed with the amount of space the blockchain was taking up and started using an online wallet. https://www.myetherwallet.com/ is the one I've been using.

+1

MyEtherWallet is in active development and they even give you the ability to easily vote for THE DAO proposals (Mist is a mess for voting).

I had a good look at their security model (and actually got them to make a few changes to their password generation management) and it's pretty sound. Everything is pushed down to the client and generated in the browser client side.

That being said I still recommend using a clean browser with private mode enabled to reduce risk. If really paranoid fire up a fresh VM, download Chrome and run a SHA1 check against the binary to ensure it came from Google, and then launch chrome, enable private mode and then navigate to MyEtherWallet to generate your wallet or vote. Use a stronger password than what they recommend in case your wallet file is ever stolen. I recommend using KeyPass for generating and storing passwords. Create at least a 16 character strong password for your wallet.

Keypass can be downloaded here.

http://keepass.info/

Again, hash check the binary for good measure. I recommend IgorWare Hasher for this, it's decent.

 

[Madpacket]

MSI Afterburner, Sapphire Trixx, the standard AMD Crimson software . . . they all have the same limitations. Some cards just don't underclock via software in Win10. In Linux, they all do.



No, but it's worth keeping an eye on it . . .

As an addendum, let me say that after nearly 24h of mining with the 290 + 390 on my Win10 box via ethminer + eth-proxy, I'm getting 24.1 + 24.9 MH/s, or a total of 50 MH/s. So it's within +/- 1% of the same cards running Claymore after the 1% fee is calculated. I'll try Genoil + eth-proxy over the weekend.

Weird, I've never not been able to tweak a 290 or 390 with MSI Afterburner under Windows 10. The only card that was stubborn was a Sapphire 380 (no voltage controls). If Linux works who cares, probably a better solution anyway!

 

[Madpacket]

FYI to all here using Radeons.

The latest AMD beta driver works just fine with Claymore miner. I'm mining at full speed under Windows 10 on my new 290 build with 3 out of 5 cards so far. This is good news as it probably means we'll have Polaris working at launch

 

[codyray10]

+1

MyEtherWallet is in active development and they even give you the ability to easily vote for THE DAO proposals (Mist is a mess for voting).

I apologize for what is likely a very noob question, but, once I create a wallet here, how do I begin the actual mining process with something like ethminer? I need to point it to the wallet I created at MyEtherWallet right? I tried to research myself, but there are tons of guides for different things.

 

[thilanliyan]

FYI to all here using Radeons.

The latest AMD beta driver works just fine with Claymore miner. I'm mining at full speed under Windows 10 on my new 290 build with 3 out of 5 cards so far. This is good news as it probably means we'll have Polaris working at launch

Which driver version?

 

[Madpacket]

I apologize for what is likely a very noob question, but, once I create a wallet here, how do I begin the actual mining process with something like ethminer? I need to point it to the wallet I created at MyEtherWallet right? I tried to research myself, but there are tons of guides for different things.

No worries, we're all here to help.

I recommend downloading Claymore miner instead of ethminer, it's faster and easier to setup, more stable, and generally as much or more (coins) as etheminer.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0

Most instruction on what you need to do to get started is listed there but I'll attempt to clear things up.

1. Pick an mining pool (I recommend ethermine for the lack of fees but nanopool is also a decent alternative).

2. Download and extract the Claymore files to a folder. Edit the file "start.bat" and add the following:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal "mining address, the address generated by MyEtherWallet".NameOfMiner -epsw x

Paste in your wallet address between the quotes and keep the dot between it and the name of the miner. This will show up on ethermine.org (your pooled mining pool).

Launch start.bat (create a shortcut of the batch file to your desktop, rename it to Claymore_start or whatever you want).

At ethermine.org paste in your wallet address in the filed located at the top right of the page, this will list for you stats about your miner (hashing speeds, etc).

I wrote this very quickly from memory and have to run but if you have any questions let us know. That's really it!

 

[Madpacket]

Which driver version?

Crimson Edition 16.6.1 Hotfix

 

[poofyhairguy]

FYI to all here using Radeons.

The latest AMD beta driver works just fine with Claymore miner. I'm mining at full speed under Windows 10 on my new 290 build with 3 out of 5 cards so far. This is good news as it probably means we'll have Polaris working at launch

Great news! Thanks to that I will hold off buying the $220 390x Frys has on sale today.