monero Mining Monero (XMR) with my current gear? Let's look at some numbers!

[WhiteGoblin]

Well, even though I've been six feet under for a long time now, the pony express never fails! Don't worry, once I live again I shall return but for now I'll leave you all with some cardboard premonitions...

 

Oh my, what's in this big box from EVGA? Could it be Hybrid FTW3?

 

 

Green Berets on tap like snow bunny bitches in Vail:

 

 

Hey, you over there, yeah you, sssshhh, heard you wanted some Team Green:

 

[8uhbbhu8]

6 hours ago, WhiteGoblin said:

Well, even though I've been six feet under for a long time now, the pony express never fails! Don't worry, once I live again I shall return but for now I'll leave you all with some cardboard premonitions...

 

Oh my, what's in this big box from EVGA? Could it be Hybrid FTW3?

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Green Berets on tap like snow bunny bitches in Vail:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Hey, you over there, yeah you, sssshhh, heard you wanted some Team Green:

  Reveal hidden contents

oh damn... all the tis!  Your gonna cause a shortage all on your own!  

[WhiteGoblin]

...and then I walked amongst the living again: (hey now, it's 2018, would you look at that)

 

Hello internets! It's nice to see you're all still alive and trolling as normal. As some of you have noticed (and sent me some very nice emails over) it's been a couple months since I've been around. As you can tell via the linkage in my previous post I've been dealing with some health issues & have been out for treatment pretty much exclusively since then. As much as I'd love to talk about high gamma ozone insufflation right now, an would find comfort in discussing it with folks of like mind, this just really isn't the time or place for that. This is a mining thread! Which as you can expect no matter what happens in my personal life the business world keeps on moving & I've been trying hard to keep up to date!

 

Which uuhhh, has anyone looked at the markets lately? It's a dark day for miners and traders alike everywhere! (and has been for a hot minute) Though I've found great pleasure in reading and listening to others reveal what seems to be another well orchestrated market manipulation that has lead to the crash we're currently riding out. Given one of my passions in life has been understanding fractional reserve banking, the concept of applying interest to it, and wealth creation in general it's been a real trip to see market mouth pieces hop on over to my side of the conspiratorial fence for a while. Banksters going to be banksters! What do we expect? LOL! This has actually all made for a pretty rough journey for the casual miner trying to go large. I've got a fifty plus page business plan and have hit banks, hard money lenders, even traditional mineral mining operations trying to get them to see the light of Proof of Work based crypto mining. I've toured mega mines, I've built and retooled more rigs then I can remember, I've checked out pool operation, I mean I've really tried to get 10,000% into this scene no matter the angle.

 

Mainly I've made a large fool of myself a number of times as I'm just a single man with a dream. When your health is down you tend to not give the best presentations or even speak to people with the respect and consideration you generally should show your fellow man in life. I've tossed off emails to media outlets like LinusTechTips, having some very nice exchanges overall but being a bit of an enthusiastic nut job through the process. How much sense I really made at any moment was probably thanks to how I felt on a given day. As I watch damn near every tech channel on YouTube I just want to throw out that I think Stephen Burke over at Gamers Nexus puts out the best mining and hardcore tech related content I can find, respect, and appreciate. I'd recommend anyone who's reading this thread in particular to head on over and check them out both on their website an affiliated channels. Getting back on track this all means that over the last couple months I've not managed to open my own sizable mine yet. Even the logistics of getting five hundred of any respectable graphic card delivered to my doorstep is a real eye opener in distribution. (if there's any reps out there reading this thread, send me a PM if you can help) 

 

Another logical problem is funding such a project! I've got three locations, two sitting around the 100K mark to get them up and running and one that would be absolutely god damn epic but require a real deep pocket to even consider, easily 500K to start. Hell it'd take half a year of just working every day to put it together, even with extra hands on board. Have you tried explaining blockchain, mining, efficiency curves, PoW vs. PoS, etc. to anyone who's not a nerd? Look if the bank itself doesn't already have a private mine with it's name on the side of it then they're not giving you money to create your own. Atleast in my last few months of experience on the manner, it's not like I've got years of experience here so maybe I'm still fumble fucking my way through doing it wrong. Then there's just the endless waves of clueless venture capitalist guys who are spitting out more random nonsensical industry terms per minute then a bestbuy cashier who wondered away from their register. Good lord I just want to build out a couple mega mines, thousand card stacks, run some pools, and get into some real interesting market plays once I have power to leverage. How hard could this be right? ROFLMAO!!

 

I've really been wanting to post here and share the journey I've been on. I could've tripled the size of this thread if I'd continued to actively blog on my experiences. But life has really been a learning curve for me lately and in all honesty, I should be dead right now. So not blogging, not being online, not even looking at a cell phone for large periods of time, that's been key to turning the corner an coming back at life full force. So while I've been missing the interaction I've come to enjoy so much with all of you, I've needed to be away as well and it's been good to be gone. Though like I said before, this is a mining thread and I'm sure you guys would like to see something cool instead of just reading about my experiences in the trenches! So today I give you a new machine I just finished putting together, the parts have been around for a while but I've not had the time to finish it until now.

 

The actual design has gone through a large number of revisions as you'll be able to see in the pictures. There has been some fun things to learn on this mainly because things really needed to be customized at certain steps. At one point I had the entire thing spread out across a monster six foot by six foot metal rack though let's all be honest, that's jank and not professional at all. I wanted to show you guys the process of putting together a cool little mining machine for your home while having a rig to be proud of an not to be embarrassed by when the fellow nerds come on over. There was also the problem of actually moving such a computer, the first few versions proved to be a nightmare to carry around. Which is why I've ended up with it's current two part design of a controller tower with an attachable plugin open air GPU frame. I'll be sure to attach a parts list onto the bottom of this post after all the pictures so people can follow along at home if they want to join in on a replication. It's also important I feel to note, I know this could be done differently and even better! This is just the current revision and I already have a growing list of things I want to change and/or just make better overall in the next one.

 

#00: Pro Tech ToolKit FTW!
Info: I see this company all over the internet advertising their kits and honestly I'm glad I grabbed one. This thing has came in sooooo handy. #notapromo #paidfullprice

 

 

#01: Quality power supply goes a long way!
Info: Corsair AX1500i PSU.

 

 

#02: Lots of power supplies go even further!
Info: More AX1500i goodness.

 

 

#03: Just lots of power supply box porn going on.
Description: Two EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova PSUs & a Corsair 150i Pro RGB AIO.

 

 

#04: Going ham on ram for lots of future hyper-v overhead.
Info: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400mhz 32gb (2x16) Kit.

 

 

#05: Straight out of China here's our graphics cards new home.
Info: Veddha 8 Open Air Mining Frame.

 

 

#06: ..and like magic we've got a frame!
Info: Veddha assembly completed!

 

 

#07: Here we'll just gut this old mid sized gaming case and reuse it.
Info: NZXT S340 Black/Blue.

 

 

#08: ZOMG HOW MANY GPUS & PSUS!?
Info: Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard.

 

 

#09: Always wire up your big ass power supplies outside the tiny case then slide it in for success once it's done.
Info: EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova being installed into the basement of the S340.

 

 

#10: Getting creative with power cable management.
Info: These ten power cables (eight pci-e and two sata) are routed from the basement through a hole an out the side of the case.

 

 

#11: Cleaning up the controller tower wiring.
Info: Thirteen cables extend outwards from the tower, the extra length is so they can be plugged into the GPU frame that will sit next to it.

 

 

#12: Building bridges of fans, yes, bridges of fans!
Info: Seven EKWB Furious Vardar 3000 fans bridged across the front of the frame with safety grills installed.

 

 

#13: These annoying little fuckers are like red headed step children.
Info: The key to attaching anything to this mining frame is learning to utilize these all over the place.

 

 

#14: Fan cables everywhere! What to do with this mess?
Info: Each Vardar needs to be wired to the controller tower.

 

 

#15: Cleanbois wiring only! #alexfaciane @facianea
Info: Here I've used an EK-Cable Splitter 4-Fan PWM extended length dongle to bring four Vardar fans together. 

 

 

#16: Flipped for that extra cleanbois feeling!
Info: The GPU frame upside down to attach wiring on the bottom.

 

 

#17: Cheap bits getting the job done!
Info: These things cost $4 but I only needed one of them in particular to match the current hole size sooo three bucks down.

 

 

#18: Things getting messy around the build site!
Info:  1080Ti's hanging out staying sexy.

 

 

#19: Video card placement and radiator management complete!
Info:  Twelve EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Edition Cards mounted.

 

 

#20: Under the upper class graphics cards lives a windy world of pissed off vardars. 
Info: Fresh air comes in below then gets pushed around the cards themselves and finally out the radiators above.

 

 

#21: Extra airflow being added to the sides!
Info: Two Corsair high performance 120mm fans added to the sides to pull in more air.

 

 

#22: ONE WIRE TO RULE THEM ALL.
Info: After multiple dongles tying them all together there's one single input cable that comes out of the GPU frame and plugs into the controller tower.

 

 

#23: Two giants of power consumption and supply hanging loose.
Info: Two Corsair AX1500i power supplies.

 

 

#24: Power cabling hanging out everywhere.
Info: Decided to remove half the side intake fans and mount the power supplies this way instead.

 

 

#25: Let's take a second to relax and chill.
Info: Here's where all the magic happens. Goblins love mines.

 

 

#26: So many cables! 
Info:  Another eight power cables on each side (two per card) need properly cable managed.

 

 

#27: Keep with the zip ties!!
Info: Still need to clean this up some more but here's the basis of my attempt at getting two cables up to each card.

 

 

#28: More power supply cable management.
Info: This is the second power supply that's mounted on the GPU frame. (pre proper management going up to each card in the back)

 

 

#29: Meet a Riser.
Info: One Supercope PCI-E 006C 16x->1x Powered Riser Adapter Card w/ 60cm USB 3.0 Extension Cable & 6-Pin MOLEX to SATA Power Cable.

 

 

#30: Riser Orgy.
Info: Or maybe gangbang?

 

 

#31: Keep on that cable management train...
Info: Is there ever an end to wiring? Here's usb & power cables from the risers. Good work bois. #TPB

 

 

#32: One big blue cable of bondage
Info: Here's one of the riser cable bundles for connecting the graphics cards to the controller tower.

 

 

#33: Wiring of the GPU frame finished! 
Info: Three bundles of riser cables (four in each) plus the cable that controls all the extra fans.

 

 

#34: The two meet for the first time in the basement, on the white table, next to the monitor, ready to explore each other but still scared of being rejected.
Info: Uptight medium sized Controller Tower A meets huuuuge junk in the trunk open air GPU Frame B. 

 

 

#35: They hang out for a while before she decides he's worth sliding on the 1x pci-e usb adapters. 
Info:  Notice how they get closer to each other over time as a bond begins to form. Here you can see his long black extensions being emphasized in hopes they'll soon couple. 

 

 

#36: The importance of that one cable to rule them all.
Info: Remember that master fan controller cable for the GPU frame? It plugs in right here.

 

 

#37: Clearly some very naughty things have occurred.
Info: Full on blue tentacle sync here, some type of odd Japanese fetish. (oh that's a nzxt kraken x62 in push+pull on the cpu there)

 

 

#38: An entire shelf of innocent side devices deal with having seen the merging.
Info: EVGA has been consulted with personally for bringing in the appropriate trauma related counselors.

 

 

#39: Sparks can't fly without the power!
Info: That's not a knife, this is a knife. 

 

 

#40: After netflix and chill the two decide to make a life together by updating their drivers.
Info: Installing graphics drivers takes a really long time when you have twelve of them. Just go smoke a bowl and relax.

 

 

#41: One pretty tired Goblin calls it quits for the night.
Info: Oooohh it glows.

 

 

#42: Then the next day we finally get to take a look around.
Info: Task Manager showing off one management iGPU and twelve ready to mine 1080Ti inside Windows 10 Pro. 

 

 

#43: We also clean up the project area. Remember a clean mine is a successful mine!
Info: Don't you remember? Goblins love mines. 

 

 

#44: You know what would make this better? Remote temp monitoring!
Info: Yeah that's right, I went to home depot or some other big box store and bought something.

 

 

#45: I think it goes right here next to this block.
Info: Yeah, bitches love blocks that light up when you tap them.

 

 

#46: See now you can smoke a bowl and relax while still knowing how hot it is downstairs!
Info: Gives you today, last 48, and weekly lows/highs. See the secret is that "outdoor" actually means "on top of the miner".

 

 

#47: Let's go ahead and fire up some mining and see how stable our new baby is.
Info: Thirteen hours and thirty-three minutes into our first test run. (gpu+cpu mining as well acting as two separate hyper-v proxies)

 

 

#48: Let's add some airflow to this party and go to bed.
Info: One eighteen inch oscillating fan added to help keep the air moving & house warm.

 

 

#49: Twenty four hour test run eth mining results! (ethminer+ethproxy+dwarfpool)
Info: Whew boi, let's play spot the twelve gpu rig! Ready? Yeah.. that was easy. The other machines are two double wave vega 64 rigs and a single 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid edition box I'm using for comparison. 

 

 

Build Log Parts List:

• 1x Windows 10 Professional x64 Operating System
  1x Veddha 8 Open Air Mining Frame
  1x NZXT S340 Black & Blue Mid Sized Case
  1x Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard
  1x Intel i7-7700K CPU @ 4.5ghz
  1x Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400mhz 32gb (2x16) Kit
  2x Corsair AX1500i Power Supplies
  1x EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova Power Supply
  3x Extra Heavy Duty Power Extension Cables
  8x EKWB FF5-120mm Furious Vardar 3000 Case Fans
  7x 120mm Metal Fan Protection Grills (still need two more for side fans)
  3x Corsair High Performance 120mm Case Fans
  4x NZXT 140mm High Pressure Radiator Fans
  1x NZXT 140mm FN V2 Fan
  1x NZXT Kraken X62 AIO
  1x EKWB Ectotherm Thermal Compound (3g)
  4x EKWB 4-Fan PWM Extended Length Cable Splitters
  1x Asus 3-Fan PWM Cable Splitter (two inside case fans + gpu extension plugin)
  1x Asus PWM Cable Extender (runs behind board then secured for gpu controller)
  1x PNY 240GB SSD Drive
  12x EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Edition GPUs
  12x Supercope PCI-E 006C 16x to 1x Powered Riser Adapter Cards
  12x 60cm USB 3.0 Extension Cables
  12x 6-Pin MOLEX to SATA Power Cables
  24x PCI-E Power Cables (16 from Corsair, 8 from EVGA)
  5x SATA Power Cables
  1x SATA Data Cable
  3x 4-Pin Molex Power Cables
  50+ Zip Ties & Misc. Cable Management Items
  8ft Industrial Strength Velcro Strip
  1x Cooler Master Octane Wired Keyboard w/ Optical Mouse
  1x SteelSeries QcK Mass Mouse Pad 
  1x Pellucid HD Series HDMI Cable (sixer)
  1x Asus VX238H 23" Monitor
  1x 25' CAT7E Network Cable
  1x 18" Oscillating Fan
  1x Remote Outdoor+Indoor Weather Station
  1x Minecraft Light-Up Redstone Ore Block
  1x Unisex Novelty Miner's Helmet With Light
  A Whole Naughty Fuck Load Of Time

The whole system has been incredibly stable since turning it on, I expected more problems to be honest. The 7700K is running at 4.5ghz because that's the max I can get it to accept inside the bios. It's chugging along at 1.25V on the core. The fan cable coming off the GPU frame that plugs into the controller tower is actually monitoring the CPU temp for it's fan speeds. Inside the bios you can only monitor CPU or Motherboard so I've gone with CPU. The fan curve is 60+C runs at 100%, 50+C runs at 75%, and 40+C runs at 50%. Same with the CPU's AIO pump as well it's supporting four 140mm fans in push+pull, plus the extra 140mm+120mm case fans. When playing around with full blast you can hear this machine rev like a car engine and it actually passes through the floor overpowering the living room. The Vardar fans are no joke and move so much air it pushes papers off the desk next to it and gives the admin sitting anywhere close to it a wicked dry eye. Each 1080Ti is running at 2025-2050mhz on the core (depending on where it decides to sit, generally depending on room temp) & 11244mhz on the memory. I've tried running these same cards at 2075mhz on the core but they'll only go for eight-ten minutes before locking up.

 

While this is a thread specifically about Monero mining, we can clearly see this happens to be a Team Green rig. Ethereum was the test currency of choice just to get things rolling quickly though the machine will become more agile as I have time to setup more complex software. Each power supply covers four graphics cards. Each card is currently drawing 225W of power at max which gives us 900 watts of draw though when flipping to other currencies or projects the cards can draw up to 300, even more if you dual mine, which would leave us in the 1200-1300W range. This is why some pretty premium grade parts have been selected here for power supplies, it's really important to keep them operating in the top efficiency peak of their curves so I went with as big as could be purchased given the situation. They also each power five fans on top of the graphics cards. Except the controller tower power supply, as it powers the system plus an additional fan as well. This is why it's slightly bigger being a 1600W instead of a 1500W like the other two. Each power supply has been ran to it's own individual twenty amp breaker meaning this machine has the ability to consume sixty amps maxed out. Each power supply comes with a rather large warning sticker on it saying not to plug it into anything less then a fifteen with twenties being recommended.

 

This rig heats the entire home it's placed in and air flow is critical. You know if somebody has shut the basement door pretty quickly as you'll hear the Vardar fans spin up to 3000RPM even while watching something on the television. Though since this is a 100% water cooled rig the parts themselves never tend to get to hot just the entire rest of the house. This is really cool when it's snowing outside and you have the windows open on your top floor with the heating turned off completely and no fire to tend too. As far as space heaters go though this is one huge sum'bitch that not only heats your home but trades electricity for crypto at the same time! I guess if you needed a password or two cracked at some point you've got that covered too.

 

Anytime you want to move this computer you simply disconnect the risers and the power cables coming out of the controller tower. Two people are absolutely required to lift the GPU frame in any sort of safe manner. The tower is pretty light weight as it's only a medium sized with no peripheral bays. The big boi amount of memory was put in for alot of hyper-v headroom and for misc. experimental projects. It already hosts two proxies, one for ethereum & one for monero7. That's actually still what all my leftover CPU time is devoted too, mining Monero. I sat on Aeon for a long time but have came back to XMR full force after stacking up some other coinage. Given those Wave Vegas are like having two of these 1080Ti's when it comes to cryptonight & cryptonight-lite algorithm based coins it feels like a waste to toss this system on the Monero right away when I could be trading more profitable to mine per hour coins into Monero at a higher rate of return. Though that's a post for another day as this one has taken a pretty long time to write.

 

At this point I'm pretty exhausted. Going to post this, check on the systems one more time, get back on the treatment train, an once I'm out of pain I'm going to go attempt to hug a pillow. I apologize for any details I've left out! Feel free to post with any questions or comments, I'd love to hear what you all think and any suggestions you might have moving forward. (optimizations!! give me the optimizations!) I'm going to try and return to posting on a more regular basis as I have a lot of topics I'd like to cover. Though between running around trying to get that next epic level mine off the ground as well stay healthy you guys might have to be entertained with this one for a bit until I return. 

 

'Goblin

[WhiteGoblin]

Testing Out Tri-Mining & Double Checking Claymore's Honesty: (powered by Jinsang's Life Beat Tape, get your ears some today)

 

Hey what up everybody! Today I wanted to investigate the fun times had using Claymore's famous dual mining software. If you've never heard of this, basically it lets you mine a primary coin (ethereum) on your GPU then on the backend dual mine a secondary alt coin with whatever left over power you have. If you check out WhatToMine.com today for 1080Ti's (screenshot for post preservation) then you'll see the most profitable coin we could be putting work into is Verge (XVG) via the Lyra2REv2 algorithm. Ethereum is the sixteenth best option & Monero is the twenty-eighth most profitable coin to dig up as the market shakes down today. This means we could be trading Verge for Monero and getting more Monero then if we just mined it directly. If you check out CoinGecko then you'll see they rate Ethereum (ETH) overall to hold second place in the market, Monero (XMR) is fifth, and Verge (XVG) is ninth. (screenshot for post preservation) Now I burn my Team Red Vegas on Monero7 all day and night, same with my leftover CPU power. Though this Team Green rig is going to need to spend it's GPU time on something a little better then twenty-eighth place for it's conversion of electricity into crypto holla dolla.

 

Even though Verge has been going through some rocky times lately, it's still doing extremely well for day trading as of this post. You know what else is cool about this coin? You can mine it via the Blake2s algorithm as well! Which means I could fire up Claymore's dual software, hit Ethereum as my primary, Verge as my secondary, and Monero as my tertiary coin, all mining at the same time! Though one big difference is Claymore is closed source, charges a dev fee, and honestly has a bit of a bad reputation out there. Don't get me wrong he's very famous and does some cool things with code, though he's got a bit of a shadow rep that follows him around the net. Plenty of people think he's dipping his hand in the cookie jar a bit to far though there's been pretty poorly documented arguments made for this case. The thing is, I don't stand against dev fees, they keep things moving along and I appreciate that. I've spoken to vast parts of the Monero community, developers, etc. and I trust them. Their code is on GitHub, open for all to see, and if you want to take out the dev fee then you're more then welcome to recompile the software without it. Though Claymore does not take this stance and it's his way, pay the mystery man behind the curtains, or get bent. He's even developed a security system into his mining software to detect when people are trying to cheat it. At which it'll report the same speeds to the frontend and to the pool but take extra shares well beyond the dev fee for himself as punishment for those attempting to hack.

A couple months ago I dug up Demion's NoDevFee project on GitHub. He was trying various ways of interjecting replacement wallet codes into Claymore's programs to remove his developer fee. This ended up getting more advanced and turned from NoDevFee into Divert, which was a new way of getting around Claymore's protection schemes using the WinDivert driver by basil00 which is using the Windows Filtering Platform. You won't see any of this on the front page of the project, you need to go into the issues/comments section to see all this new version action. I've been running alot of tests (ex: 1,2,3,4) to try and help these guys along mainly because I was really interested in that bad rep and seeing if we couldn't shine any light on the situation through these guys hard work. Of which I'm happy to post today saying progress has been made and we can finally see what's going on through the mysterious Claymore fog!

The methodology here was pretty simple, test the various modes of Claymore's newest dual mining program (v11.6) and see if there was any of them that lacked the SSL developer connections integrated a couple versions back. This was funny enough put into the program right after a bunch of us reported success with rerouting his wallet addresses. One could speculate from this timing of events he watches the internet for anyone working a bit too hard on taking his earnings. Anyways, the encrypted protocol was first supported by ethermine.org ...and testing there clearly shows you're not going to redirect the dev fee anywhere. Though testing the ETH-Proxy mode (ESM 0) seemed a logical step because I could run Claymore's Eth-Proxy integration right up against the official opensource EthMiner client when ran in combination with Atrides Eth-Proxy for DwarfPool. I could compare free software vs. fee software then if I found things still worth going forward I could hopefully test the fee and make sure it was honest. Here's where I found something really interesting, given this mode is written directly for RPCv2 pools using asynchronous networking (aka: DwarfPool), the client won't connect out via an encrypted port/pool as DwarfPool doesn't currently support SSL. It won't relaunch the miner in a new mode just for the dev cycle as that would be a huge waste of time & shares. So what does it do? It calls out to loads of DwarfPool servers on tons of different wallet addresses and just accepts it's fate as unprotected data. This is really cool because now we can get the Divert program to intercept it's data, so finally we can log dev cycles, shares, all of the goodness without triggering his security system. The latest release notes & Readme!!!.txt file found inside the Claymore V11.6 package say "This miner is free-to-use, however, current developer fee is 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode (-mode 1) and 1.5% for dual mining mode (-mode 0)..." then goes on to defend his fees / antihacking measures.

So let's look at some pics of the process so everybody can come along for the ride. Here's a screenshot of Divert 3.6 working so you can all see it in greater detail. As expected, down to the second, every hour it calls to authorize a change in the Ethereum login & start working towards a different account. What we see Divert doing is grabbing these new account credentials and redirecting the process back to the primary account by literally swapping them. So it just relogs into your own account, gives the thumbs up everything is great, and keeps on working until it's time to swap out of the dev cycle and back into the normal work cycle. Now let's have a look at this occurring as detected by DwarfPool's side of things instead of my side of things. Here you can clearly see it waiting to login once an hour for both the clients used in the test runs. The machines where started shortly after each other so there's a bit of a delay between one logging into the dev cycle and the other logging into the dev cycle. Though clearly we can see Divert working and the shares being rerouted back to the same account. If you want to actually see the history of shares via DwarfPool's account graphs over the time period of the testing then, here it is as well! I like this image because you can see the various stages things went through including my own faults in testing which caused me to restart them completely, twice. First you can see the official open source combo ran, next you can see legitimate Claymore operation paying forward all the dev fees, then after two unexpected downtimes, you can finally see testing Claymore's dev fees via Divert 3.6. You can also see where I was attempting to test this during the unexpected downtime hours because the developer cycle was still consistently logging into the account and submitting valid shares. What's all this time spent leave us with for results? Check for yourself, here's what I ended up with!

Claymore's Dual Ethereum v11.6 Miner + NoDevFee Divert v3.6 Trial Results:

 

2.01%! That's not at all what he claims he's taking for a developer fee. Actually, that's another third on top of what he claims he's taking for the price of dual mining. I was hoping to shed some positive light on the subject after months of hanging out with the NoDevFee GitHub crew. Though taking more then the stated dev fee is a bit of a dark spot for me, doesn't really come off very GoodGuyGreg that's for sure. Makes me happy there's folks out there double checking things and even making the tools to do so in the first place. If you're willing to believe that he's just made a mistake in his program's dev cycle or that maybe I've botched my test results then that's certainly possible. I've not ran ten passes of each test then compared results, this is just the first fully completed without interruption results I've gathered so far on the new v11.6 release. Though it's certainly food for thought and look at those numbers, they worked out to be exactly 2.01% over the previous test. I'll let you all decide how you feel about that as I'm sure opinions differ. Even bringing up the use of a tool like Divert to redirect dev fee cycles is a pretty hot topic in any mining community. Anyway, here's to a new version dropping after this post goes live. LOL! 

Moving on let's talk a little bit about the process of dual mining on your graphics cards. In my experiences, testing extensively on blake2s & pascal algorithms, it jacks up your juice pull & stress on your graphics card by about a third while giving you about a quarter to a third of a real card. Example: maxed out Ethereum mining at 36.6 MH/s on my EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Editions takes 225W of power. When I turn on and crank out a dual mine algorithm on top of this load it goes to 300W, increasing its consumption by 75w which is a third of its previous power consumption. So +33% power roughly delivers an extra 25-30% in results, it's not quite a 1:1 trade but it's a whole additional mining operation on top of equipment that's already mining. That's pretty cool if you ask me, this means that the beast Team Green Rig from the post above gains an additional three and a half 1080Ti cards worth of hashing power overall when dual mining. (just ran the blake2s conversion to double check) It also means it costs four additional cards worth of electricity, but once again, you just invented these cards out of no where sooooo still pretty cool. Depending on what you pay for power this may not be attractive to all people, though if you're looking to get your hands on results at the maximum possible rate your gear will produce then this is definitely an option.

The rig above when fired up Tri-Mining as the hipsters like to say, produces roughly: 439 MH/s ethash, 21.3 GH/s blake2s, & 175-225 H/s monero7. Here's some screenshots of the front end during operation: while testing legitimate Claymore v11.6 shares & while testing Claymore's developer fee with Divert. A worthy side note here is the power consumption per 1080Ti when the temps in the mine change over the course of the day. During the ball busting heat of the mid day if it's sunny it can go as high as 105%, which comes out to be 180 watts of extra power load!! (60 extra watts per power supply, 15 extra watts per card) Though in the middle of the night I've seen them drop as low as 93% during the dual mine which comes out to be 252 watts of savings! (now reducing the load by 84 watts per power supply or 21 watts per card) So as you can tell it's really important to over spec your machines so they can handle events like the natural day/night cycle of your mine. Winter is always going to be amazing but once it starts getting hot again... #roughbois.  This means at peak so far, torture down in the mine when it's been 95+F, the machine itself is drawing 3,780 watts of juice to keep the dual-mine alive, let alone the tri-mine of the processor going max as well. There's 4,600 watts of available power, which when going through the hottest day recorded yet in it's system logs looks to have left around 200 watts of overhead per power supply. Brutal, even on really high end parts! If I lived in a hotter area or didn't have other options for temp control at my disposal then I'd consider capping the machines ability to draw more power so that it stayed groovy, even if it was at slightly lower speeds.

Anyways that'll do it for me today, hope you all enjoyed the post! As always comments and/or questions are more then welcome. Thanks for reading, /cheers!

'Goblin

[WhiteGoblin]

Goblin's Oops My OS Restarted Miner Recovery Script: (keeping the tri-mine alive, looking sexy pickaxe bois while doing it)

Well no matter how much I try to prevent system crashes by using high ends parts, putting things on batteries, and overall obsessing over their condition constantly things still happen outside of my control. There was a spike in downtime from my ISP, less then a minute, didn't have a failover in place yet and it occurred while I was sleeping. This is such a rare occasion I hardly ever have to deal with it or really become hassled by it. Honestly, a minute of downtime isn't the end of the world so who cares right? Well I'm still testing the Claymore developer fee and between it flipping through failover pools while attempting a reconnection it crashed. It occasionally happens, the system was up for over three days straight when this happen. I mean the man has built an impressive suite of features into his dual mining release so sometimes when things seem to fall apart it's forgivable. But this time, even though it was trying to restart the mining software, it just further crashed leaving the system useless until I found it while waking up to my email alerts going mad.

The rarity of this event is no reason not to do solid tech work so after grabbing some coffee I set out to find a solution. After a while spent playing around ...and remembering basic batch commands I came up with exactly what I was looking for. A quick'n'easy, slightly dirty, operating system has restarted emergency script! It has text to remind people not to screw with things if they saw it popup when I'm not around, while also taking care of everything I want in the background silently. It's pleb levels of simple to use and change to your own needs, don't expect anything to complicated, which honestly I think is the beauty of the whole thing. Kinda like my ultra simple iframe load out for stat screens I posted half a year ago, it gets the job done. 

So first, let's look at the code then we'll talk about what happens and when it happens:

@echo off
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:: Goblin's Miner Restarted Because Fuck Knows What Happen Emergency Script
:: Find More Long Winded & Detailed Coverage At My Mining Blog Over On ArsTechnica
:: See: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=35194363#p35194363
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:: Using "BatchGotAdmin" For Initial Placement & Trial Run Testing
:: See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894967/how-to-request-administrator-access-inside-a-batch-file
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM  --> Check for permissions
>nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system"

REM --> If error flag set, we do not have admin.
if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' (
    echo Requesting administrative privileges...
    goto UACPrompt
) else (
    goto gotAdmin
)

:UACPrompt
    echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
    set params = %*:"="
    echo UAC.ShellExecute "cmd.exe", "/c %~s0 %params%", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"

    "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
    del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
    exit /B

:gotAdmin
   pushd %~DP0
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TITLE Goblin's Oops My OS Restarted Miner Recovery Script
::------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wmic process where name="explorer.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority" > nul
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo -  This Miner Just Rebooted Completely!  Let's Start Bringing It Back!  -
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo.
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo -   OS Relaunch In Process   :                                          -
echo -                            :  Windows Explorer Set To High Priority   -
echo -                            :  Virtual Machines Are Coming Online      -
echo -                            :  CCleaner Is Finishing Maintenance       -
echo -                            :  MSI Afterburner Applying Overclocks     -
echo -                            :                                          -
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
timeout /t 75 /nobreak > nul
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo -   Getting Pickaxes Ready   :                                          -
echo -                            :  Launching NoDevFee Divert v3.6          -
echo -                            :  Divert Set To Above Normal Priority     -
echo -                            :  Launching Claymore v11.6 Dual ETH Miner -
echo -                            :  Launching XMR-Stak v2.4.2 DEV XMR Miner -
echo -                            :  XMR-Stak Set To Below Normal Priority   -
echo -                            :                                          -
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
cd "C:\Mining\Divert\"
start /MIN C:\Mining\Divert\divert.exe
wmic process where name="divert.exe" CALL setpriority "above normal"  > nul
timeout /t 10 /nobreak > nul
cd "C:\Mining\Claymore\"
start /MIN C:\Mining\Claymore\start.bat > nul
timeout /t 60 /nobreak > nul
cd "C:\Mining\XMRSTAK\"
start /MIN C:\Mining\XMRSTAK\xmr-stak.exe > nul
wmic process where name="xmr-stak.exe" CALL setpriority "below normal" > nul
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo -          You're Off To The Races Again! Thanks For Crashing!          -
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------------
timeout /t 10 /nobreak > nul
exit

 

So what's going on here? Well first off it's changing explorer.exe (window's gui, well, technically I think it only controls the Start Menu, Taskbar, Desktop, and File Manager but I could be wrong who knows anymore) to High Priority. This is debated in the tech community going all the way back to Windows 95 (that I remember atleast) and it's not a topic I'm going to load this post down in coverage with. Do it, don't do it, doesn't really matter to me captain. Next it tells you the operating system is currently relaunching and lists a bunch of things going on in the background. This script doesn't actually do any of those things, those happen on their own after the machine reboots thanks to settings in their own programs.

For instance, MSI Afterburner has an option to load on startup and to apply profiles on startup, you don't need to script it. Same with all the virtual machines turning on in the background via hyper-v for the proxies that are running. Though they do all need time to run and time to run without interruption. The real time sink is Afterburner turning on while applying overclocks to twelve graphics cards, it seriously takes fifty-five to sixty seconds! I timed a couple boots and it's always done loading everything just around the minute mark, so to stay safe I give the script 75 seconds of pause time before moving forward. The text is literally just there so people who happen to be staring at the screen as the system turns off and on making all sorts of fan curve travel noise have something to read before they touch the system. It doesn't need touched, though that's never stopped anyone from touching the button labeled don't touch before.

After the system is up and ready it starts loading mining software. First it brings up NoDevFee Divert v3.6 so I can measure Claymore's Dev Fee. Then it sets this process to Above Normal priority as it's pretty important to catch the network traffic for redirection. (the mining software will shutoff if it can't connect to a dev cycle pool) Then after it's been given proper time (with a bit of overhead) to load up it launches Claymore's v11.6 Dual ETH miner. This uses a consider amount of processing power when setting up high eres miners on each graphics card so it's given an entire minute to power through all the work and get itself comfortably mining at ease again. Afterwards, it launches XMR-Stak for the tri-mine using the CPU to pull up some extra Monero7. Given there is alot going on for this machine outside of just mining on the CPU it's process is then set to Below Normal priority so that it's only eating up leftovers and not getting in the way to much.

Here's a picture of it running after it's just recovered a machine: (just before it's exit call)

 

Now when does this actually happen? Well there's the worse situation all together, random reboots. A problem often faced by low end and/or misconfigured rigs, certainly not a problem anyone should be facing or wants to be facing. If you can't track down exactly when an why a crash occurred then you're doing it wrong. While this will work for that situation entirely and get things back up and running, this whole script was actually created more to interact with Claymore's software directly. It has two features that are pretty neat and that we're using here today. One is the Watch Dog Mode (-wd 1), once enabled it'll shutdown the miner if any thread is not responding for a minute or if an OpenCL call failed. Though if you have the next setting on, Restart Miner Mode (-r 1) it closes the miner and executes the reboot.bat file if there is one inside the miners directory. Here I've created that file but placed "shutdown /r /t 15 /f" (without quotes) inside it. This actually shuts down Windows & restarts the computer after giving programs fifteen seconds to save their work and close up shop. Anything that's still running after that time period is forcibly shutdown. So let's take today's situation, the one that started this whole mess. Instead of trying to restart the mining from inside an already crashing piece of software, it would've just immediately restarted the machine. Then as it came back online, the script would kick in and get everything back up operating smoothly.

Now how do we get the script to come on with the computer inside Windows 10? Well that's done through "Task Scheduler" which you can just type into the Start Menu inside Windows 10 to find, or if you don't jive with those bananas then you can find it inside "Windows Administrative Tools" at the bottom of your Start Menu program scroll bar. Once opened you'll see in the right column under Actions, you can "Create Task..." which is what we'll be using. Click it and another window will open up, here you can specify a name, description, checkmark to "run with highest privileges" (important one, notice the bold), as well change the dropdown configuration option to Windows 10 instead of the default Vista / Server 2008. Pretty important screen so double check that. Next, a tab over, you'll see "Triggers" where you can create a new one that specifies on login or even startup to launch the event. Another tab over we see "Actions" which is where we tell it to actually run the script. Just point it towards where you saved the .bat script you've created from above. The next two tabs are just additional (see: optional) conditions and settings you can experiment with. A nice one is "run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed" as well "allow task to be run on demand", though really there's a ton of cool stuff you can do inside Task Scheduler so look around and have fun with it!

Additional advice for the smoothness of this operation is to go into "Windows Defender Security Center" then click "Virus & Threat Protection Settings" then click "Add or remove exclusions " where you'll finally add your "C:\Mining" folder, or wherever you've dropped your software at, to the exclusions list. This way as long as you're sailing the ship and you know others aren't dicking around on your miner and have overall good security, you can save yourself a billion false flags and removal issues for your standard daily driver mining software. Actually having the machine scripted to this extent opens up another possibility, actually turning back on Windows Updates. Sure the downtime would bite when it does need to occur, but this is great for folks who happen to worry about needing all those security patches they tend to drop. Now the middle of the night random windows update reboots are your friends! It'll apply the updates, run the security scans, give you the thumbs up, and the script will keep your mining alive and well through the whole process. I actually tested this while writing the script today so I can confirm it works great on this principle. Wasn't really setting out to do this today but hey problems show up and we knock'em down.  /crescent  

'Goblin

[WhiteGoblin]

Dreaming about Ethereum's Erectile Dysfunction Problem: (...and this isn't even a joke)

 

Here's one I think basically everybody goes through at some point.. you're laying in bed, trying to relax and get some restful sleep but your mind is on fire else where. Well ever since I read this post about an Ethereum boost for GDDR5X cards by Porina on the LinusTechTips forums it's never left my mind for longer then a few seconds, minutes at best. What's all this about? Well there's a user by the name of OhGodACompany on GitHub, who a couple days ago, released a program called "OhGodAnETHlargementPill" (GitHub & BitcoinTalk.org), it's also being called "ETHLargement: The Hashrate Harderner" as you can see in their BitcoinTalk thread. What's this suppose to do? Well they claim it tightens the memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards and greatly improves their Ethereum hash rates.

 

What's the problem here? Well as many users have pointed out across the net, they've not posted any source code for this even though they posted the code for their previous projects. Some users are reporting security related issues after using the program, some people claim it's a sham, some people claim it's replacing the information locally but it's not reported or verified at all by the pool, and some people are saying it works great even going as far to saying it deserves a dev fee of it's own! Reading online it appears to be boosting the RRD & FAW values of the cards though once again with no source code it's a mystery at the moment as to the full scale of what's going on. There is also no uninstall script or way of turning it off outside of rebooting your machine. It's flagging in anti viral / mal scans but that's normal for mining software, though some people are reporting it's flagging pretty extreme. They offer the software in two doses, 50mg and 100mg, aka, one for Windows and one for Linux.

 

As of writing this very post I just found that 1stMiningRig.com is also reporting on this release and have found it very effective! Saying while there is compatibility issues with Claymore's newest 11.7 version it was tested successfully inside 11.6. They took a triple 1080Ti machine from a reported hashrate of 108 Mh/s with a active rate of 88.1 Mh/s and got it going bonkers with this all the way up to reported hashrate of 163.2 Mh/s with an active rate of 171.8 Mh/s. Which is freaking awesome!! They ended up consuming 15% more power themselves and people on the forums are reporting massive increased heat output but I think that's understandable given what's occurring. Can you dual mine with this? Does it work with a bunch of other mining software? I frankly don't know yet, still got alot of reading to do! I can also think of about a billion new tests to run now with this possibility. Since purchasing the 1080Ti's for the 12GPU rig in the posts above I've been waiting for a better understanding of the memory to come out for what I believed would be a freebie boost in performance for the extra cost of the parts upfront. And here, I'm hoping, that day has finally arrived. Will report back and let you all know what I find out myself a little bit later. 

[WhiteGoblin]

The 1080Ti Little Blue Pill Is Real, All Hail Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Inhibitors! (rock hard all night long... bow'chicka'bow'wow)

Well here we are about twelve hours after dosing 50mg of ETHLargement across a gaming rig with a single 1080Ti in it as well the full beast mode twelve 1080Ti rig. I've discovered quite a bit and had to change a number of my settings around to become compatible with this modification but at the end of the day it's been a huge gain. To start off, yes you do see a 15% power gain while using this, it does light up your entire card's heat output so be prepared! Though the gains are wonderful, the single 1080Ti plugged directly into a motherboard operating at 16x is chugging along at a reported hashrate of 55 MH/s with peaks above 79 MH/s! While the riser system running at 1x can't seem to be pushed as far, the memory overclocks have to come down to the weakest card in the bunch until individual per card hand dialing is achieved (just don't have the time currently) so I've only been able to stabilize them all at.. 53 MH/s! And yes, this is WHILE DUAL MINING inside Claymore v11.7. Bringing them together the machine reports 636 MH/s though the pool reports peaks above 818 MH/s!

As for things that needed change to get this to work, I really had to dial down my -dcri values SIGNIFICANTLY. If you're trying to max out production on your 1080Ti stack (using blake2s as your secondary algorithm) then I had to fall back an entire third in value to see the larger increase in Ethereum rates. Keeping my values the same (I use to run 150) I only saw an increase from 36.5 MH/s to 41 MH/s. Though when I dropped this down to 95-100 I saw the eth rates climb all the way up to 52 MH/s. It's through further overclocking of the memory that I've been able to get them all the way up to 55 @ 16x & 53 @ 1x. Once again, I firmly believe most the cards in the twelve stack could be pushed a bit further but blanketing one setting on launch so far has shown that to be the quickest to find highest stable hash rate. Depending on how far you're willing to push your power consumption beyond 100% you can actually keep your dual mine alive and well at the same speeds you where getting before! Though let's look at that, you had normal Ethereum mining taking roughly 65% power. You're now taking 15% more, so you're at 80% power. Dual mining blake2s in my experience likes to take about a third of the card, so now you're at 113% power consumption when your mine is running nice and smooth with no temp abnormalities.

I've technically got the power overhead on paper to run them all at 115% given they're rated for 1500 watt continuous power with peaks up to 1650 watt. Though that makes even me uneasy as we're wildly getting out of that beautiful efficiency curve I like to talk about so much. I've assigned a power limit at 110% for each card which I feel much comfortable with as the dual mining rate just drops as the heat rising throughout the day instead of it drawing more juice from the power supplies. This means when speaking power wise it runs what I consider to be safely "maxed out" twenty four seven now in this configuration. That's 330w per 1080Ti so 1320w per power supply, though there's also four vardar fans on each. These have a power draw of 5.64W at max so that's an additional 22.56W, leaving us at 1344.56 watts of draw or with roughly a 150w overhead. To push the cards the additional 5% to hit the "friendly safety power cap" alot of overclocking tools generally like to assign at 115% would only consume an additional 45W of power total. Though that's the line, you really are putting some juice through your rigs at that point and in all honesty it does make me slightly uncomfortable.

I'm sure there's ton of miners out there that would gladly push them right up to the very line of it, but we're already 10% over spec, that's considerable horsepower we've restored already. For anyone who's actually gone through the RMA process, (even though it's generally more of a paperwork thing at this point) you know the value of all that downtime. Couple weeks to entire months without a card is far worse then just simply cooling your jets by 5%, and actually, I just checked, the solo 1080Ti machine has lost 1.77% of it's blake2s hash rate by controlling it's last 5% of power that could be pushed. Though the twelve stack, since I can't push it as far is losing 5.63% of it's blake2s hash power by not giving it the extra juice. Big picture mode though, we're talking about 1.77-5.63% of loss on the secondary mine, while we're increasing our primary mine by 45.75% on the big boi and 51.23% on the solo machine. Reported Output Gains of +45.75-51.23%!! 

Yeah we're going to see a devfee/private version of this for other algorithms I'm sure of it as they've clearly gotten our attention with this release focused solely on Ethereum. I've been testing a few other settings with the newer Claymore version so I'll be sure to come back and make an additional post about my updated scripts and software I'm using now. Though until then let's take a look at some pics! Everybody loves those screenies so here's some more!

 

Twelve 1080Ti Inside Claymore v11.7 Dual Mining Blake2s While On The Pill: (oh nvidia, you make me so fucking hard, I swear it's all you baby)

 

 

Single 1080Ti @ 16x Pounding Out 55 MH/s: (motion of the ocean, is the one better then twelve randoms?)

 

 

DwarfPool Server Side Results, 865 MH/s Broken Down & Explained: (throbbing out at the pool, looking large, feeling good while we do data analyst)

 

 

Keep it crescent everybody, I'll return with more soon! 

'Goblin