This short article covers my dual-mining ETH(Ethereum) and XVG (Verge) with Claymore v11. It’s not intended to tell you if it’s profitable. Just my experience doing and provide some information for those curious or have questions about mining with mixed GPU rigs.
For those who do not know, it’s possible to mine 2 types of crypto assets at the same time. Claymore has made this very easy for a long time, and with their latest release we can now mine Blake2s algorithms (they have a lot of other nice updates in v11.) Which opens up the doors for dual-mining ETH and XVG!
Test Rigs
To test ETH & XVG mining I’m using the following 2 test rigs which are both mining on Ethermine.org for ETH and NLPool.nl for XVG.
Rig 1 (baby rig):
- 1000w PSU, Intel i5, Asus MB, 8 GB RAM
- Windows 10, /w Claymore v11
- 3 EVGA NVIDIA 1060 SC 3GB. Afterburner settings MEM 700MHz, Power 59%, Fan 80%. Everything else stock.
Rig 2 (big brother):
- 1600w PSU, Celeron, 4GB Ram, Asus MB, 4 GB RAM
- 4 MSI AMD 580 RX Gamer X 8 GB — BiosModed, MEM 2050MHz, 1000 MEM and CPU voltage (set via Claymore), Fan 65%. Everything else stock.
- 4 EVGA NVIDIA 1060 SC 3 GB — Afterburner settings MEM 700MHz, Power 59%, Fan 80%. Everything else stock.
To baseline, when mining just ETH both rigs will hash at ~250MH/s. These rigs are very stable and can run interrupted for days on end. But, I do nightly reboots just in case. I ran Claymore v11 for a few days before dual mining without any issues.
Dual-Mining Start!
Only a 4–6 MH/s total drop! But effective rate plummeted! What happened!?
When I started, I wanted to get a overall baseline and I turned dual-mining on for all cards. Bad idea, NVIDIA cards do not like dual mining. This is nothing new. They can do it yes, but they just do not do it well. On average I was getting about 300 MH/s per NVIDIA card, and almost 1800 MH/S for each AMD card. AMD is KING when it comes to dual mining.
But, that doesn’t answer the effective rate drop. I honestly I can’t really figure it out.
When I’ve dual mined SIACoin I didn’t see the same drop in ETH effective rates. I’m sure there are smarter people than myself with the answer, please comment if you do. When I turned dual mining off for the NVIDIA cards (yes I lost some total hashing power for XVG,) my effective rate of ETH returned to almost normal. My accepted share rate also returned to what I would expect.
XVG Results
With only my AMD cards dual-mining, I’m hashing an of ~5.5 GH/s. Which is pretty good. And I’ve earned 72.91880115 XVG in the past 3 days. Not bad for just updating my Claymore bat file.
Rig Impact
I did not notice any issues with stability or additional heat when dual mining. I had a slight increase in power consumption on the AMD cards, but not enough to matter. I’ll provide baseline and dual mining power draw updates at another time.
Final Thoughts
Claymore makes dual-mining simple. If, you have a rig with AMD cards already it’s a no brainier. You can pocket a little extra crypto. And for me, I was able to do it without impacting my main goal with my miners; Which is to mine ETH all day, ever day.
UPDATE: 3–4–2018
After getting some great feedback from a Reddit user, they noticed a larger then normal gap in my reported vs. average effective hashrate when mining on Ethermine.org. After some back and forth with the user, it turned out my cards were overclocked just a tad too much. They didn’t throw errors, they don’t crash, and they run relatively cool (low 60s). It would have been easier to spot if there were bad shares, but my stale share rate was ~3%. Additionally, my logs in Claymore had no invalid shares. I honestly, didn’t see the ‘forest for the trees’ and notice the large delta between the two rates. So, after stepping my memory overclocking down a touch (75 on the NVIDA and 50 on AMDs) my effective hashrate climbed and the gap between the 2 rates is now in a far more acceptable range.
Find this helpful?
Give it a clap, follow me, or feel free to send me some thank-you coins at:
XVG : KezXZPvB9C5o1vijEvZntBveDm4ybkpTr
ETH : 62Fc5B9994dc08b7B78d5a6655b732b25fF57892
