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Many GPUs rig owners have been reporting getting 10%-25% less shares or payouts for mining Dagger (Ethereum) at the pools, when compared to the mining calculators. I decided more than 2 weeks ago to research this topic for the benefit of the GPU rig owners' community.

For these benchmarks – I will be using:

Claymore Dual Miner 6.2 Windows and Linux:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0

Modified Titan Nvidia Drivers, to be used for 1070s and 980s:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B69wv2iqszefQVRfOEhWS0FCdUE
These drivers are no longer recommended, as they can cause the PC to crash on restarts - switch to latest drivers

Latest AMD Drivers:
Crimson Edition 16.8.2 Hotfix

OS:
Windows 7 64Bit

-----------------------------Aimed to remove all causes of lost shares at pools------------------

Test settings and Hardware setups:

AMD RIG
1) Phenom 555 dual core processer, 1 core disabled and overclocked to 3.5Ghz.
2) Asus Crosshair Formula IV motherboard
3) Antec PSU 850watts
4) 8GB DDR3 running at 1066mhz (faulty memory controller on Phenom and can only run memory at the lower speed).


INTEL RIG
1) Sandybridge 2500K Quad, 2 cores disabled and set to 3.3Ghz
2) MSI Z77A-GD65
3) EVGA PSU 600watts
4) 8GB DDR3 running at 1600mhz (memory speed does not really matter with this processer)

Firstly, running the CPU at 3.5Ghz and 3.3Ghz does result in more shares (4% more then when power saving modes for Intel and AMD) accepted per hour, when dualmining or solo mining at a pool, but above 3.5Ghz there are no extra shares found per hour. By disabling 1 core and 2 cores in the motherboard bios, you can bring the electricity usage back down to an acceptable level.

Window 7 OS - Special settings:
1) Aero graphics disabled and put into High Contrast Black.
2) "Desktop Manager" disabled via "Services". It is debatable as to whether this good for long term OS stability, but helps in benchmarking.
3) “Superfetch” disabled via “Services”; "Superfetch" destroys SSDs performance figures over time.
4) AMD Hotfix patch for FX CPU installed for the Phenom CPU

AMD GPUs

1) earliest iteration of R9 290 (ASUS) - overclocked to 1100mhz and memory 1300mhz. Powerlimit 20% Sweet Spot for Mining ETH and SC.

*Powerlimit above or below 20% produce less shares accepted per hour.
*Can be overclocked to 1150mhz with 50mvolts, but produces less shares per hour, then when no extra voltage is added for solo mining.
*Dual mining can be overclocked 1130mhz with 50mvolts, but produces less shares per hour, then when no extra voltage is added for dual mining.

This GPU does not like extra volts and will hash lower when overvolted and when undervolted.

2) XFX Radeon R7 370 2GB Double Dissipation - overclocked too 1180mhz and memory overclocked too 1500mhz, Powerlimit 20% Sweet Spot for Mining ETH and SC.

No options on MSI Afterburner to change Powerlimit above 20% or add extra mvolts.


Nvidia GPUs

Go to Nvidia Panel - Scroll down to "Power Management Mode" and change to "Prefer Maximum Performance" and click "apply". The default "optimal" setting attempts to save a few watts, but causes rejected shares in dual mining mode. Updated 31.08.16.

A matched pair MSI GTX 1070 8GB Aero OC Edition Graphics Card.

1) Fans set to 90%.
2) It is recommended: you go into "Device Manager" and disable all Nvidia HDMI drivers


Currently, these MSI card shipped with Micron memory modules, however this is a lottery because manufacturers ship the same cards with either Micron or Samsung memory. Bios updates have been released for Micron Nvidia cards by Palit, Gainward and EVGA cards, but MSI is still working on bios update release.

More info here:
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/manufacturers-roll-out-firmware-updates-for-geforce-gtx-1070-due-to-memory-issue.html

Interesting Discovery 1:

When the 1070’s were put onto AMD RIG, they found more than 11% (can be as high as 20%) less ETH shares per hour then when they were on the INTEL RIG.

When AMD GPUs were place into the INTEL RIG, they found 8.5% less shares ETH per hour than when they were in the AMD RIG.

Yelp, Nvidia Compute is being primarily coded for INTEL RIGS and AMD openCL is primarily being coded for AMD RIGS. Not having the right Chipset/CPU combination on the RIG for your GPUs is going to lose you a lot of ETH shares per hour at the pool.


---------------------------------Claymore Dual Miner Fees----------------------------------------------

3% better hash-rate then public releases.

Fees paid to Claymore:

1% for solo pool mining ETH.
2% for dual mining ETH and SC or ETH and DECRED.

Consequently, you won’t actually notice the fees, when mining at a pool, because the Dualminer is 3% faster for solo mining ETH at the pools.

Special Setting for AMD GPUs – set all GPUs to slow mode or “-etha 1” in the bat.

Benchmark Dual Mining ETH and SC versus Solo Mining for AMD GPUs 200 and 300 series.

Dual Mining ETH and SC sweet spot setting is: -dcri 22

Solo mining ETH is less efficient then dual mining ETH and SC, efficiency of shares found per hour is better by 2.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly everybody - dual mining ETH and SC gets you more ETH at the pool, than solo mining ETH by itself.

Why would this be the case: these GPUs were built for gaming loads - give the GPUs the correct load and you get more efficiency and more ETH at pool.

Above a setting of -dcri 22 for dual mining - you lose a lot of ETH at the pool.

Setting -dcri 40, reduction in ETH hashrate is 8%.

However, there is 14.6% drop in shares found per hour at the pool.

Net disadvantage of this higher SC setting is: -6.6% compared to the reduction in ETH hashrate.  

Therefore, not really much reason not to Dual mine, plus there is an extra 2.5% Eth at pool each day.

Benchmark for 1070's for dual mining SC and ETH using Nvidia 369.05 drivers provided by Claymore's for his Dual Miner!

DO NOT SET A FAST OR SLOW SETTING (-etha 0 or 1) in the bat file.

It appears: the sweet spot is 50, this maximises the Ethereum shares found per hour for each 1070's hashpower.

Below 50, you lose a lot of shares (6.29%) accepted per hour on ETH and above 50 you lose a lost of shares accepted per hour on ETH.

For example: at SC setting of 70, you see a 6.29% drop in Ethereum shares accepted found, but hashpower has only been reduced by 1.9% in the dual mining mode.

Therefore, you end up being 4.39% worse off, in ETH mining efficiency.

Should people find the the sweet spot for dual mining ETH and Decred for AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, please post a reply.

I will be fine tuning the Dual Mining the 1070's settings in next week and will post and update.


----------------------------------------Turning to rumours of Bots intercepting you pool connection and stealing shares------------------------------------------------

I have no evidence that Bots exist - e.g. they intercept your pool connection and pinch your shares and reassign them to the Bot operator's account or wallet address!

It is alleged Bots steal up to 12% from the major (established) crypto pool shares from a mining rig.

It is alleged Bots steal up to 25% from the minor (under development) crypto pool shares from a mining rig.

Therefore, I feel it is something that needs addressing, even if what follows is an entirely hypothetical - since I am explaining how to stop Bots, when it is only a rumour ;D

Firstly, with mining software, which is open source (no fee disconnections) the solution is pretty straightforward.

There are 2 types of pools: a) wallet address pools; b) sign in accounts.

a) Simply use a new wallet address each time you restart your miner - a Bot can only intercept old connections from the public list of pool wallet addresses. Where it to indiscriminately intercept all connections to a pool it would be discovered.  

b) Set up a new worker, with the longest randomised password on each restart of your crypto rig. Delete of, all, the very oldest workers as you go along to help the account mining pool out.

Claymore Dual Miner - private miner with fees:

a) Using new wallet address will work, but each time you disconnect there is always the chance a bot operator will be able to intercept your re-established connection. However, they won't know the exact time of disconnections, therefore it will be hit and miss. The 2nd algo is always connected, so simply using a new wallet address each time you restart will keep the bot out.

b) Set up a new worker for both account mining pools, with the longest randomised password that the pool allows. Eventually, a bot operator (if you have one who is a hacker) will be able to crack the password on the ETH mining pool and intercept your shares. Therefore, you will need to set up new workers and passwords every 1-2 days to maintain your share averages and ETH payouts. Delete of, all, the very oldest workers as you go along to help the mining pool out.

Future major improvements: to the Claymore Miner would be not to disconnect from the main ETH mining pool, but merely to stop doing work for up to 72 seconds when doing Claymore's fee on his mining connection.

Therefore, some hypothetical solutions to deal with rumours of Bots on the POW algos.

Just as update:

You may see posts about overclocking the 1070's close to 2Ghz,

This will, indeed, get you to about 29.5mhs Dual mining ETH.

However, I would imagine temps will be pretty toasty  :D  ;D Perhaps with watercooling?

However, I have not tested solo mining ETH at the pool, because I'm expecting their will be lower amounts of shares found per hour then dual mining e.g. the 1070's will not have enough workload to mine efficiently and will find less shares per hour.

On the power side for 1070s - no overclock:

Solo mining ETH uses 96watts.

Dual mining ETH and SC use 117watts

Yelp, that is right - dual mining uses only 21 watts more electricity on the Pascal GPU architecture than solo mining ETH :)

This tends to indicate - the Pascal GPU architecture will be very short on workloads when solo mining ETH at a pool.

Dual mining SC calculations are:

UK electricity costs per day 21 watts: £0.05
SC earning per day: £0.21

please post the .bat setting for AMD 7950 card for claymore dual mining miner. Please

GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool eth-eu.dwarfpool.com:8008 -ewal deleteandaddwalletaddressETH -epsw x -eworker rig1 -dpool stratum+tcp://siamining.com:7777 -dwal deleteandaddwalletaddressSC.rig1 -dcoin sia -allpools 1 -allcoins -etha 1 -dcri 22 -r 734 -estale 0 -cclock deletewithGPUclock -ttdcr deletewithmaxtemp

Set powerlimit, memory and fan speed with AMD Overdrive.

These are settings for 200 series and 300 series GPUs, you may have to adjust for you GPU - as it is very old.

Can you explain the difference between slow mode and fast mode ?  What is the actual difference you saw in testing ?

don't forget to add -tstop 85 this is very usefull to control our temperatur
anyway i think you must move this thread to mining section

Nope, put it here for reason.

7 months left until POS!

I want every newbie GPU owner to crypto-currencies to mine and have ETH in a wallet :)

If you did some testing you'd know that you only have to set GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT for 2G cards.  The rest are unnecessary, and can even cause problems.

Most calculators are accurate.  For example, I've checked this one:
http://karldiab.com/EthereumMiningCalculator/

In testing with my fork of Genoil's miner, pool returns are within a couple percent of calculated when averaged over a few weeks.
https://github.com/nerdralph/ethminer-nr/tree/110
I've tested with MPH and Coinmine.  Returns on dwarf are lower, probably in part due to dwarf not sharing uncle inclusion rewards.  They also didn't reward stale shares the last time I checked.

and how long did you run these tests for?

What do you think the reason is for this 4% increase?

any official ANN for POS system ?

Is that for one 290 card that you get £0.27 more each card? So the extract earning is £0.17 per card.

That might not worth the dual mining.

You get 0.17 more a day net on SC

But, up also get an extra £0.063 ETH a day - through 290 hashing more efficiently on Dagger and finding more shares.

The ETH boost cost no extra electricity - so total gain is £0.233 per 290.

Furthermore, if enough GPU owners optimise their own hardware efficiency for their mining pool - the number of duplicate jobs will go down and their will be mining pool boost in efficiency - the mining pool will find more blocks and miners will get better payouts closer to Ethereum calculator figures.

For example:

A GPU owners has 10 R9 290s mining at TotalETHpool (not a real pool).

He/She has them on Intel Chipset/CPUs, when openCL needs AMD GPUs to be on AMD chipsets/cpus

He/She is sending 312mhz to poolside, but because they are on wrong chipset/cpu their efficiency to solve jobs is equivalent of:

254.3mhs

So, the stratum pool will assign jobs at 312mhs, but the rigs will solve those jobs at 254.3mhs.

Other GPU owners will then, be given more duplicate jobs to make up for that guy or gals inefficient rigs - this reduces the blocks found by the mining pool and reduces the mining payouts for everyone at at that mining pool!

So you are saying that if i now got my rig mining with settings

EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool TotalETHpool:8008 -ewal deleteandaddwalletaddressETH -epsw x -eworker rig1 -dpool stratum+tcp://TotalSIApool.com:7777 -dwal deleteandaddwalletaddressSC.rig1 -dcoin sia -allpools 1 -allcoins -dcri 45

I should change the dcri to 22 to get more shares?

My rig is 7950, 280 and 280x. (and now using Intel e8400)

Now i got Eth with 50.645 Mh/s and Sia 990 Mh/s (Claymore and -dcri 45)

when i change to  dcri 22 i got only Eth 50.487Mh/s and Sia 555Mh/s?!

I still should change the dcri...did i understand you right?

I have other rig with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 (am2), would it give me more shares?

Need some basic information:

Ethereum calculator says you should be getting: 0.32ETH a day for 50.64mhs minus 1% pool fee.

But, my calculation says you will be getting under 0.285ETH a day. Is it correct, are getting under 0.285ETH a day?

Secondly, is ETH you priority or SC your priority?

You need to use the "frontier diff". Some calculators still use the old reward wich is higher than the current reward.

Etherscan calulator is showing:

0.328ETH per day for 50.64mhs minus 1% mining pool fee.

That's what i'm getting...

:D Then don't waste my time posting with fake newbie account - this is an ANN for people who getting 10%-25% below the ethereum calculator.

You can't read English, can you:

"Many GPUs rig owners have been reporting getting 10%-25% less shares or payouts for mining Dagger (Ethereum) at the pools, when compared to the mining calculators. I decided more than 2 weeks ago to research this topic for the benefit of the GPU rig owners' community."

What is wrong with you?

Current block 2131068
Difficulty 65556
Frontier-style diff 78667

(not precise after homestead release, use Frontier-style diff)

http://karldiab.com/EthereumMiningCalculator/

SP_ I wouldn't trust something set up by some anonymous bloke on the internet ;D

Should the official mining calculator be incorrect, then simply PM Ethereum Foundation!

They will launch and investigation and send you a email back with their findings.

https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator

It's because the calculator you are using is based on the  homestead release difficulty.

If you use the frontier difficulty you get 0.27 ETH for 50.6 MHASH

The calculator I linked, was linked by Dwarfpool and it is pretty accurate.


Homestead was the old version of Etherum with higher payouts to the miners.

Frontier is the latest version of etherum with reduced payout to the miners.

Yelp, but if you don't PM the Ethereum Foundation about this, how will they be able to fix it?

Fuck The Ethereum Foundation...

There is no reason to swear SP_ , young people could end up reading this thread!

You need to set a good example to the young one's.

You started it, you mentioned ethereum foundation...

What is your opinion about pools with profit switching dagger mining ports? Are their calculations right?

I don't bother with them - waiting 7 months -2 years for investments to mature returns better value.

Not to mention: the huge time saving from not having to pay attention every change in mining difficulty and small movements in markets.

You don't need to worry about young people.  However there seems to be at least one old prude reading this thread...

a thing that most of the users don't understand.

Confirmed.

Well, at least you've posted before ;D

I found this digression in one of your posts interesting:

"I grew up in a rural area; knew how to shoot, drive a tractor, and handle a chainsaw by age 12.  However I find intolerance is far more pervasive in rural areas than urban.  It was nothing to hear nigger and paki jokes at school, and if you valued your life you didn't come out as gay until after you left town.  I didn't realize how bad it was until I moved away for university (and suddenly found out some of my friends were gay)."

What part of USA are you from?

China is a much more open and transparent place to operate for economic entrepreneurial minded people and business minded people - one of it's economic selling points.

When it comes to crypto-activities and crypto-business they are quite open about what you get for you hashpower.

Currently, f2pool.com is paying: 0.00638993 ETH per 1 Mhash/s pay by share.

50.63mhs would earn you 0.32352ETH today!

Please note pool fees are 3%, therefore net earnings a day will be 0.3138ETH.

As you can see: Etherscan is completely accurate for those lucky people mining ETH in China :)

The Ethereum Foundation is telling you the truth, about what you should be getting on the Etherscan Calculator.

Don't trust Ethereum Calculators by some anonymous bloke on the internet!

The 51st state, AKA Canada. :-)

this is a total bull shit.
dude you don't understand what you are talking about.

about that 121 watt for a 1070 mining eth+sia, how much is the hashrate for both? i don't remember such a low wattage for dual mining

Not overclocked, Windows 7 and not Linux

25.55mhs for each card, total 51.1 mhs

426mhs for each card, total 852mhs

It may be the MSI model, because people are reporting higher ETH mhs with different manufacturer's card, but they may have bigger power draws.

For example, I use to have some 750TIs mining Lyra2re2:

Palit 750TI Storm Dual X used 75watts.

EVGA 750TI FTW used 55watts.

Pretty much the same hashrate on Lyra2re2 algo when I had them!

The EVGA model used 26% less electricity.

So, pick your 1070's out carefully - there can be a big difference in electricity usage between models and between different manufacturers.

mmh i think you can do a better thing at 140w with 30MH for eth and 600 on sia? i've not tested this so mere speculation

Yeah,

I understand you can do better with a different implementation of Nvidia 1070 :)

There is nothing fake about my account, everyone is a newbie at start....but sorry i missed the part "when compared to the mining calculators"...

Are you using stock BIOS on that R9 290, or are you using one of the BIOS from TheStilt?

no one knows a report to understand better which GPU for dual mining with your miner???
something like this:
MANUFACTURER:MODEL:GB:SINGLE MODE:DUAL MODE:MH/s:WATT

i want to buy 4 GPU... but i do not know what.
no benchmark about gtx 10603GB in dual mining?

I can't give you any advice on the 1060's - I don't have any and not many people have posted stats on them. It is a very new release.

PM Claymore, to check that he is supporting the 1060's.

I've found GPUs with longer warranties tend to have lower electricity consumption, in order to prolong GPU lifespan.

Remember mining difficulty tends to go up around blockbuster ALTs like ETH - so it can be too time consuming to be worthwhile.

Many times, buying the ALT can be more lucrative then GPU mining it. I have often skipped GPU purchases and bought the Alt with cash.

Extra Watts Dual mining is 27%.

R9 290 uses 45watts.

This costs (in UK) £0.10 more each day.
The extra SC (SIA) is worth £0.27 more each

Therefore, not really much reason not to Dual mine, plus there is an extra 2.5 Eth at pool each day.

Is that for one 290 card that you get £0.27 more each card? So the extract earning is £0.17 per card.

That might not worth the dual mining.

It is marginal, there is no doubt about that. But, a large number of people will mine and keep the SC in new active wallets.

They have a really good wallet and SC looks very promising for the future!

SC difficulty has gone up by 18% - since I originally posted, so daily SC is now worth £0.21 per R9 290.

It is marginally, but of interest as an extra crypto-currency investment to accumulate.

I enjoyed this thread, thanks for sharing. Its thought provoking as I'm losing around 10-9% efficiency and always assumed it was down to the pool

Yelp, you can get very close to ETH calculator, after deductions for pool fees and Claymore fees

Do you mean just keep them here https://sia.tech/apps?

What is the difference from keeping them at Polo?

guess I'm gimped as I have Intel boards with AMD GPUs :/

OP, would you mind doing some tests on NiceHash pool? Thanks!

I did a short 40 minute test when Claymore did the original Nicehash Dagger support over a month ago - everything looked OK, no rejects!

The Nicehash Decred stratum has around 1.9% reject rate, which again is acceptable.

Obviously, a lot of people who do not want to own GPU's (heat and noise reasons) can purchase hashpower at Nicehash at up to 9% discount - varies with the bidding process.

However, you need a really good mining pool, with fast servers and fast Alt coin network to make those tight margins work out.