Thanks for the advice!  I cancelled my order for the 5a and instead have both a 6a & 7a on the way. Will experiment with both and see which one works best but I suspect both will be fine, in which case I will hold the next one until I am able to get a hold of another mini.

Good news... my rig has now been running 24 hours with no crashes and most of that time at -dcri 17.  This has got me up to 912 total h/r (4 GPUs) for Pasc and still maintained a reasonable 107.5 for ETH.  Overall system now pulling 695 watts so still have plenty of headroom with my 1000w Plat PSU. 

I will start trying to push a bit higher and see what happens, but given the explosion of ETH price and continued drop of Pasc, I need to re-crunch the numbers and see if the extra wattage and slight loss in ETH h/r is actually still worth it. I think it is, but if these trends continue, it won't be at some point, so I want to identify where that point is.

Can I ask the advice of someone running a Mini miner?

For the power adapter, will this be sufficient?:

https://smile.amazon.com/Style-Power-Supply-Adapter-Flexible/dp/B019W93CYA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1488393010&sr=8-3&keywords=DC+12V+5A+Power+Adapter+2.5mm

This is 12v/5a/60w with 2.5mm plug. Seems to be a match to the specs listed on Baikal site but wanted to make sure before ordering it.

Thanks!

So... got my rig#1 running ETH + PASC with Pasc intensity at 13 for almost 12 hours now so seems stable. Although still getting close to 7% rejected shares. I will start trying to bump it up from there over the day and see what happens. I created a thread for reporting PASC settings/results here if anyone is interested:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1808904.new#new

On another note, I just got notice from Baikal that my Mini miner has shipped and will arrive on Friday!  That was super fast and very happy about the great customer service from their team!  But, it cannot get here soon enough given that Dash is now pushing $40!

Also happy to see ZEC back up close to $40. I thought it was dead last week when it went under $30 but i guess not.  Even though Im still not mining it, hopefully the recent price bump will help spread some of the WW hash-rate away from ETH 

Well, my rig seems very stable with 13 Intensity for Pascal. It ran overnight and now pushing 12 hours that way. Overall rejects trending down and now at 6.8%.  I will start pushing it upwards today with the current 1940 clock settings and see what happens.

Got my rig up to 14 on Pascal and ran for maybe 30 minutes then crashed.

Re-did my bat file to start at 13 and backed clocks off to 1940 and relaunched Claymore. It has now been running like that for over 2 hours stable: 

109.5 ETH,  711 PASC, but about 8-9% rejected shares.  Anyone getting this kind of high rejects?  They seem to come in spurts... none for 20-30 minutes then 8-10 within less than a minute.  Even caused temporary disconnect from suprnova pool a few times.  I know with other coins excessive rejects usually means too much overclock but not sure if thats the case here or not. Maybe tomorrow I will bump it down to around 1900 but much lower than that it won't be worth it due to loss of ETH hash-rate.

Hello everyone... with the recent release of Claymore's dual ETH miner v8.0 that now supports Pascal mining, I've been tweaking settings for the past day or so trying to find the best balance for my system.  I thought this would be a good opportunity for people to share their results and settings, as Pascal mining seems to differ vs the other dual options like DCR.

I'm running ETH + PASC on 1 of my 2 mining rigs. Specs are Windows 7 Pro, 4 MSI 470 4GB GPUs (1 onboard and 3 via USB risers - all 4 are strap1500-modded and under-volted),  1000w Rosewill Quark Plat PSU.

My best solo ETH mining settings:  GPUs set to 1125/1975;  Claymore .bat settings at default.  Getting about 110 Mh/s using about 610 watts.

Initial ETH + PASC settings:  GPUs set to 1125/1975 (same as ETH solo);  Claymore .bat settings: ETH intensity at default 8, PASC intensity at 20.  This attempt resulted in a blue-screen & reboot about 1 minute after launching miner.

Attempt #2 ETH + PASC settings:  no change to GPUs 1125/1975;  Claymore settings: ETH at 6, PASC at just 10.  This ran stably for 1-2 hours, getting 111.2 on ETH and 555 Mh/s on PASC... using 670w total system, so about 60w added for PASC @ 10.  % of rejected PASC shares seemed high though at around 9-10%.

#2a- Bumped up PASC intensity to 11, which added about 55 Mh/s but did not really hurt ETH. Added about 5-6 watts.

#2b- Bumped up PASC intensity to 12, which added about another 55 Mh/s and barely lowered ETH h/r. Added about another 5-6 watts and ran stable for about 10-15 minutes but then crashed.

Attempt #3 (currently running stable for close to an hour as of this writing): lowered clock speeds a bit to 1125/1950; ran Claymore again at the 6/10 settings. Getting slightly less h/r of course due to lowered clocks but still getting 110 on ETH and 550 on PASC.

#3a- Bumped PASC up to 11, resulting in expected add of about 50 h/r and 5 watts.  This seems to be running overall more smoothly than attempt 2. Rejected PASC share % is down from 9-10% to about 3-4%.

And, just before I hit post, i get a run of like 8 rejected shares and got temporarily disconnected from pool because of it. although now seems to be running ok again. I will continue trying to add 1 incremental intensity to PASC until things start to get unstable.

Would be very curious to see what others have done with this dual option.

OK, just got rig#1 running with ETH + PASC about an hour ago and here's the first report...

Started out with default ETH intensity of 8 and tried 20 for Pasc.  This resulted in a blue-screen reboot about 1 minute after the miner was launched.  So, I tweaked the bat file to 6 for Eth and 10 for Pasc and it ran fine for about an hour with the following results (4 GPU rig): 

ETH: 111.2 Mhz / Pasc: 556 Mhz / 672 watts (about 60 allocated for addition of Pasc mining over solo Eth mining)

Obviously, this hash-rate for Pasc is quite weak (due to only 10 Intensity) and accordingly to calculators, equates to about .40 cents per day profit.  Nothing to get excited about, especially since Pasc seems on a downward price trend. However, there are a couple of mitigating factors, at least for me.

First, getting 111.2 on ETH was quite surprising because mining Eth solo with the exact same settings, I was running about 109.2.  This is especially strange considering the 111.2 is with Eth intensity at only 6, vs the default 8 in solo mode. I don't understand how this can happen but I'm not complaining at all.

The other thing is that for whatever reason, I have not been able to dual min ETH + DCR on this rig for a few weeks now... despite it running fine for about 1 week straight initially.  I tried a lot of tweaks but nothing worked so I have just had rig1 on XMR for the last 2 weeks. But, now with ETH being about 50-60% more profitable than XMR to mine, i needed to get this rig back on ETH anyway, even if only in solo mode. So, even .40 extra from Pasc is not bad but hopefully i can increase that at least a bit.

I am planning to start doing +1 to Pasc and see how much more i can squeeze out before crashing. I already tried +1 (so to 11) and it's been stable for 30 minutes, so will probably try adding 1 about every hour. The result of the first +1 was about 10% more Pasc hash, almost no ding to ETH, and about +5w. I've got plenty of power headroom on this rig so not worried about that. Hoping to get it at least in the 15-16 range, which should give about 850, which would make it about .65 cents profit/day.

Ahhhh... thank you very much for that!  I did look at the readme for 8.0 but i guess i missed the pasc example. Thanks again for this!

Yeah, your 2nd format is what I just figured out from digging into my Suprnova account. They give that exact 2nd example from Poloniex, which I guess is identified by the 86646-64 piece, then the piece after the . if your own Poloniex wallets address.  I added this piece to my Suprnova setup for Pascal, then went into my .bat file and simply changed the dcr.suprnova pool address to the new pascal.suprnova address then launched Claymore 8.0.  However, this didn't work for some reason.  The miner was still trying to mine DCR for some reason, which of course it coudln't do.  It seems there must be an additional command or something that needs to be added to the code to kick off pascal mining but i couldn't figure it out yet.  I posted this question over on that thread but if anyone here knows, I'd be happy to hear suggestions.

Edit: someone just posted this on the other thread:

-dcoin pasc

EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool europe1.ethereum.miningpoolhub.com:20535 -ewal Delle54.R9280X_0 -esm 2 -epsw x -allpools 1 -ethi 8 -dpool pasc.suprnova.cc:5279 -dwal Delle54.R9_280X -dpsw x -dcoin pasc -dcri 20 -allpools 1

the key here being the -dcoin pasc in bold near the end. I guess this is mentioned in the readme but i must have missed it. Will give this a try tomorrow morning as I dont wanna start something new this late for fear of an overnight crash.

I have been mining ETH + DCR with v7.4 successfully using Suprnova pool for DCR.  I wanted to change over to try Pascal with v8.0 so I simply copied over the start.bat file, left everything the same, except changed to the secondary pool address to Suprnova's Pascal address from their DCR address.  From my understanding of how Suprnova works, I assumed this was all that needed to be changed, since the suprnova username.workername part of the bat file should be identical.

However, after making this change and launching the miner, everything starts fine for ETH, but the miner is still attempting to mine DCR, which of course it cannot due to the pascal.suprnova pool address, resulting in invalid DCR shares... and, it's not even attempting to mine Pascal for some reason.

Does someone know if something else needs to be changed in the start.bat file to trigger the Pascal mining?  I can't seem to figure it out.

I'm pretty sure that that 3-5% speed improvement comment is a hold-over from a previous version update... like 7.2 or something.  Claymore typically notes any speed improvement for the current update at the very top of post #1... in this case, under V8.0, he mentions no such speed improvement.  That and the fact that ETH mining speed has pretty much been maxed out for quite some time and I'm pretty sure there was no expected speed bump in this version.

Hey Phil, for the life of me I can't figure out how you're supposed to configure the .bat file for use with ETH + PASC.  I looked through the Claymore 8 thread and seems like in addition to adding the PASC pool info, you need to somehow add a combination of those 2 numbers (Payload and Deposit Address) but doesn't seem clear on exactly how to do that.  I even went to the Pascal site but can't find any mining info there, which is a bit weird but maybe I just missed it.

Hi Lone... so, I just plan on doing the standard strap-1500 bios mod on the MSI 470's. Well, at least for the 4 that Phil is sending me since those are all hynix memory.  For the 2 new ones I'm getting from Amazon, I will either do the 1500-strap (if hynix) or the 1750-strap (if Samsung). Both are exactly the same process, except of course for coping the timings for 1500 as your base vs 1750.  The one MSI 470 i have with Samsung worked perfectly doing the 1750 strap, so at least I am prepared for either scenario.

I'm pretty sure that the lone Nitro on rig #2 is accounting for about 40-60 extra watts since it is not modded and only very slightly under-volted vs its factory settings.  It comes factory over-clocked at 2000 Mhz but also with a default +4 in the voltage offset. I usually override that to 0, which saves a bit of W but that's not anywhere near my average offset per modded MSI 470.  I am relatively lucky on this rig in that I have been able to under-volt 4 of the 5 MSIs by average -18 offset (2 at -19 and 2 and -17). The 5th is only -8 because of lower factory defaults in stage 7.  Of course, this is always the crap-shoot. Will have to wait and see what the factory numbers are on the 6 for me new rig but hoping for reasonably close to the ones I have on rig #2.

The other thing I should mention (and this could be why we differ in total wattage) is that I dialed back the over-clock on all 6 cards on rig#2. I currently have the MSI set at 1125/1925 and the Nitro at 1225/1950.  This is about 25-35 Mhz lower than I CAN do on this rig per card, but at those clocks, it was pushing 1050w, which i am not comfortable with long-term. After backing the clock speeds down I was able to get it under 1000w in dual mode. I really only lost about 5 Mhz total hash-rate on ETH (160 vs 165), so it seemed a decent trade-off for me... about a 3% reduction in h/r but 5% reduction in power consumption.

Thank Phil! Can't wait to get that 3rd rig up!

And yes, these threads are easily the friendliest I've seen on this forum. Several others I've been on people are very reluctant to help or give any info at all, which I guess is why i usually gravitate here for even semi-off-topic issues lol.

What a weekend! Instead of doing my taxes like i promised myself, I ended up committing to build a 3rd mining rig and purchasing a Baikal Mini Miner! Really excited to see what that can do as at current prices of Dash, ROI time seems minimal at about 4 months. But either way, no huge risk since it only costs $333 landed.

Now to my 3rd mining rig... this will be a nearly identical build as my rig #2, 6 GPUs on a ASRock BTC Pro r2.0 Mobo. However, due to things I have learned in this forum, I am able to build this for about 20% less than the last rig, which is a rather large step towards shorter ROI time.  The key areas I was able to save this time were:

- GPUs:  got 4 used MSI 470's from Phil & the 2 new ones will only be $165 each after rebate. Lucky timing with that since it's the end of the month... ordered 1 yesterday and will order the 2nd on Wed march 1st so that both will be eligible for rebates.  Savings total here is about $250-$275.

- CPU:  rig #2 had a 4790K that I paid about $175 for. While this was good for some extra XMR hash power (about 300 Mh/s) while that rig was mining XMR, it never got CPU XMR mining to work in conjunction with ETH + DCR mining... and even if I could, I don't have enough comfortable headroom on my PSU to add the extra 50w for CPU XMR mining anyway... so, decided to just go with a $72 Intel G3258 for rig #3, saving about $100.

- RAM:  learned from feedback here that I really don't need 2x8 GB RAM like both my other rigs have, so lowered that to 2x4 GB and saved about $35 there.

Unfortunately, the Quark 1200w PSU i need shot up to $185 (got it for $120 last time) so I lost out there. Tracked that thing for 2 months but it was at $165 for a while then $185 and has not moved at all. I also had to buy a monitor for this rig while I was able to use an old monitor I had laying around for rig #2. I know I technically could go headless but I found a decent monitor for only $60 so figured that wasnt a bad deal for the peace of mind of not hassling with a headless setup. All in all, a net savings of about $350-$400 vs rig #2 so I am pretty happy with that.

In addition to costing less, this rig should also be around 10-15% more efficient than rig #2. The reason for this is that rig #2 has 1 Nitro 8GB 470 (along with 5 MSI 470 4GB).  While i have strap-modded and under-volted all 5 MSIs, I was never able to find solid enough data to risk doing the same to the Nitro. So, as it stands, it is under-hashing vs the MSIs and also pulling more wattage. That rig is sucking about 970-980w doing ETH + DCR, but with 6 modded MSIs in rig #3, I expect to get that down around 920 or so. Plus, I will gain hashrate on both ETH & DCR. 

Once up and running, this should be my final full rig (although I did say that after rig #2 lol). Although, I would consider getting additional Baikals if that experiment goes well. Luckily, I'm in Oregon with a cool/mild climate, so over-heating in the summer is no big concern. In fact, I know for sure that running my 2 current rigs has saved me at least a little on heating so far this winter. Not enough to offset 100% of the extra electricity charge but certainly enough to at least make a dent in it. The other thing I am doing with rig#3 is to make it fully mobile so I can move to different rooms depending on time of year.  Rig #2 is almost there but would need to do a bit of work on it before being able to move it. Rig #1 is not mobile at all (learned a lot since then) but it's home is in the garage anyway so not a concern there.

Anyway, thanks to all that have helped educate me on building rigs. I am by no means an expert but really appreciated all the feedback and suggestion I have got from this forum and especially this thread!

Hello everyone... I just recently became interested in mining Dash and after doing a bit of research, pulled the trigger on 1 mini yesterday.  Seems like a relatively small risk with good upside, even though I previously never thought I would enter the ASIC realm (although this unit seems to almost be a hybrid ASIC/FPGA).  Anyway, I have already been very impressed with Baikal customer service. I sent them an inquiry over the weekend and they replied first thing Monday morning China time. Within a couple more hours, I had my order placed with no issues. Really looking forward to trying this unit out!

Thanks Citronik, I really appreciate those details! I have been ASIC resistant mainly due to what Phil talked about but this might be a decent opportunity.  I certainly could see getting like 1-2 of the mini's since at $300 or $600, it's not a horrendous amount to risk and seems to have good upside possibilities.  The thing I am a still struggling with though is the expected ROI period for these. 3-4 months is a no-brainer for me but 7-8 is a different story.  I know you mentioned your friends ROI was about 8 months, but was that before the recent surge in Dash price? 

Yesterday I was comparing projections at coinwarez and cryptocompare and they were way off... like $4.50 vs $2.00 ppd.  This is what got me confused but when I just check them both again right now they are very close... $2.51 vs $2.35 ppd.  So, assuming about $330 landed cost per Baikal mini, that's about 4 months to ROI under current conditions.  I've got an e-mail out to Baikal CS about shipping costs and a few other things so hoping to hear back from them tonight since it's just now Monday morning in China.  If shipping for 2 units is the same as for 1, I may just get 2 and see how things go.

The thing I do like about these are that they seem more like FPGAs vs true ASICs since they have the capability of mining other algorithms. And in addition, what you friend said about transitioning to node mode after Dash is mined out is very intriguing. I need to educate myself of that aspect of it though as it seems I would need much more than 1-2 minis to get into that side.

Yeah I saw that Claymore added Pascal support but I don't know much about that coin.  Not sure what the profitability currently is but I would imagine it would difficult to match DCR right now since 1 is at 20 cents and the other at $2.50.  But, certainly might be worth some hashes for those that feel PASC may rise.  Since turning my 6-GPU rig onto ETH + DCR, I've been getting about 1 DCR per day, which has been a rather nice $2-$2.50/day on top of ETH profits. Has definitely been worth the extra 100w or so it requires vs solo ETH mining.

ummm... is that "yiimp.ccminer" a valid Decred Pool?  I would recommend trying a pool change to see if that fixes your issue. I have been using decredpool.org for about a month and it has been working very well with no issues.