Hey guys... are any of you using or looked into the Baikal Mini miner?  With the recent skyrocketing of Dash price, seems like a good investment to get a few of these as the ROI period at current rates is less than 3 months.  Any ideas about this or first hand experiences in regard to reliability of these units?  Also, have you ordered directly from Baikal?  They seem to have the lowest price at $300 but not sure about shipping.

He's not stopping... just revamping his operation and upgrading to Panda Miners & next-gen GPUs.

And yes, the 470s are still very relevant for mining and I would expect should be so at least until the end of this year. Will be interesting to see how quickly miners upgrade... but hopefully it won't put a major dent in 470s effectiveness for a few more months

I've been mining for about 4-5 months. Built 2 rigs from scratch with 10 MSI 470s, primarily mining ETH, XMR & DCR during that time. After being away about a month for work, I started doing to research and realized that Dash prices have gone through the roof since Dec'16.  This got me interested in mining Dash of course. I quickly learned that there are now ASICs to mine Dash/X11 and I am seriously considering trying at least 1 of the Baikal miner since the ROI period is currently only about 3 months.

However, what I was wondering is if the recent advent of ASIC has really totally killed GPU mining of Dash or if it still could be more profitable that GPU mining XMR, for example.  I have 1 6-card rig dedicated to ETH/DCR but would consider moving my XMR rig to Dash if more profitable.  So, does anyone know about what hashrate a 470 4GB is capable of pulling mining Dash... and also what wattage it pulls?  Yes, I know i could try it myself but I would prefer not to waste the time if the answer is an obvious no. Thanks for any advice in this area!

Hey Phil, i would like the remaining 4 if still available. Sending you a pm momentarily.

Anyone here using Suprnova to mine DCR?  I got locked out of my account yesterday while trying to update payout info and cannot get anyone to respond or help me on the Suprnova support side for over 24 hours now. Their automated email that apparently walks through how to unlock account was never sent and attempts to contact their support through 3 diff methods have not been answered.  Any suggestions, including alternate DCR pools for US-based miners would be appreciated.

Hello everyone... a couple of days ago, I turned back on the DCR mining in 7.4 due to the recent rise in price of DCR. The first couple days went fine, actually getting more DCR than the calculators say. But yesterday, I tried to update my payout info on Suprnova (amount threshold of 1 DCR & my DCR wallet address on Bittrex).  However, after submitting the request, it kicked me back to the login screen and since then my account has been locked for some reason and I can't login.  The message on Suprnova says to follow instructions in an email sent to my acct but of course, the email never arrived (yes, i did check my spam folder).  I then sent a message through their site (about 24 hours ago now) and then another one about 4 hours ago, neither of which they have responded to. I even posted over on the Decred forum as a few others had this same issue and a forum member fixed it for them... but no response there yet either.

So, my question is, have any of you that use Suprnova to mine DCR experienced this issue and if so, how was it resolved?  There seems to be a major issue with their both the functionality of their site and their customer service, which really makes me want to jump to another DCR pool.  The mining itself APPEARS to be going fine but of course, I have no way to check on the actual results until I can login again on Suprnova.

I would be happy to hear any recommendations on what to do, including other good DCR pools for US-based miners.

Sure Phil, happy to help out!

Claymore XMR CPU 3.5 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=647251.0

The bat file is actually very simple... only need to designate your pool (-o) and XMR address (-u). Here is mine for Dwarfpool, which has been the best for me:

NsCpuCNMiner64.exe -o stratum+tcp://xmr-usa.dwarfpool.com:8050 -u 46shm7maKo9Ev35kJiAoW6ZsWSxGWkNeuBrfgcN49g9JJWQe7yE513SGRiqsper1uG9T1xFDFH3inMS G7hrKW2oMHGrTDez -p x

The other possible thing to put in the bat file would be how many threads you want to use. It auto-selects otherwise, which works for 2 of my 3 machines, but the 3rd with the i7-6800k 15MB cache, I need to add the "-t 7" command in the bat file to maximize HR.  Optimal thread useage for this miner is based directly on how much cache your CPU has.  That 6800k has 15 and each mining thread requires 2MB, hence my -t 7 command to use 7 threads (of the 12) = 14MB of cache. Exceeding that 2MB rule will actually reduce speeed.  I tried to use 8 and 9 threads and both resulted in worse performance. So, your CPU's cache divided by 2 is what your -t command should be.

The other thing to note with this miner is that at least the first time, it needs to be launched in Admin mode. But, i actually just launch it that way every time.  And, the .exe file is what needs this, so, since it is launched through the bat file, you actually need to go into the file properties of the exe file and set it to launch as admin.  This should enable your miner to start in Fast Mode.  If it does not, let me know and I can help trouble shoot. Hope this helps.

thanks to both for the advice... i figured that might be a bit much for this a 1200w PSU.

I tried only changing core clock to 1100 on the 5 MSI's (not touching the orphan Nitro at this point) and got a blue-screen about 2 minutes after starting Claymore 7.4.  After reboot, decided to go with 1125/1925 and also took an additional -2 off their voltage offset each. This resulted in only about 1-2% drop-off in HR for each coin but dropped my power useage by about 75w, so sitting right around 980-985 at this point (with DCR at 34), which I feel much better about.  I will play around with it more over the weekend though just in case I can get better results. I suspect I drop the voltage offsets a bit more, especially on the 2 GPUs that have 1160 default value there.  I would love to get it down close to 900 so I can run XMR CPU again on this rig again, but I think DCR is more profitable than CPU XMR at this point, but I will do that calc tomorrow after running DCR for 24 hours.

Hello everyone... just got back from 2.5 weeks away and looking to optimize what my 2 rigs are running based on current profitability scenarios.  I was pretty lucky while away... rig #1 (W7 - 4x470) ran the entire time on XMR GPU 9.6, XMR CPU 3.5, & Burst mining. In fact, that rig has been doing that exact combo for very near a month now with not 1 second of down-time, which is something I thought I would never see.  Rig #2 (W10 - 6x470), actually did better than expected, running 10-11 days XMR GPU 9.7 and CPU 3.5 until crashing. Still, that's the longest I've had that up so far so I will take it.  Got some weird error though with XMR and was not able to fix it remotely, so just switched to ETH for the last few days and it was ok.  My profit is still roughly the same for both ETH & XMR, so was going to go back to splitting rigs when I got home anyway.

Something that caught me eye recently though was the recent explosion of DCR... currently at about $2.60!  This is nearly 3x what it was several months back when I was analyzing dual mining ETH + DCR. Back then it didn't make much sense but at current rates, or even anything about $1.50 or above, it does seem to be worthwhile, so today I went back to dual-mining on my 6x rig.  Sure, it sucks power like a MF'er but seems like it's going to be worth it.  my first hour penciled out to over 1 DCR/day but that has dropped off quite a bit since, even though HR is same. I will monitor for 24 hours then get a better idea, but seems good to me at current prices. 

I wanted to mention this since i didn't see anyone factoring in DCR while catching up on the last 9-10 pages of posts here. Seems to me that with XMR maybe just being slightly better than ETH only, that extra from DCR could swing it in the other direction.

At default settings in Claymore 7.4, I was getting 165 on ETH and 2470 on DCR.  Let that run for 3 hours and was totally stable, although pulling 1045w on my 1200w PSU.  This brings me to my questions...

1- is this enough headroom (150w) to run 24/7 or too risky?  I know some people say 20% headroom is preferred and this is only 12.5%.  With some tweaking, I hope to get it down to about 1000w, which leads me to my next question...

2- what is the current consensus for best 470 4GB (MSI in my case) settings for ETH?  I currently have them all running at 1150 core/1950 mem.  I know some are running at 2000 mem but on the other end, is anyone running core at lower than 1150 for ETH?

3- Regarding the ETH+DCR settings... what is the supposed optimal mix for 470/480's?  I did a bit of tweaking and found that increasing DCR intensity by +1 starting at default 30 increased about 3% HR per +1 but only offset by a very marginal .06% drop-off in ETH HR. This held true up to DCR +4 (34), resulting in a 13% gain in DCR HR while only cutting ETH by .24%.  However, this change did end up pulling about 10 more watts, which is why I stopped there since my system is now pulling 1060w and I don't want to push it any farther than that.

Other than potentially lowering the core clock speed lower than 1150, I think i have a bit more room in the Watt-tool voltage offset area since 4 of my 5 MSI 470's have stage 7 default values of 1150-1168 and I currently only have their offset values set between -14 & -16... hoping to get those 4 running solidly with closer to -20.
   

Ah ok, makes sense.  I actually went ahead and downloaded and started running v11 before I read this and it seems to be working on with my 6x470 rig.  My 5x modded MSIs are getting about 230 per card, while my orphan Nitro 8GB OC (non-modded) is doing a bit better at 245 S/s.  So, getting a bit over 1380 S/s using 800W total for GPUs.  I left the settings the same as for ETH mining... so 1150/1950 with - voltage offset down to about the 1050 range on the 5 MSIs.  Still, even using a full 100w less than ETH, my profit on ZEC is less than both ETH or XMR at about $4.05/day on this rig. XMR is actually right around that mark right now but ETH is about 10% better than both, despite the recent explosion in difficulty.

Anyway, I will probably let this run for a few hours to make sure it's stable then switch back to ETH until I go out of town. That rig runs soooo much cooler on ZEC... and XMR for that matter, but I like to split up my mining most of the time, especially when the profits are reasonable close.

Bottom line on ZEC, I was pleasantly surprised to see my 470's getting in the 230 range. If indeed Claymore can squeeze more out of them in his next rev, that will make the decision to switch to ZEC for a while easier.

edit: and of course, very shortly after i post this, ZEC profitability plummets due to almost 50% diff spike lol.  Seriously, not sure how you ZEC miners deal with this BS lol. I get why those with old cards do it since it is still their best (only) option, but the 470/480 crowd I would think would shy away from this at this point. Unless of course you're expecting ZEC to tremendously outperform ETH/XMR in the near future ;-)

hmmm.. that's interesting coming from the guy (Wolf) who keeps posting that he is getting 800-820 H/s from 470s but of course, won't divulge how lol.  While there may be some truth to it, just curious why Claymore himself hasn't mentioned this on his own XMR miner thread, but I guess we will see.

I did see that Claymore just released ZEC v11.  Can anyone report their speeds using 470's on it (please specify modded or non-modded ROMs)?  ZEC keeps showing as far less profitable to mine for me vs ETH & XMR, but I realized that I am still using the 200 S/s benchmark I was getting with V8 I think.  I know Claymore has been focusing on improving the 390/290 speeds and he rarely mentions 470/480s in his updates, so wondering if 470s have at least seen a marginal increase over that 200 I was getting a few versions back.  At least at this point with prices/diff, I could justify switching my ETH rig over to ZEC if I were able to get about 250 S/s per modded 470.  Looking to switch rig #2 off ZEC while I am out of town since I am not that comfortable with a rig running that hot while I am away.

Geeze lol! Why does he keep spending 95% of his time on ZEC when it has been well below both ETH & XMR in mining profitability for many weeks in a row now?  Yeah, I get that there is not much more room for improvement with ETH mining but XMR seems to have some room, esp for 470/480's, since those were not even out when he made his XMR GPU miner.  He did update it about a week ago but it was only to bring it up to date feature wise, with no speed increase.  I guess there are still more miners with only older gen cards that can really only mine ZEC that are keeping updates in demand, but the profitability simply isn't there for the 470/480 crowd.

Oh well, it could be worse... all 10 of my cryptocoin holdings could be down double-digit % today.  Of wait... they are... so, strike that.  Bad day to be in crypto. Hope it turns around soon. Really wish the government in China would shut their f'in mouths.

Ahhhh!! thanks for clarifying that! I had mis-understood his post to mean that he was SOLELY using the 6-pin, but now I read it again and that is of course not the case.  That does seem like a much better way to do things but now I am wondering about being short on PCIe cables... but actually, I think I have at least 2 left over from my first 2 rigs so probably will work. Thanks again, I will order that 6-pack promptly.

hmmm... but how does this provide enough & even power to the GPUs?  Most of what I have read indicates that IN ADDITION to the riser power, the 6+2 pin connector coming from the PSU must be plugged directly into the GPU. Maybe I'm missing something but I thought there is supposed to be a balance between GPU power coming from the PCIe slot/riser and directly from the PSU via the 6+2 pin connector. Is this not correct?

This is quite interesting!  So, to make sure I understand correctly... these risers are powered by converting the sata plugs coming from the PSU to 6-pin PCIe-type power (instead of either sata to molex or molex to molex)?

Is this a legitimately better way to go than the sata to molex type?  I had always avoided that on my GPUs since I heard several people saying that this caused problems due to wrong voltage pull or something like that. So, I had always gone molex to molex, but of course, that is also why I am always short on molex connectors since I would need 3 x 2 for GPUs and 1 x 2 to power my BTC pro r2 Mobo.  Needing 8 molex on 4 cords sucks when even 1200W Plat PSU only comes with 2 x 2.

So, if I understand this correctly, using these 6-pin adapters, I could make use of the extra sata cables/connectors for 6 GPUs... meaning I would really only need 2 molex to power my mobo?  If true, is there still a limit of 2 GPUs per string?  Or could I reasonably put 3 per string?

Thanks Citronick, I appreciate your insight on this issue.  I understand and agree with what you said about sticking with the reputable brands. In fact, my 2 mining PSUs are both Rosewill Quark (1kw and 1.2kw), both of which I like very much, hence looking at another Rosewill for rig #3, just Gold vs Platinum. By all appearances on NewEgg, this Capstone appeared to be inline quality wise with the Quarks as both had 4-star reviews. However, the difference became evident between the 2 in reading the in-depth reviews that Phil linked to.  If it was just the 2% difference between Gold and Plat, I would buy that Gold right now, but the build quality appears to be noticeably worse, even though from same brand, which is why I opted not to buy it.  I will probably just wait until that 1200w Quark drops in price again and stick with that.

As to your comments about RAM and GPUs, I'm not sure it can help much in my specific case. Firstly, I am not in the market for multiple sticks of RAM (at least not past the 2 i will need for rig #3), so there would be no possibility for volume discounts there.  However, I do have a question about quantity of RAM needed for mining.  Both of my rigs so far have 16GB of RAM (2x8GB).  Is this overkill?  Could I get by with 2x4GB instead?  I would primarily be GPU mining ETH/XMR/ZEC and CPU mining XMR, so maybe this is an area I can save in?

As for bulk discounts on GPUs, I doubt that 6 would qualify me for this. I'm under the impression that I would need to be more in the 15-20 range for a distributor to even talk to me, and that's not going to happen any time soon. I think i will be good at 3 rigs for now, unless of course crypto prices go crazily high in the near future.  Of course, I said the same thing after planing rig #2, so who knows 

Hi Claymore... any estimate on when you might release a version of this updated to hopefully increase hash-rate for those of us with 470/480s?  If you are already working on it, any idea of what kind of increase may be possible?  Thanks again for all your work, it is really appreciated!

Thanks Phil... I agree... based on that review I am not exactly gung-ho on that Capstone.  I will probably just wait for the price of that Quark to drop again. After all, I cannot really justify spending $1100 for 6 new MSI 470's at the moment anyway, so any money spent on other components that would just sit around for several weeks would probably not be wise.  Also, RAM prices seem to be quite high right now, although not as confident that those will drop.  If I had everything else except the PSU I would be more gung-ho but I actually only have the Mobo for rig #3 so I may wait a bit to go full-bore on rig #3. Probably will pick up at least 1 MSI 470 before Jan end for $170 though since I don't want to miss a rebate month.

you did quite well then... I missed that drop below $850 but bought $200 worth when it was around $920 I think, so not great but luckily, this happened:  I had requested a poker cash-out of $400 when BTC was a bit over $1100.  Lucky for me they are on a 2-3 day lag and the day they actually sent that $400 worth of BTC to my wallet, it was right at the $900 mark. So, I ended up about even but could have very easily lost $100 in value if it would have transferred even 24 hours earlier, so I count myself very fortunate there.

So, i didn't end up pulling the trigger on those 2 x 550w PSUs.  It was going to cost $140 for 1100w vs the 1200w single unit, which yes, now costs $180 but has been as low as $160 recently and $120 a little longer out.  I just didn't want to hassle with a 2-PSU setup for what would probably be a nominal savings.

So... still on the lookout for a good deal on a 1200w unit, I found this Rosewill Capstone G Series at NewEgg for $100 after $10 rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182361&cm_re=rosewill_1200w-_-17-182-361-_-Product

This at least appears to be very similar to the Quark Plat Series, with the exception of course of the 2% difference in power efficiency, but was wondering if anyone on this thread had used this series (in any wattage).  In addition, the Capstone seems to be semi-modular, but with only the 24-pin connector permanently connected, so probably no issue there. Otherwise, seems to have the same # of cables/connectors as the Quark.  This still puts me 1 molex cable short, but hopefully can find a work-around for that.

If i do my math right, the incremental electricity cost for Gold vs Plat is only $2/month, so ROI wise, this would be a no-brainer vs the $180 (or even $160) Quark version.  But, wondering if there are any other differences that I am not catching.