wow 400 @ 950 is nice. Im going to try getting the ram down to 300 or maybe 280 tonight and see what I get. Heres hoping I hit near the 400 that you have!!

yes you can use pushpool to do this.

in its standard format, pushpool+bitcoind will never send any BTC to any miners. People can mine, but you keep all BTC.

After a week of trying out both pools at various hash rates, heres a little review I came up with. Cant post elsewhere so hopefully it helps someone in this section.

My home mining rig goes up to 370MH/sec (on a good day) and I use guiminer/phoenix 1.48/phatk. My other mining rig is doing just over 1500MH/sec at work.

Deepbit
Paid out as promised. Easy to use web interface and stats updated quite quickly. Found blocks regularly. Hash rate reported was pretty close to the hash rate reported in my client, but was still a little under (considering the drop outs). I put this down to the network timeouts, which were a pain. I know some of the larger pools had some attacks so this may be a cause of those drop outs. The more drop outs there were, the more my avg hash rate went down - and there were a *lot* of drop outs at the network level initially, though this improved later on. My stale shares were very low on deepbit, I think ~1.5% IIRC. Deepbit is the biggest pool.

Eligius
Overall, I found that Eligius EU paid me slightly more that deepbit at all hash rates I used (total BTC reward vs total shares submitted) . Paid out as promised. The connection stability was better than deepbit, but did still have drop outs. My stale share percentage was higher on Eligius (~5%) even with LP. The basic styling to Eligius web interface could be a bit off putting to some, however I personally found them very feature rich in terms of stats and graphing (once you find the right bits). I did find that Eligius computation of my average hash rate wildly fluctuated. For example, sometimes my (home) avg hashrate was as low as 200, whereas it could go as high as 500 (!?) even though my rig wont go past 370. This could be down to those connection problems though.

I noticed Eligius gets 'unlucky' a lot - the amount of invalid blocks seems quite high, and sometimes blocks take 6 to 12 hours to find on EU. Im not sure what causes these runs of bad luck, but they seemed to happen quite a bit.

Overall
Ronseal. They both do 'what they say on the tin'. If I had to chose between the two, I would choose Eligius for the higher payout, more stable connectivity and the fact Deepbit is so damn big.

In real life, I dont have to chose between the two. I find neither of the two pools really works for me in the way Id like and they both seem to have their issues. Ill be using different pools in future and will post up more reviews as I do them.

Peas out

A pool where all the mining clients pay the pool 100%? Sounds to me like the 'miners' / 'clients' probably wont be aware they are mining I can think of a few circumstances where that would come into play.

Read up on how pooling works. You dont need to set any payout in a pool. The pool wallet gets all the BTC. Its then up to the pool owner to distribute those BTC to the miners under the pool payout scheme, either manually or using software.

Yep, gives me about 5MH/sec *less* though

One of the reasons I wanted to try 300 on the RAM, to see if worksize 256 would help

Hiya,
Cheers

I gave that a shot but its saying 'no suitable device found' . Bummer.

Other tools show up the card just fine, they just dont let the ram clock go below 600. Still, its doing ~370/MH with that setting ATM.

Hiya
Ive got my 5850 running at 366MH/sec with 945mhz/1200mhz RAM (modded 5870 bios). Ive read (admittedly conflicting) reports about downclocking the RAM to 300mhz to get a MH/sec boost.  Id like to give it a try. Ive added thwe following into MSI afterburner:


and changed the unlock voltage parameter


However I seem to only be able to reduce the RAM clock to 600mhz minimum in MSI Afterburner. In ATI ccc, its 900mhz maximum downclock.

What am I missing?

Thanks Bert Thats brilliant

cheers

Brilliant. Thanks so much !

Pool should be at 500MH/sec by tonight. Hopefully 1GH/sec by the weekend.

Ive looked at the calculator and from what I can see we should be expecting our first block within a week, does that sound reasonable with current difficulty and our hash rate?

Thanks Bert.

So if im getting this correctly, pushpool thought the solution was sufficient for the block, but bitcoind said 'no' ?

Really appreciate the help, cheers!

Hi Bert,
Thanks for the reply. I did check the source code and thats whats puzzled me you see. As far as I can see, there is only one section that will print the following (and thats the section you highlighted):

(remote_host, auth_user, "Y", NULL, NULL, hexstr)

But thats not what I saw in the log. There was no 'NULL' for upstream_result. it was 'N'

However, thats what I saw in the log:


Ive checked in the mysql DB and upstream_result written in there with the 'N' too:


My guess would be this section that has caused it


but then I dont fully understand the reasons why pushpool would think the share work is enough to submit to bitcoind, but then get an upstream result of 'N' ?

Sorry if im sounding a bit thick.

Heya
Sorry its on the wrong forum section, but my account is limited to just here

Ive noticed soemthing odd with our pool (we run pushpool). Normally our share logs show 'IP username Y - -'

[2011-06-15 07:58:45.226391] ::ffff:87.194.1.1 test Y - - 000000016bb097662658dc02c5c94b269f91fe4357d882529ddfa69b000015a9000000009772fa1 8de12513b0e7f1b9c7776827e4f3ebc17a3a4bd693fab809cfa4b5da04df866331a1d932f1fba8c 0300000080000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000080020000

However every now and then, something crops up. Instead of the upstream result being '-' (NULL in DB) it comes through as 'N'

So 'IP username Y N -'

Anyone know what this means?

[2011-06-15 11:51:3.691804] ::ffff:87.194.1.1 test Y N - 000000015d59759d9d64a30622943f5ad37efcad184935b5de6e84bf00000a81000000005508473 8be6f076686f2a3c98f61e19659a18908788fe79f7fa2fa0ed439d8144df89ca51a1d932ff3fde9 7400000080000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000080020000