R9 290 is a ton better at ETH than ZEC - bios mod them with one of TheStilt undervolt bios helps a ton on dropping temps, stability, and lowering power usage.

1100 core is WAY overkill for ETH mining on them - 900-950 seems to be about the most you need for max hashrate AND drops power consumption quite a bit.


Might vary a bit if you have aftermarket cards - mine are Sapphire reference models, and seem to be optimal on ETH mining at 1250 memory clock (1300 LOWERS hashrate and much higher gets unstable).

I believe you need to do BIOS mod - but I don't run mine on Windows so not sure.
The Stilt made a series of modded BIOS for these for use with Litecoin/Scrypt mining, those BIOS do a very good job of dropping power usage and allowing for a lot more overclock or a lot lower temperatures.

High quality USB CABLES can easily exceed that, when not used for actual USB service.

Don't confuse the "usage spec" with the "hardware spec", like folks using "PCI-E 6 pin connections" to power ASIC miners sometimes do.

Don't know when they changed from .rar to .7z but I find BOTH of those formats irritating and worthless in today's computing environment.

They made SOME SENSE back when DIALUP was the norm for file transfer and they could literally save minutes off of a transfer, but they're a total waste of time and effort TODAY when they might be lucky to save *A SECOND* off the file transfer time but waste a LOT more time than that dealing with the file itself.

Let us know when you manage to get listed on a MAJOR exchange - I've never even heard OF any of those exchanges before now.

Not "zero" like the post you were replying said, but pretty bloody close.


It shouldn't be hard to set up ability to merge fold with Curecoin - just kill the "need to be on OUR team" requirement.
Merge-folding with Foldingcoin is going to be a lot tougher, since you both require wallet address as part of your name.

Because it offers a LOT MORE SUPPORT FOR FOLDING if this coin could be cooperative with the LONG STANDING Curecoin and Foldincoin initiatives - which have supported "merge folding" for years.
A LOT of coins support "merge mining" - reference DOGE for the best-known example.

Since the STATED objective of all 3 coins is to "support Folding@Home", it is a lot more logical for all of them to WORK TOGETHER as opposed to your "of course" MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN them idiocy as being able to get all *3* for folding work gives a lot more incentive for more folks to DO folding.


You CAN use USB risers in folding, but higher-end cards suffer a significant performance hit if you do so, ballpark 25-30% in some brief testing I've done on my Aorus GTX 1080 ti cards.
If you were seeing 500k on one, you either had a "pain" work unit type or there was something else limiting the card, even on a USB riser I normally see more like 800-900k on most work units (vs 1.2M AND UP on most work units on non-riser setups).
The hit is less on lower end cards, but still noticeable.

On the positive side, a riser-type rig is a LOT easier to keep cool, and USB risers are INFINITELY easier to work with than multiple "16x ribbon" type risers.

One REAL CPU core per GPU is definitely needed - "hyper-threaded" cores need not apply they can't keep up with higher-end cards and WILL throttle your performance badly.
More than one core per GPU does not help, as the folding client isn't coded to use more than one CPU core per "thread" and it runs one "thread" per GPU core.
If you DO have spare cores, you can use those for other stuff though - like folding on them or XMR mining.
Even REAL cores are starting to get marginal sometimes - I was doing some testing once on a G-series Pentium (G4560 or G4600 forget which offhand) and a single 1080 ti was loading one "real" core on that to over 90% average, and I THINK I was taking a small PPD hit on the GPU even so.

For 12 1080 ti cards in a rig, 12+ real core Threadripper or 12+ real core recent Intel server CPU are the only viable options for full PPD - but you're going to be impacted by USB risers as well even WITH enough CPU power.

Ballpark half of last year the Foldingcoin income was more than the Curecoin income - part of that was Curecoin went though it's first "halfing" somewhere in that year.
I never understood the "more folding = more coin value" BS out of Vorshalk either.
When he decided to bring hig HUGE farm online, it ticked off a lot of long-time folders and put a serious HURT on the profitability of folding.

My board has never seen Windows.

There is no "phase" to DC.
Different power supplies WILL have slightly different voltage outputs though, usually.

I would not be shocked if Bitmain moved to Samsung's "10nm" process for their S11 model, since TSMC seems to be a fair bit behind the curve right now (and the TSMC "7nm" process is going to be very very close on performance to the current Samsung and Intel "10nm" processes) while Samsung seems to be actually in production (abet small-scale so far) on their 10nm process.

I do have some question if a process designed for "low power applications" like smartphones is going to handle the high-power-density requirement of a cryptocoin mining ASIC well.

If the Celerons were low-end single core models, I could see some potential for driver + Windows overhead choking performance a bit.

I thought about doing sometime similar back when I ran a "place to play games" in Indianapolis, but never had enough money to invest into the idea.

If you're not flexing the cables a lot, crimp + solder is a GOOD idea.

If you ARE flexing the cables a lot, the solder will tend to break eventually and can cause issues, but that should not be the case in a GPU rig - we're talking typically many thousands of lifetime flexes, not a dozen or less for install + occasional troubleshooting.

XMR-Stak - don't wast time with any wallet "miner".
DSTM is ZEC not ETH - not sure if it supports AMD as I'm not mining (currently) with any of my AMD cards except part-time on the Vega (it replaced one of my Aorus 1080 ti cards in my "gaming" system).



As an update to my upcomming "Mark 2" shelf design, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zrfLmpqX4lfY_l4tMxriiZoWb4ZNYfSQ/view?usp=sharing which is where that Aorus (and my 2 others) went.
It's a special setup due to the huge size of the AORUS cards and their high power draw compared to most of my cards.
The power supply is short enough it would normally be mounted all the way to the left and still clear the "support" shelves, but the AORUS is long enough the right card needed extra clearance.

Basic idea is I redesigned the shelf support structure to be free-standing, then the shelves just slide in and out - and I added a 7'th "special rig" shelf.

Basic concept electrically is still to feed one "shelf unit" from a NEMA 14-30 drop cord (or functional equivalent), run 6 rigs split between 3 15-amp 117 VAC circuits (limited to appx. 6 amps per rig), then run a 7'th "high power" rig on the same circuit with the fans/LAN switch/monitor/Small LED-type or compact flourescent light.

Balance between the "hot" legs won't be quite as good as on the original 6 shelf design, but it uses more of the circuit without overdrawing it and the imbalance should be less than 3 amps with the fans on low (less if I have to crank the fans up at all).

It also gives me a place to put my current "high power" cards and lets me add more (like Vega cards) in the future for "special projects" or "special usages".

I'm figuring on having the first actual "rack unit" put together sometime this week, got all the boards cut for it just gotta put it together - not sure if I'm going to go ahead and wire it, but probably (I have a spare panel and plenty of spare outlets to use).

Other than the Aorus "Thunderbolt Box" models and that MSI blower model 1070 ti with the VERY POOR cooling, anything 1070 and up listed at Newegg BY NEWEGG has been selling out very quickly.
There have been several RX 570/580 models that have been listed for 2-3 days before they sell out though, and usually at least a half dozen "newegg" sales listings on those at any given point the last 2 weeks.

Availability does seem to be showing a SLIGHT improvement, but pricing is still high probably at least partly due to the RAM shortage/pricing issue.

Positive pressure of FILTERED air in the room will reduce dust levels quite a bit.
It's not a 100% cure, but it's a LOT better than nothing.

It's also nice if you live in an area that gets smoke at times (last summer in Central Washington was BAD) to be able to BREATH.


The "increase filter area" idea is a sensible one - it's one of the reasons most large commercial installations use 4" filers, they have that "V" built into them.
Better yet, make it a 4 or 5 sided "box" of filters on the intake (4 if the fan is against the floor, a wall, or the ceiling, 5 otherwise).

None.

The original Baikal ASIC supported X13 mining.

I don't think the current ones do but not sure there.

Depends on what is wrong with the GPU, most commonly a bad GPU won't even let Windows boot at all but SOMETIMES it's only sorta-bad and CAN crash Windows.

MOST blue screens are software issues but not always - a GPU that is overclocked a LITTLE too high can cause a bluescreen once it warms up enough.

If you use powered risers, you don't need to use the MOLEX at all.
Then there is no question of "which PS should be attached to which MOLEX" on the MB.

Bitcoin has not been mineable with GPUs for YEARS.
Go try the altcoin section.

The S5 is *2 GENERATION OLD* technology for the cryptocoin that has by far the most competition.
Even with very cheap electric it is a money LOSER today.

The 1050ti is a CURRENT GENERATION, abet low-end, GPU - and GPU mining right now is a lot more profitable in many respects than ASIC mining.