Sorry if I double posted this, it wasn't clear to me if it was posted or not the 1st time I tried....

I know that probably most people using XMR-stak are probably AMD miners, but I am one of the crazy Nvidia miners who uses XMR-stak to mine Loki (cryptonight-heavy) currently. This is mostly because I live in a country with very expensive energy costs, so mining one of the cryptonight variations, or Lyra2z sometimes is one way I try to lower my power consumption. I chose Loki because I have always like Monero and Dash and Loki seems to combine elements of both nicely. I'm mining to hold and hope for the future success of Loki rather than just for immediate profit.

I have a question that I hope another Nvidia miner can help me with:

in the tuning info for XMR-stak, it states that "The memory limit for NVIDIA Pascal GPUs is 16 GiB if the newest CUDA driver is used."

I am using mostly 1070s, and a couple of 1080s with OhGodAnEthLargementPill running to help the utilization of their GDDR5x memory. I get around 650-700h/s from the 1070s and similar with the 1080s, or if I don't run OhGodAnEthLargementPill the 1080s only manage 550-600h/s.

Around 700 seems to be the highest a 1070 can do if I do some Google searching and read about what other miners are posting, but in the config file nvidia.txt for xmr-stak - it seems I am still limited in how much memory I use. I changed the "threads" and "blocks" numbers after reading a post somewhere to T 96 B 15 and I have also tried T 48 B 30 and it makes little difference. Those numbers seem to do better than what XMR-Stak defaulted to, but that is still only 1440 megabytes if I'm not missing something. If I try, for example T 96 B 30 (2880 megabytes) it crashes as soon as it tries to spin up that GPU. Is T 96 B 30 just crazy or am I being memory limited to under 2 gigabytes?

When the XMR-Stak notes say "newest CUDA driver" I guess that means 9.2, so will I need to install the latest CUDA SDK on this rig, or is the newest Nvidia driver enough? This is running on a Windows 8.1 machine so maybe I have to be running Win 10 for the "newest"?

Does anyone know if utilizing more memory on the GPU will even help the hash rate or will it just take longer and therefore produce more stale shares?

[CURRENT]

Hi - this has been buzzing around in my brain for quite a while so I just wondered what other people think or know about this subject. I haven't done actual measurement or calculation so if anyone else has I'd love to hear about it.

I've been mining now for at least 2 years. Can't remember exactly when I started but I do remember that when I did ETH was around $10 and BTC was around $600. I started with AMD & spent a long time using R9 290s, but now I transitioned to Nvidia 1060s, 1070s and (unfortunately) 1080s, mostly because of power efficiency when I have to pay around $0.17/kWh for energy.

I have never had more than 3 rigs running because I live in a pretty old house with shitty wiring. Although I am in a 240V AC country, I can still manage to trip a 16A breaker if the mining rigs are on, say neoscrypt, and I run the dishwasher and/or use the air-con.

So I have tried a few of the various algorithm auto-switching solutions, like for example nemosminer on zpool.ca or ahashpool.com, or switching between various coins on one algorithm like equihash at miningpoolhub.com. It's never ever been just "set and forget" like it is if you concentrate on one coin and set memory and core clocks for the best hash per watt - it's always been a situation where I have to compromise and work out which miners or algos are going to crash under which conditions the GPUs are set. Also it never seems to pay what is predicted, compared to when I mine a specific coin and accumulate enough so that all the little fees and exchanges don't take too much of the profit.

It seems to me that if you are auto switching based on calculations about CURRENT price, difficulty, etc and this changes or "switches" every couple of minutes or whatever: unless you hash a LOT of hash power so you are immediately gaining that advantage and converting to BTC within minutes, by the time you have mined a little bit of whatever the auto switch decides is good right now, it's already changed and you are now mining something that everyone else who is auto switching is also mining so the difficulty is through the roof and you are screwed. So those huge GPU farms out there where energy is cheap might do great auto switching, but people like me are better off just mining something obscure that looks like a good idea  & HODLing a lot of different obscure coins in the hope that one goes to the moon, or sticking to something established and relatively predictable and just making whatever profit I can manage. Right?

Does anyone out there with 2-4 rigs, or like 8 -20 GPUs think that they do better using some kind of auto-switching software and pool? If so I'd love to hear about what they use and how they have tweaked it.

Of course this is an argument purely about mining for profit. I have also often mined something just because I like the project or something or someone related to it. Sometimes that has meant I got really lucky if my instincts were correct and I end up with a few hundred or something that goes right up in price, and sometimes I end up with something worth a couple of cents that took weeks to mine.

Maybe I am stating the obvious to people who have worked all this stuff out, but I am interested to hear what other people in similar situations are doing.

I have 2 rigs running Windows 8.1 which have different kinds of Nvidia GPUs on the same motherboard, one is 4 x 1060 6GB + 1 x 1080, the other is 4 x 1070 + 1 x 1080.

For some reason I don't understand, the 1060 + 1080 rig has decided that the Windows license has expired or something. I don't even remember where the license came from, or if maybe it was after I did a Windows update - these rigs are just cobbled together with hardware and software I had lying around.

Anyway, I bought a cheap license for Windows 10 and started the upgrade process by running the Win 10 ISO. At some point while the upgrade was running it popped up a message that said something like "This hardware will not function in Windows 10: GTX 1080". So I just stopped it. The 8.1 OS is still running and I'm mining away, and now the message about the license expiring hasn't appeared again for a few days, so WTF is going on? Anyone ever seen an issue like this before? Is there any sane reason why 4 x 1060s plus 1 x 1080 will not work in Windows 10?

Hi all - I have a rig with 2 x gtx 1070 and 2 x gtx 1060 6GB.

After checking with Whattomine.com it seems that Decred is currently the most profitable coin so I have an account with SuprNova's decred pool.

I started with the new CCminer 2.0 RC3 and with some powerlimit adjustment it reports around 8500mh/s for about 550W.

Then after doing some reading I tried the Gominer recommended at the official Decred site. I can get it to run but it's pretty hard to tell what hash-rate it is actually delivering.

Added to that the Suprnova dashboard fluctuates wildly in reporting my hash-rate. I can watch it for 10 minutes and see anything from 0 to 10000mh/s.

I just wondered if anyone else has been mining decred with similar setups and can recommend which miner I should be using and if Suprnova is a good, fair pool or am I better off using any other pool?

Thanks for any advice.

There has been huge demand for new X11 miners since the dash price went skyward.

Yesterday I got an email from Baikal to say that I could now order from them.

It's a new product that looks just like a mini-miner but does double the hash-rate at 300mh/s for 75W.

Is that credible?

After a few attempts with their TERRIBLE website and sending many emails to them, I finally got an email from "Charles Zhou" who told me that they had arranged for me to pay in Dash and "fixed" my order on the website. I paid their price of 13.86 Dash - which I assume is the $799 plus around $60 shipping (which is a hell of a lot really). Then I sent them 2 different emails with screenshots of multiple confirmations of the dash payment.

I haven't heard a single thing from them about the order since and on their website it says I still have to pay, but also says that I took too long to pay so the order was cancelled.

Has anyone who has paid for one of these new miners actually received any confirmation from Baikal that their order was successful? Or any information about when they are shipping? Or any communication from them at all?

I hope I'm wrong about this but I'm worried that I just got ripped off.

[very]

I have been running a couple of rigs for over a year now, mining mostly ETH but also ZEC & XMR and sometimes dual mining with claymore some DCR and LBRY. Probably 80% of the time I have been just mining ETH using Ethos (custom Linux mining distro).

The rigs are mostly AMD R9 290s, and one 390 and a couple of 380s.

I live in Australia where power is very expensive.

I also have a machine which is used as a HTPC and for some gaming which has an Nvidia GTX1070 in it. Obviously I have used it to mine alongside the AMD rigs a lot and it blows me away sometimes to see what the Nvidia Pascal chips can do in terms of hash-rate vs power consumption. For example, today I tried DCR mining just out of curiosity. The 1070 gives me 2.5gh/s at about 130-140W. I haven't tried mining just DCR with the AMD cards but dual mining ETH/DCR one 6 GPU rig does 180mh/s ETH and 1.5gh/s DCR (with the DCR at 20% in claymore) but it's using 2kW.

This got me thinking about maybe selling the old power hungry AMD cards on Ebay and getting maybe some GTX1060s.

Can anyone give me advice about the best Nvidia cards in terms of price, power consumption and hash-rate?

Is it necessary to buy the 6GB version of the GTX1060 or are the 3GB ones enough?

I was thinking about probably mining ETH still, but maybe (depending on coin prices) mining DCR, VTC, LBRY, XMR, ZEC or whatever. Maybe actually taking the time to learn properly and get a CCMINER autoswitching multi-algo setup going.

Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.