A Comparison of ewbf, dstm, and bminer --Which Equihash NVIDIA miner runs faster?
Hi guys, Ewbf,Dstm & Bminer are the 3 equihash (ZEC, ZCL, & BTG) miners for CUDA GPUs. There is no systematic comparison between these 3 miners to figure out which one is the fastest, so I did it.
Here is my conclusion:
Bminer is the fastest miner and Bminer is also very stable. I will explain my experimental results in detail.
FAQ****What is equihash?
Pls visit this blog:
https://z.cash/blog/why-equihash.html****Why should I mine Zcash?
You can visit whattomine and make a simple calculation by tick your GPU and the device number you had to figure out the most profitable coins you can mine, and it will show you a list that the most profitable coins you can mine on 1080ti/1070 are ZCL(zclassical) ,Zen, BTG and Zcash(Zec).
****What Can I mine with Equihash NVIDIA miners such as Ewbf，dstm & bminer?
Equihash miners can not only be used to mine Zcash but also zcl(zclassical),zen, and BTG; you can switch the coins you want to mine anytime.
My experimental setupI tested three miners on my personal mining rigs in Ubuntu 16.04. Each rig contains one NVIDIA 1080ti GPU and five NVIDIA MSI 1070 GPUs. I downwatt my 1080Ti to 170W and my 1070 to 115W for power efficiency, because there is a maximum power I can draw for my house. All GPUs are in the stock settings.
This screenshot presents nvidia-smi output:
https://preview.ibb.co/eSaHUG/Pic_1.pngHere are the result of my testing and How I did it:I tested the 3 miners one by one on the same 10 machines. I ran them for more than 10 hours each and measure the reported average 6-hour on nanopool. I got the speed on the pool site for 60 GPUs so the result are convincing.
Miner Avg latest 6-hour hashrate from pool（sol/s)
Ewbf 25476.5
Dstm 26528
Bminer 27253.7As you can see based on the hashrate reported by nanopool,
Bminer is faster than Ewbf by 7.0%. Bminer is also faster than Dstm by 2.7%. Results screenshot:dstm running results on one machine
https://preview.ibb.co/g67WpG/Pic2.pngdstm results of 10 machines on nano pool:
https://preview.ibb.co/nsoFGw/Pic3.pngBminer running results on one machine:
https://preview.ibb.co/jtZpbw/Pic4.pnghttps://preview.ibb.co/mgp0ib/Pic5.pngBminer 5.1 results on pool side:
https://preview.ibb.co/jOt49G/Pic6.pngEwbf results:
https://preview.ibb.co/iLcmOb/Pic7.pngEwbf results on pool side:
https://preview.ibb.co/dQYFGw/Pic8.pngNotesAbout devfee: Bminer, dstm, and ewbf have 2% devfee. I tested ewbf with both normal and -fee 0 options. I see no difference in the hashrate. I cannot tell whether ewbf still collects fees with -fee 0 or not, but at least you do not benefit from using -fee 0 in ewbf.
2% devfee is pretty high. Unfortunately, it seems we have no open source alternative for Equihash that is even close to bminer and dstm.
About stability: I did not observe any crash from bminer and ewbf during my experiments. For dstm, during my first attempt, it crashed on one of my rigs after running for 4 hours. I had to restart the experiments on dstm again for collecting its data. So for me, bminer is more stable than dstm.
About power consumptions: I set the same power limit for GPU cards in my experiments. All three miners also have very similar CPU usage. I do not think there will be a big difference on power consumptions with those three miners.What I did observe is that ewbf does not push GPU utilization to 100% (stuck at 98%-99%). This may cause ewbf to use slightly less power than bminer/dstm, because ewbf only used 98-99% of GPUs not 100%.I do not think there is a big difference on power consumptions with those three miners.
