As it's so hard to mine ETH these days, I've decided to dual mine some other altcoins in the hopes that they pump one day and I can recover my costs. I've been trying to mine multiple coins at the same time in order to maximise GPU usage, after seeing how Claymore's 9.7 miner is able to mine DCR with next to no impact on the ETH rate.
Mining:
GPU 0: ETH,DCR (26.6Mh / 1060Mh)
GPU 1: ETH,ZEC (26.3Mh / 32S)
GPU 2: DAS,ZEC (5.3Mh / 151S)
GPU 3: ZERO (10.5S)
Miners:
GPU 0: ETH,DCR (Claymore 9.7)
GPU 1: ETH,ZEC (Claymore 9.7 / Optiminer-zcash 1.7.0)
GPU 2: DAS,ZEC (sgminer 5.5.5-gm-a / Optiminer-zcash 1.7.0)
GPU 3: ZERO (Optiminer-zero 1.2.0)
The current setup is far from ideal and I'm only experimenting with it really. I've only just started testing the ZEC mining. Which coins pair up on the same card nicely without impacting mining rates significantly? What do you guys recommend I mine with these cards in general? Any other advice? I do understand that there are ASICS and FPGAs out there, and I'd rather not be competing with them.
The system peaks at about 950 watts when I dual mine only DCR and ETH across all cards. But I don't want to dual mine only DCR. Currently it's sitting on about 750, so there's plenty of room for improvement.
To the best of my knowledge, Zcash is currently the only cryptocurrency using Equihash for mining. (And even having the same algorithm doesn't guarantee that two selected cryptocurrencies can be merged-mined)
While you can run mining software for ZEC and something else for the same GPU, it's not really merged mining, which is what I think you're looking for if you're trying to mine "with next to no impact" on the performance of either one. Dual mining is always possible, but there's usually a performance hit for both hashrates. In some cases, that performance hit can be reduced significantly, but we don't really know what's going on inside Claymore's closed-source dual-miner. You'll still have to calculate if dual mining is netting you more than just mining one or the other. I generally wouldn't expect a big gain from dual-mining, but your mileage may vary, since it appears to be working out fine for others.
You can check out this thread on the Zcash forums for dual mining ZEC and ETH, but most of the replies don't seem that encouraging. My rig only has 1-2GB 7xxx series cards, so I can't mine ETH anyways.
https://forum.z.cash/t/dual-gpu-mining-eth-zec-working/7220I'm not sure what you plan on doing with all the cryptocurrencies. If you plan on exchanging them all back to ETH, then exchange fees and that extra hassle are another thing to note, especially if you start looking into dual-mining more obscure coins.
If your system is peaking at 950W at the wall, you might want to be careful with that 1000W PSU. If it's mostly around 750W, you're probably good, but keep in mind that pegging a system 24/7 is usually pushing consumer-grade equipment to abnormal limits.
tl;dr: Continue with Claymore's ETH/DCR dual miner or just mine either ETH or ZEC, then optimize your GPU clock settings on that individual miner. Messing with driver, OS, and over/under clock settings are usually enough variables to worry about without trying to optimize all that, along with one or more additional cryptocurrencies. (For example, clock settings that work wonders on ETH might decrease your ZEC mining performance on the same card.) Sometimes the time spent optimizing ends up cutting your profits more than just letting the rig do its job, but hopefully this isn't resulting in too much downtime.
I've only ever mined 2 coins simultaneously, and that was way back with Bitcoin and Namecoin, so take this post with a grain of salt, as I haven't done much with dual-mining today's GPU cryptos.
