Primecoin GPU miner: 9.1 CPD on a 280x / pool / 2% dev.fee

[ivanlabrie]

Who exactly are you doctor? 

-

I improved airflow and am now mining at 13c less than before (with lower fan speeds too).

We'll see if it affects stability or block finding.

[1714046020]

1714046020

[1714046020]

1714046020

[1714046020]

1714046020

[1714046020]

1714046020

[1714046020]

1714046020

[primeGPU]

We definitely need to to put this heat issue into FAQ.

[Starlightbreaker]

Who exactly are you doctor?  

-

I improved airflow and am now mining at 13c less than before (with lower fan speeds too).

We'll see if it affects stability or block finding.

on my mix rig, it's crap.

maybe if it's all the same, it'll work better.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

[merc84]

this is the first miner that's pretty sensitive to temperature.

i don't exactly cool my gpus, and if it goes over 80c, the time will go up, and will affect the whole rig, not only one card.

Well depending on how ur rig is setup (ie cards in case or open air with riser additional fans etc) dumping 80oC onto ur motherboard is a general recipe for disaster and just general bad practice
On a side note anyone of the tester have a killawatt meter and care to give us a reading from the wall what the whole rig is pulling during mining dont forget to post detail on the rig when quoting power draw.

[Starlightbreaker]

3 years of mining, never had much issue with high temp anyways.

4 cards in a closed box, gotta vent them heat outside.

~800w with 4 cards and athlon X4, overclocked.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

[ivanlabrie]

on par with my readings...145w per 280x mining xpm.

[trogdorjw73]

Why selling it already i don't see much hard proof of the performance on the forum, just some lucky and some very unlucky testers, and the whole buy all the license in 2 weeks or we feed them to the whales doesn't give much confidence that u really care for the coin you just want the money within 2 weeks either way u don't care who pays. I highly doubt  many of these ppl with such farms are genuine enthusiast they only see the chance for much better profit than what is to be made elsewhere currently with their massive farms, you can be sure miners like this will dump as fast as possible while its still profitable then move on to the next best thing as soon as it isn't. If you are serious about being fair about this you need to make more effort to assure smaller miners that they will get the advertised speed's and come up with a better plan than feeding the remaining licenses to those who already have deep pockets. Perhaps u can release in batches of maximum 8 license per forum user and not letting all the mining power become concentrated to a few mine/dump farms.

Define "fair", please. It's this ideal that gets bandied about, but really I don't know that anything is ever "fair". Usually people complaining about what's fair and what's not just mean, "I don't want others to get more than me, even if they're willing to do more than I am." If someone invests heavily in mining hardware, and they see it as a chance for profit, how is that different from a "crypto enthusiast"? I dare say 99% of us would not be here if there wasn't a chance to make some additional money. If that's not the case, then please come "mine" in my backyard for some "coin" -- the mining equipment looks suspiciously like rakes, hoes, and shovels and the coin looks a lot like weeds, grass, and vegetables, but just take my word for it: there's some serious "cryptography" going on!  

That said, the price of 65 XPM per GPU seems a bit much. Even if the software could deliver on the promised performance (which would mean around 19 XPM per day on a 280X), we're talking about a current price of $50 per GPU. PrimeGPU thus makes 93,600 XPM in a short period of time (well over $50,000), most likely sells them (dumps them if you prefer) while the XPM price is still high, and then all those miners that bought the software come onboard and it takes around four days of mining to recoup their XPM. In the meantime, the price of XPM goes down and difficulty goes up, and instead of $14 per day per 280X you're earning $5 per day per 280X -- and dropping. Every coin that's "CPU only" and then gets a GPU miner basically experiences the same thing, and eventually prices and difficulty reach an equilibrium where you earn about as much with any decent coin as with any other decent coin.

The trick of course is figuring out which coins are "decent" and which are just garbage/clones, and even if a coin looks good (or bad) the market sentiment can go the other way. As I don't have a bunch of 280X GPUs available and I'm not willing to pay $50 per GPU to mine XPM, I will sit this one out and watch from the sidelines.

So at what point did LTC experience this and not recover from it? I was there when Litecoin launched and was only mined by CPUs and then I was also there when GPUs came on board. So far so good...no problems there.

Your view is too short-term.

I'm not sure what you're getting at? Obviously scrypt ASICs are going to push down mining returns from GPUs for scrypt coins, but right now LTC, DOGE, DRK, HIC, VTC, and many other coins are all earning about the same amount of BTC per day (after trading, naturally). That's what I'm saying: we're at more or less at "equilibrium". If you could get PrimeGPU and mine at $10 per day per 280X, you'd basically quadruple anything else out there that I can find (and also pay off the cost of the GPU in just over a month). But of course, as soon as any significant number of people get the GPU miner, XPM prices will start to trend downward. Will it take a week, a month, or maybe two months? That's the only thing I couldn't tell you, but widespread access to a GPU miner will push down profitability of XPM, that's for sure -- either price will take a nosedive, or difficulty will skyrocket.

[trogdorjw73]

Even if the software could deliver on the promised performance (which would mean around 19 XPM per day on a 280X)

Huh? Where did you get those numbers from?

My bad -- I had put 3.6 chains per day in my calculation (for 3x280X). Which means it will take that much longer to recover the cost of 65 XPM per GPU license.

[fudge]

Do you accept new testers? Got some 7970

[ozzy1926]

when the miner out will it support 290 cards ?

[primeGPU]

Do you accept new testers? Got some 7970

Nope, sorry.

[The Doktor]

Who exactly are you doctor? 

A shibe with a badly chosen nick. Should be "The Vet"

[primeGPU]

when the miner out will it support 290 cards ?

Yes, but 290 has 10% less performance than 280x currently.

[ozzy1926]

when the miner out will it support 290 cards ?

Yes, but 290 has 10% less performance than 280x currently.

how ?Because of clockspeed?

[Primorial]

It seems to me that member mtrlt was on the right track but needed some help with an efficient multiple-precision arithmetic implementation.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258540.0

Although I have almost no experience with OpenCL, it will not take too much time to supercharge mtrlt's code with an efficient implementation of some functions. I will have some playtime in May to mess around with the code.

You are right, his code makes perfect sense but contains several bugs, some of them are obvious, some are hard to even detect. Making a functional prototype out of it seems to be moderately hard (don't ask me how do I know), getting competitive performance even on GCN is much harder, as usual, though. Modern AMD's OpenCL compiler is unstable, unpredictable and buggy, it is no fun to play with.

[Supercomputing]

It seems to me that member mtrlt was on the right track but needed some help with an efficient multiple-precision arithmetic implementation.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258540.0

Although I have almost no experience with OpenCL, it will not take too much time to supercharge mtrlt's code with an efficient implementation of some functions. I will have some playtime in May to mess around with the code.

You are right, his code makes perfect sense but contains several bugs, some of them are obvious, some are hard to even detect. Making a functional prototype out of it seems to be moderately hard (don't ask me how do I know), getting competitive performance even on GCN is much harder, as usual, though. Modern AMD's OpenCL compiler is unstable, unpredictable and buggy, it is no fun to play with.

Do you have any suggestions for the best OpenCL compiler version to use? ISA Assembler?

Thanks in advance

[ivanlabrie]

Found two 10 ch and 1 block after reducing temps by 13c and decreasing core clock by 25mhz.
Running time was barely 8 hours this time, after mining with different settings and higher temps for 12hs without a single 10 ch.

2 msi gaming r9 280x cards at 1075mhz core, 1050mv, 1500mhz ram, i7 3820 at 4.3ghz and samsumg ram at 1600mhz cl11-11-11-28-1t.
Win 7 Pro 64
8gb of ram

[madMAx510510]

when the miner out will it support 290 cards ?

Yes, but 290 has 10% less performance than 280x currently.

how ?Because of clockspeed?

Probably because it has 40% less 32bit mul capability. This is due to the Hawaii chip clocking the DP units at half the speed compared to Tahiti.

Note: The DP (64bit double precision) units are also used for 32bit mul in case ur wondering.

[ozzy1926]

when the miner out will it support 290 cards ?

Yes, but 290 has 10% less performance than 280x currently.

how ?Because of clockspeed?

Probably because it has 40% less 32bit mul capability. This is due to the Hawaii chip clocking the DP units at half the speed compared to Tahiti.

Note: The DP (64bit double precision) units are also used for 32bit mul in case ur wondering.

that means using this miner with 290 not worth its 65xpm price?

[ivanlabrie]

It will be worth it once a patched optimized miner comes out...till then it's only good for r9 280x cards. Not even 7950s.