But not everything is as simple as it seems. AMD cards are considered the most profitable for Ethereum mining, but now you won’t find them on store shelves during the day. In this case, potential miners can only buy video cards from the “red” competitors, that is, cards from Nvidia. Now they have also increased greatly in price, but at least they are still available on store shelves.
Our article today will mainly be devoted to “green” video accelerators. Let's try to understand which Ether miner for Nvidia is best to choose today. Shall we touch on some details? how to mine Ethereum and what mining equipment we will need.
So, if you still want to assemble a mining farm early next year, then take a few minutes of your time. It is quite possible that this article will slightly reduce your pain in choosing.
How to mine Ether with an Nvidia video card?
Essentially, mining Ethereum on an Nvidia graphics card is no different from mining on AMD cards, and you will just need to make slightly different settings.
The only thing is that for Ethereum mining you will need cards of the tenth series, since they have a significantly higher hash rate than the previous line. However, first you need to say a few words about the necessary mining equipment. If you plan to mine not just on your home computer, but want to assemble a small farm of several video cards, then you will need a full-fledged ATX motherboard with a large number of PCI-E slots. Here it is very important not to make a mistake and choose a model with at least four ports, and even better with five or six. For a small farm, this is more profitable than buying special equipment or two cheaper motherboards. It doesn’t make much sense to mine ethereum on a processor now, so we take a not too expensive stone from Intel or AMD just for the normal functioning of the system. An average dual-core processor with a frequency of over two gigahertz is quite suitable.
RAM in our case also does not play a special role, but it is recommended to have at least four gigabytes, since we will be installing a 64-bit operating system. Both Windows 7–10 and Linux are suitable for mining; here we simply choose what is more convenient for you or what you are used to. Any hard drive (if we are not going to download the official Ethereum wallet) is also quite suitable, you can even save money and buy it on the secondary market, the main thing is to check that it has no bad sectors. Or you can take a small SSD, it will make your work much more comfortable. And finally, one of the main things on our list is the power supply. Here you can take either one powerful one from 1200 watts, or several watts at 700–800. The first option is cheaper and more convenient, but less reliable, the second, accordingly, is more reliable, but will be more expensive.
That’s all, we purchase the necessary components along with video cards and, using “razer” adapters, assemble everything into a farm. Now we will need to go to the official Nvidia website and download the latest drivers. We type in Google “download Nvidia drivers” and using the first link we get to the page we need where we select our video card model and download the latest version of the driver without the “Beta” prefix. Now all preparations are completed and you can proceed to setup.
The most common problems with Ethminer
There are a fairly large number of messages on the network that msvcr120.dll error appears when starting Ethminer and we suggest reinstalling the program. Don’t rush to tear down your software and install it anew - the problem is easier to solve. Simply download the latest version of Microsoft Visual C++.
You may also encounter a message like:
NVML: cannot get current temperature, error 999 (an internal driver error occurred)
It usually appears after the farm freezes. Unfortunately, there is no software solution to this problem - you need to check the performance of the RAM and video cards installed in the farm. It is also necessary to check the risers.
Mining acceleration utility
To speed up Ether mining on an Nvidia video card, it would be absolutely useful to use the special nvidia-smi utility. For the latest GeForce video cards, this small utility should come with the latest drivers. You can find it at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI. Make sure you have it where it should be, and move on.
The next step we need to go to the command line with admin rights. To do this, enter the abbreviation “cmd” in the search bar and use the right mouse button to launch the line we found with administrator rights. After that, in the window that opens, write the line - C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI, and after it enter “nvidia-smi -q -d SUPPORTED_CLOCKS | more". This command should show us what frequencies our video card supports, namely: we are interested in the top two parameters in the list, these are the video memory frequency and the maximum core frequency programmed from the factory.
Next, enter the command “nvidia-smi -ac”, where after “ac” we indicate the maximum frequencies of your video card from the first two lines seen earlier, for example, “nvidia-smi -ac 3505.1455”, where 3505 is the memory frequency, and 1455 – core frequency, respectively. After this, the program will try to fix this frequency for all your cards. However, if your farm uses different cards with different parameters, then you will have to do everything manually.
To do this, in the command you need to specify the number of your video cards with different frequencies. In our example it will look like this:
- nvidia-smi -i 0 -ac 3505,1455
- nvidia-smi -i 1 -ac 3505,1392
With these settings, our cards will no longer drop the frequency when the load decreases, which will already increase the final hashrate by 2-3MH/s, which means that ethereum miner Nvidia will work faster.
But in order to further increase ethereum mining on an Nvidia video card, it won’t hurt us to overclock it, since the Pascal architecture lends itself very well to overclocking. To do this, download the MSI afterburner program and increase the core and memory frequencies to the most stable values. However, be very careful and do not get carried away with raising tension. It should be remembered that with excessive overclocking, the heat dissipation of the card increases disproportionately to the increase in power. It will be much more profitable to keep the temperature within comfortable limits for the card, thereby extending its service life, than to receive one or two percent of additional profit, but “killing” the video card after a couple of months. In addition, know that increasing the memory frequency is much more profitable in Ethereum mining than overclocking the video core.
Optimized Ethereum miner Ethminer
Ether mining on Nvidia has always been less profitable than on AMD cards, but with the arrival of the tenth series and the release of the optimized Ethminer miner in mid-2022, the situation has almost leveled off. Now the speed of the GTX 1060 has increased by several megahashes per second and is almost equal to the RX 470, while significantly exceeding the speed of the GTX 970. It should be noted that in the new version of the miner 0.11.0rc1 the hashrate has grown the most on the 1060 video card, but has grown very little on GTX 1070 and GTX 1050 Ti, and remained virtually unchanged on the GTX 1080 - GTX 1080 Ti.
Today, Ethminer is only slightly ahead of Claymore's Dual Ethereum, although it has some advantages. However, we can say with confidence that mining on Nvidia video cards, as well as mining algorithms on GPUs in principle, is progressing very quickly, and we expect that in 2022 Ethminer will again take the lead in terms of hashrate, since it is optimized only for cards from one manufacturer. The most important advantage of this miner over its competitor today, undoubtedly, is that no commission is charged for its work, and all the money you earn goes to you.
To run the miner program, download its latest version from the official website. Next, unpack the archive with the miner, indicating a directory convenient for you, but it would be best to do this on drive C.
After unpacking, the archive will not contain the “start” executable file, so we need to create it ourselves. Open a text document and enter there: ethminer -G -S coinotron.com:3344 -O maztakillars.xal:1. The only difference is that you will need to provide your own information about the worker and password, which you create when registering on your pool. Next, save the document as “start.bat”, and this should complete the miner setup. We launch the miner and immediately get to the pool of your choice.
Why compare ETH mining software?
The answer is obvious. All miners (we mean people) want to know which miner (we mean program) is the best, namely the most reliable and with the highest hashrate. Moreover, the hashrate is important precisely on the pool, and not in the program window. Yes, this is important, because the pools pay you for the balls that they received from the miner, and how fabulous the hashrate is drawn in the farm console is absolutely not important.
Holy wars on the topic “which miner is better” are conducted regularly on all fronts: on YouTube, Reddit, in Telegram chats, on forums. “T-rex is the fastest, Phoenix inflates the hashrate, Gminer beats them all, lolMiner is the most adequate, nothing compares to TeamRedMiner, NBMiner can only be understood by the Chinese” - we hear these and many other phrases every day.
Miner Nvidia
But why is our old test bad, and why carry out a new one? There are several reasons.
- new versions of programs have been released.
- The old test was not accurate enough, and we figured out how to make the study more accurate.
- the price of Ethereum is breaking all possible records, so you need to squeeze the maximum possible out of your equipment.
Claymore's Dual Ethereum
Second in line, but not second in popularity, is the dual miner claymore. Among Ether miners, Claymore has been popular for a very long time, as it has a number of undeniable advantages, for example, dual mining of eth and dcr. This allows miners to “not waste time” and mine Decred at the same time as Ethereum. It should be noted that in this mode, the speed of Ether mining drops, and the load on video cards increases by 10-15%, however, despite this, such mining can be very profitable in some situations. Also among the undeniable advantages of the program are its regular updates, after which the speed of video cards sometimes increases significantly. But there are also disadvantages, for example, when using this miner, you pay a 1% commission for a single mining mode and 2% for a double mode.
You can download the miner from the official website of the program, then unpack the archive into a folder labeled in Latin letters. Next, find the Start.bat file and open it using Notepad. We need to enter a certain line there in accordance with your pool and wallet number.
In our example line it would look like this:
- We write the value at the beginning of the line - EthDcrMiner64.exe
- Edit -epool to match your pool. In our case, dwarfpool is used, so the line looks like this -epool eth-ru2.dwarfpool.com:8008
- Next, in the line -ewal, indicate your wallet number, for example, -ewal 0xe245e192263a77635c5680e1dfb80ba95de1a45e
- Then we indicate the name of our worker. Here you are free to choose any name, since this value is only needed for monitoring the system within the pool. Example, --eworker komp1
- It would also be a good idea to add the word pause at the end of the line so that the worker does not close when errors occur, but only pauses.
As a result, you should get a line similar to this: EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool eth-ru2.dwarfpool.com:8008 -ewal 0xe245e192263a77635c5680e1dfb80ba95de1a45e -eworker komp1 -epsw x pause
We check that all data is correct and save the file. This completes the setup of the miner, click start and start mining the coin.
Recommended mining pools
Very often, pools have certain recommendations for miner programs so that all users of the pool use only one program. That is, you can choose a pool according to your preference for one or another miner program. In addition, we strongly recommend that you choose a pool with which you have the most stable ping, this will allow you to waste less time on disconnections. It is also quite useful to look for a pool with a large number of participants; this will significantly speed up the opening of the block and, as a result, receiving coins. Of course, you can mine yourself, but in modern realities it is very unprofitable.
Now there are quite a lot of good pools for Ethereum mining, but in this article we will only touch on three, in our opinion, the most relevant pool systems:
- dwarfpool.com/eth. Quite a young, but already very popular pool with a large number of participants. It is very beneficial for residents of the Russian Federation, as it has a server on its territory. Standard commission of one percent, which is not artificially inflated. The only downside is that the site is quite difficult to use.
coinmine.pl/eth/ This pool also has quite high power and good ping. In addition, his clients respond positively to the commission amount, which does not exceed 1%.- eth.nanopool.org/ Very high pool power, plus a fairly user-friendly interface and ease of setup. On the downside, users often complain that the site charges a large commission. than officially stated.
How is the hashrate determined on the pool and in the miner?
We agreed that the number of balls on the bullet at the end of the test is the most important parameter. In addition, the table with the results shows the hashrates:
- real , that is, the hashrate that was obtained on the pool. It is worth noting that here we are talking about the average hashrate for the entire experiment time of three hours.
- hashrate in the miner or what you see in the program when it is running. It was taken from the miner’s log at the very end of the operation, that is, the last hashrate value was taken before the miner was turned off.
Miner logs
The hashrate in the miner is determined quite simply; the program goes through the solutions of the block - millions of solutions per second. Be sure to read “What is mining? Good luck in mining." The program counts how many decisions it has already gone through: good, bad - it doesn’t matter. With each new solution, +1 is added to the counter.
Miner and farms
The hashrate on the pool is a calculated value. Each ball sent to the pool has a difficulty of at least 64M, because the difficulty of the ball is set by the pool. Let's say that in ten minutes the miner sent 1200 shares. This means that per second the miner sends on average 1200 / 10 / 60 = 2 balls. We multiply 2 balls by the difficulty of the ball 64M and we have a hashrate of 128 MH/s.
Remember that in mining and in cryptocurrencies everything can be understood on your fingers and calculated. Blockchain remembers everything. If you don't understand something, read the Cryptocurrency Bible.
Creating a crypto wallet Ethereum Wallet
For greater reliability of Ether mining, we would recommend that you install the official Ethereum wallet called Mist on your system. However, for this wallet to function, you will need to download the entire blockchain system to your hard drive. This procedure will take you more than a hundred gigabytes of disk space and about three days to set up.
Not everyone likes this kind of red tape, so it’s better for beginners to pay attention to the wallets that cryptocurrency exchanges provide to their clients. It’s very simple to create such a wallet; we select the exchange to which it is most profitable for you to transfer Ether, after which you just need to register and go to the appropriate section of the site. Next, indicate your wallet number in the miner program or on the pool. Exchanges are also very convenient in that the coins transferred to you from the pool can be exchanged for fiat money or other cryptocurrency on the spot. Among the disadvantages, it can be noted that exchanges are not entirely reliable storage, and it is better to store large amounts of ether in your personal wallet.
Testing miners for AMD video cards
Mining farm where the test took place:
- MSI Z270 A-pro motherboard
- Processor Celeron G3930
- RAM 4 GB
- SSD 120 GB
- Power supply Cougar CMX 1200W at 1200 Watts
- 4 AMD Power Color RX 5700 Reference video cards, Micron memory, flashed in XT
- Overclocking settings: core 1300, memory 930
- Driver AMD driver 20.40
- Linux operating system
Rig AMD
Programs that participated in the experiment:
- Team Red Miner 0.8.0
- Phoenix Miner 5.5c
- lolMiner 1.20
- NBMiner 36.1
