Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"
by
VyprBTC
on 24/01/2018, 19:37:21 UTC
I suppose its my turn to contribute something.  If you are into Cryptonight mining, which it sounds like a few of you are, check out this Gigabyte mini-pc for $250:  https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164036

You won't be adding any graphics cards (unless you are using eGPUS) but this thing will hash at 614 H/S.  You might be wondering how its possible to get that kind of performance out of a cpu with a 6 mb l3 cache.  The game changer is that this processor has an embedded Iris Pro GPU with a 128 MB L4 cache.  XMR-Stak recently included an optimization to take advantage of this cache space.  It should ROI itself in 2.5 months.  You have to provide your own ram and HD, but it does come with a wifi card so you could put this thing anywhere.


Ok, I picked up and set up one of the 5575rs (identical to the 5775, just i5 instead of i7). Out of the box and just using xmr-stak with the energy saver off, I'm getting around 200-202 h/s, which is not great but not bad. I haven't figured out how to enable support for the Iris Pro yet, still working on that, but I'm feeling pretty confident I can get it up significantly...

EDIT: ok, not exactly identical, it's 2.8-3.3ghz and 4mb l3 instead of 3.3-3.8 and 6mb l3, but I still think I can get it up much higher than 200h/s

If it has an Iris pro then the L3 size is irrelevent.  The issue you will run into though is that the I5 only have 4 cores and no hyperthreading.  To take full advantage you need 8 threads.  Make sure for the low power setting you are putting in 5.  you should probably be in the 300s


So you're pulling 600 h/s on your i7? What needs to be changed in the config or CPU file . . . I'm only pulling in 250, I didn't mess around with any of the low power settings, it's still on the stock "false" -

Correct.  When I ran it with the default settings out of the box I think I got around 250 also.   Here is my cpu.txt:


"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },
    { "low_power_mode" : 5, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },

],

In most situations you wouldn't mine using the hyperthreads let alone affine to them, but I think this low power mode must be less cpu intensive at the cost of more memory.

In /etc/security/limits.conf  I also added the following 2 lines:
* soft memlock 262144
* hard memlock 262144

and in /etc/sysctl.conf added:
vm.nr_hugepages=128


Proof:



Many thanks!

I picked up a Brix unit with the 4770R chip for a steal and stock it wasn't doing so great.

Used your settings and put Virtual memory in windows 10 to 16GB (I have 8GB ram) and bam, 574 H/s.

About what you would expect for a Haswell i7 given that your Broadwell chip is 5-10% more powerful given an equal clockspeed.

Although it must be throttling as its dropped to ~540 h/s. These Brix units are terrible with heat/cooling. Should be fine to stick it in the shed outside where it gets much cooler.


Not sure what's up with mines then. I have 4 of them on win10 and 1 on linux mint all have 1 8gb stick in them VM is set to 32gb And I only get the initial boost to 574 within 10 minutes I'm down to 250-275 Mh/s.

I'll play with them for another 2 weeks, once I hit day 29 I'll be returning all of them.