Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: Does system memory speed matter for Cryptonight?
by
MagicSmoker
on 01/02/2018, 13:38:39 UTC
My understanding - which has been borne out by testing on 2 different machines - is that the only memory that matters with CPU mining Cryptonight is the L3 cache; the faster it is, and the more of it, the faster Cryptonight can be mined.

FYI, the ideal number of threads for mining Cryptonight is L3 size in MB / 2. For example, the Ryzen 5 1600 has a 16MB L3 cache so the ideal number of threads is 8.

Also, avoid the use of Core 0 / Thread 0 if you run Windows 10 and need to use the computer for other things.

I highly recommend XMR-Stak in CPU-only mode and posted below is the relevant part of my cpu.txt file that sets up the thread configuration for my Ryzen 5 1600 and which gets around 440 H/s on average with minimal impact to usability:

Code:
"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 9 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },
    { "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 11 },

],

This configuration was figured out with the help of PM conversations between me and fellow user @Set Ready Go.