Category: mining

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Should I replace my thermal paste?

good thermal paste

How often should you replace your thermal paste

Lets start out with what thermal paste or thermal grease is first. Thermal Paste is used to create a very heat conductive seal to somewhere heat is generated to somewhere heat is dissipated. Your CPU has a heat sink on it and this heat sink is removing the heat from the CPU. The thermal paste helps to move the heat into the heat sink efficiently and effectively. Thermal paste is used on graphics cards, CPUs, ASIC miners and just about anywhere a computing chip is used.

 

So how often should you replace it? It depends. For a CPU you should really replace it every 1-2 years. Thermal paste dries up and the heat isn’t transferred as effectively than with new thermal paste. For GPUs you may be able to make it to 2-3 years before you should look into replacing the thermal paste. For ASIC miners, you may want to change your thermal paste yearly.

 

How difficult is it?

Replacing thermal paste on a CPU is very straight forward. You remove the heat sink, clean off the thermal paste then re-assemble. The same goes for GPUs. For ASIC miners it may be a little more complicated but many youtube videos, such as this one can be found to guide you along.

 

How much do I need?

Not much. A small dab is plenty for CPUs, GPUs and ASIC miners. 29g is plenty to change the paste on your GPU, CPU and ASIC miners and if you cant remember the last time, if ever, you replaced your thermal paste $4.99 for enough to replace your thermal paste on your CPU GPU and ASICs isn’t bad for peace of mind that your equipment is working as efficiently as possible. This can translate into better hashrates!. Speaking of hashrate, use code hashrate for 5% of this syringe of 29g of thermal paste.

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Alexis ccminer for nvidia cards and how to mine Galactrum

ccminer is a miner that is primarily for Nvidia GPUs. The Alexis version of ccminer is getting harder and harder to find windows .exe files for. The alexis fork works well for mining Galactrum and if you have an Nivida graphics card you may see improved hashrates over other versions of ccminer. For Galactrum I saw increased performance on my GTX 1060 6gb and my GTX 1080Ti. You can download and give the alexis ccminer fork from here ccminer-alexis-1.0-windows download. Let me know if you saw increased performance from your Nvidia GPU below in the comments.

Need a new exchange since the cryptopia hack? Check out my top 4 picks here

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Compiling CPUminer for beaglebone black in 2019

First off, you’re not going to get rich from mining on your old unused BeagleBone black and you’ll arguably only lose money, but for about 10W of power, you might be able to mine some low difficulty altcoins that are cpu or gpu only. I am currently mining Galactrum on mine using CPUminer-multi.

Beaglebone black mining

Thanks to its wide array of miners, you can use cpuminer-multi to mine a lot of altcoins, so lets get into compiling it.

First, the deps

$ sudo apt-get install automake autoconf pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev make g++ git

 

Now lets make a folder for it

 

mkdir cpuminer

cd cpuminer

 

Now we need the source code

 

git clone https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi

cd cpuminer-multi

 

Now lets get to the compiling

 

./autogen.sh && build.sh

 

Yep, really that easy.

 

The usage for cpuminer-multi is below. Have fun mining! and Since cryptopia has been hacked, If you need a new exchange to trade on, check out my four favorite exchanges here

./cpuminer -u user -p pass -a algorithm -o stratum+tcp://pool:1234 -t cputhreads

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Mining on the Raspberry Pi in 2019

Its 2019 and your Raspberry Pi is sitting in the corner. You haven’t used it much since your last project and you are ready to do more with it. Why not mine a CPU only or low difficulty coin? Sure you won’t get rich, but you’ll have some crypto to trade around and learn about compiling miners and how to use exchanges and how to use mining pools. The Pi also uses a very small amount of power.

 

Allow me to introduce to MagiCoin at https://www.m-core.org/

 

Magi coin uses a POW/POS system but with a bit of a twist. As they put it “MAGI concentrates on global energy savings when maintaining its blockchain system. MAGI aims at worldwide mining based on, for example, mobile devices. MAGI’s PoW with difficulty dependent mining rewards applies a limit to the total network hashrate, where huge amount of computational power for mining is no longer necessary”

This makes it the perfect target for mining with that old Raspberry Pi you just have lying around.

Click here to watch the YouTube tutorial

To get started install Ubuntu or Debian or Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 and connect to it via ssh.

To begin make sure you have the latest software

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

 

Next we need some deps to complete the compile of the Magicoin Miner

sudo apt-get install automake autoconf pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev make g++ git libgmp-dev screen

 

Lets make a directory so we know where the miner is to be located

mkdir magiminer

cd magiminer

 

Then clone the Github Repo

 

git clone https://github.com/magi-project/m-cpuminer-v2.git

 

Now we just need to compile the miner to get to hashing.

 

cd m-cpuminer-v2

 

./autogen.sh && ./configure CFLAGS="-O3" CXXFLAGS="-O3" && make

 

Now that you’re mining away, check out this cooling fan  kit we sell to help keep those temps down. Get 5% off with code “hashrate”

Raspberry pi cooling fan for mining
Raspberry pi cooling fan for mining

 

 

This might take a while but when it is done you’ll be ready to earn some Magicoin.

The next step is to find a pool, personally I use https://pom.m-hash.com/ They have a limit of 250K/hs so its great for slow miners

The next step is to start a screen session so that even after we disconnect from SSH the Pi continues mining.

 

screen

 

Now its time to hash away! To start mining

 

./m-minerd -o POOL_URL:PORT -u USERNAME.WORKER -p PASSWORD

 

To detach from the screen session after verifying its mining, hit ctr+a d

To reconnect, use screen -r

 

Magi is also POS so if you set up the official wallet you can begin staking coins, if you mine enough, or buy a few extra. If you just want to sell or buy Magicoin you can do that here. 

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How to mine with the ButterflyLabs Jalapeno in 2019 on ubuntu


First off, you’re not going to make any money if your electric is costly, but if you’re a hobbyist like me and you’ve picked up one of the arguably most hated ASICs to play around with mining some sha256 altcoins and you’re having trouble on finding the instructions for compiling on Linux since BFL shutdown the forums,  you’ve come to the right place.

Another warning, these devices and the firmware/software they require is old and sometimes it doesn’t play well with newer updates. Finding the right dependencies is hard but not impossible.

Start off with these, skip over any broken ones and hopefully you can get it to compile.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential git pkg-config libtool libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev libudev-dev

 

make a new directory to hold this special version of cgminer

mkdir bflminer

cd bflminer

 

next we need to clone the github

git clone https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.git

Time to try compiling, cross your fingers

cd cgminer

./autogen.sh

the flag in the next step is what allows this version of cgminer to work with the Jalapeno

CFLAGS="-O2 -Wall" ./configure --enable-bflsc

make

sudo make install

 

I got an error requiring a version of libusb to be installed, after I installed the required package, cgminer compiled fine.

since you’re accessing a usb device, you need to run cgminer as root

start a screen session to keep that paperweight hashing

screen

now we can start mining

sudo ./cgminer

fill out your pool details and worker name and you’re mining!

Ill try to answer any questions in the comments the best I can.

 

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Should I replace my stock CPU cooler

Is replacing your stock cooler with the popular Hyper 212 EVO worth it?

When I built my computer I had narrowed down my CPU choice between two processors, an AMD FX series or the i7-4790k. I ended up going with the i7-4790k as it was a better performer and AMD processors are notorious for running hot and I didn’t want to deal with trying to keep high temps under wraps. When I installed my new i7-4790k I used both the stock cooler and the stock thermal paste. 

 

My computer booted up, and after I updated my drivers, began bench-marking. I was expecting medium-high temps as I am aware of Intel’s stock cooler performance issues and the heat hyper-threading can give off, however I saw temps as high as 80-90°C. After some research, I headed over to Amazon and purchased two things, the Hyper 212 EVO and some Arctic Silver thermal paste.

 

When my shipment arrived I removed the stock fan to find that there was very little thermal paste on the CPU or cooler due to the stock paste drying up. My extremely high temps were likely a symptom of inadequate cooler to CPU contact and an inefficient cooler.

 

After cleaning the old paste off the CPU chip, I put a pea sized dot of the Arctic Silver thermal paste onto the CPU and installed the Hyper 212 EVO. Installing the new cooler was a bit more difficult than the stock cooler, but it’s still easy enough that the average user can install it. After securing the cooler and the backplate, I rebooted the PC, this time enabling the OC genie that came with my motherboard. I re-ran 3Dmark and saw about a 5-10% increase overall in performance and the Max temp was 60-70°C, a temp that is well in range for an overclocked i7-4790k. The Arctic Silver thermal paste and the Hyper 212 Evo had lowered my max temps by about 20°C and my ambient temps by about 5-15°C. That’s quite a gain for such a low cost air cooler.

 

The Hyper 212 EVO paired with the Arctic Silver thermal paste solved my overheating issues with my i7-4790k and I fully recommend the popular air cooler, which you can buy on Amazon by clicking their picture below. I personally prefer air coolers over water coolers because air can provide sufficient cooling without the worry of a defect dripping water all over your newly built PC.