Mining on I7 3970X X79 Platform

Mining Mining Support
1

HI guys,

just wondering can anyone tell me why when I am mining, only 1 core is being used to mine zcash ? should it be using all 6 cores and 6 hyperthreads?

what would be the best config for this cpu to mine zcash? should I be forcing it to use more than 1 core ?

apologies in advance for my noob questions :slight_smile:

Thanks a million

2

Is your genproclimit set equal to 6? You will likely be solving faster at 6 cores, but you will eventually have to deal with the law of diminishing returns relative to the # of cores youā€™re using when mining Zcash. Best way to do find out is to test with your hardware with:

time ~/zcash/src/zcash-cli zcbenchmark solveequihash 10

This returns the # seconds to complete the equihash algorithm ten times. This will get you pretty good info for now. You can set it to a higher number, e.g. 20 to get a more accurate average.

See this thread for more info

If you do test, it would be great if you could post your results here: https://benchmark.minezcash.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

3

hi,

thank you for your reply.

the cpu has 6 physical cores and then 6 hyper threads, what would you recommend for mining on release? 1 core or the 6.

I ran the benchmark at 20 and here are the results, but benchmark seemed to only use 1 core for test.

evo@evo-System-Product-Name:~/zcash$ ~/zcash/src/zcash-cli zcbenchmark solveequihash 20
[
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 49.47145700
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.21209300
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.27919300
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 25.30477900
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 31.44853600
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.72591200
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 49.97061600
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.26229000
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 44.25791600
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.36923500
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 25.54395600
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.94496600
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 37.77035000
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 50.48386400
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 13.02238700
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 74.44942800
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 25.01156200
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 62.01387800
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 12.77710500
},
{
ā€œrunningtimeā€ : 38.00605200
}
]
evo@evo-System-Product-Name:~/zcash$

4

Looks really good for you so far. Unless my math I miscalculated, looks like you are getting equihash solve times on an average of about 34 seconds, which is very close to the optimal 37.5s (of course you should test more to get a more accurate mean and standard deviation). My most efficient results have come from using 2-4 core machines and allocating 2GB of RAM per core (anything RAM-wise beyond that doesnā€™t seem too helpful). Keep in mind that memory bandwidth plays a huge factor, while threads arenā€™t really going to make a difference. If you want to test with different numbers of cores set:

genproclimit = n

With n representing the number of cores.

5

When you say set genproclimit, do you mean as an environment variable? Thanks

6

in ~/.zcash/zcash.conf

7

I made a script to automate running multiple tests with varying thread count. Simple and free: zcashHashTest/zcashHashTest.sh at master Ā· MetaRossi/zcashHashTest Ā· GitHub

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