Testing SGMiner 5.4.0 performance using 2 x MSi R7 370 4GB AMD GPU’s
I recently did a post on using the Marlin miner at the Siamining.com pool and in this post I wanted to do a comparison using another pool and different mining software.
SGMiner has been extensively tested and developed and is one of the most popular miners due to it’s performance and also the wide range of algorithms it supports. This miner can be used by Nvidia and AMD graphics cards.
Today we’re using a custom version which is best suited for use mining Siacoin and it can be downloaded using the link below.
Download Link – SGMiner 5.4.0 Siacoin GPU Miner
I tested the miner at the Suprnova pool and had my batch file configuration set like this
sgminer -k sia -o stratum+tcp://sia.suprnova.cc:2786 -u riskyfire.worker1 -p x -I 25
Using the 2 X R7 370’s installed in this machine and using their default clocks speeds of core 1030 memory 1400 I was able to get a average hash rate of 870 Mh/s around 435 Mh/s for each GPU.
When testing the cards with a overclocked core speed of 1150 mhz memory 1500 mhz the performance was improved by about 10% and increased the average hash rate to 978 Mh/s
I did test the effect of changing the miner intensity but it didn’t seem to yield any obvious performance gains during this brief test.
I also tested this miner on another GPU a Gigabyte R9 280x using factory clocks speeds of core 1100 mem 1500 and it hashed at 910 Mh/s for comparison.
Overall this miner and pool combination performed very well and with no advantage or disadvantage in comparison to using the Marlin miner on the Siamining.com pool. A longer duration test or wider range of tested hardware might provide a better indication of the best combination but I think the time would be better spent on optimizing drivers, clock speed and voltage use to get the best overall performance and efficiency from mining Siacoin.