Benefits of Dual Mining with the Convenience of NiceHash

There’s a lot to be said about the convenience of using NiceHash. NiceHash will continuously monitor the wildly fluctuating offer prices of mining different crypto coins and switch each of your GPU’s to algorithm that is currently producing the best price for mining. This takes away a lot of hassle in doing all this manually while monitoring the markets. You probably already know this and the following article expects you have a NiceHash rig running.

Recently you’ve probably noticed the unfortunate drop in revenue from NiceHash mining. There’s really nothing you can do to compensate the falling prices but this led me to hunt for methods to squeeze at least a little more from my own mining rig.

Dual Mining Coins 

The first thing I found is a beast called Claymore Dual Miner. On many of the newer GPU’s you can actually use your card to mine another coin while still mining Ether at full speed. This is what Claymore does. The other coins that it supports currently are Sia, Pascal, Decred and Lbry. Not only that but on Nvidia cards, the latest Claymore (9.7) mines ether faster than the miner included in the NiceHash 1.7.5.13.  
Well, Claymore seems like a pure win, right? Except that it does not pick the currently best coin like NiceHash does. That is something I really don’t want to give up. Luckily Dillon Newell has made a fork of the official NiceHash miner that includes the latest Claymore miner and supports all the dual coin combinations mentioned above. 

Dillon’s Forked NiceHash

You’ll find Dillon’s fork here and you install it pretty much exactly like the normal version of NiceHash. Make sure you enable all the new algorithms (they have Claymore in their name) before you run the benchmarks. If you have trouble with failing benchmarks, Dillon suggests you run the benchmarks with the “Precise” setting.

For each combination of coins you want to dual mine, you also need to decide on how much effort is given to Eth and how much to the alt coin. This is called the intensity and tweaking it is documented here. Do note that the listed values on that page are for previous version of the Claymore miner and after the eth related optimizations in Claymore 9.7, the values will be different. I had to drop the intensity on all of them some 10 points or so. 

Results

So what do we get out of this? With my EVGA GTX 1070 FTW, Claymore mining Eth+Decred pushed my daily revenue up by 12% compared to the best non-Claymore miner (which was DaggerHashimoto on ethminer for me). Even the slowest dual mining combination brought 7% more BTC/day than the ethminer.

On my Asus GTX 1060 6Gb, the difference was a 9% bump up in daily revenue with the best dual mining combo (Eth+Sia) and fastest non-Claymore miner (ethminer).

These are high enough numbers that I encourage you to move Dillon’s fork. But do remember that I compared the BTC/day values, which depend a lot on the current buy pricing so your percentages will be different. What was interesting was that even just mining Eth was faster with Claymore than it was with ethminer. So with the dual mining you should always get a boost to your daily revenue. 

Future

While developers of NiceHash are focusing on developing the new 2.x version, Dillon has told us that he will move to maintain the 1.x series of NiceHash (which will be called NiceHash Legacy in the future). This promises great things for an otherwise abandoned 1.x, especially when 2.x is still underperforming compared to the official 1.x series.

So good luck and happy mining!